November 9, 2010 Archives

Write the "con" side of the same argument that you wrote in P8. 200 words, uploaded to Turnitin.com.

I'm not asking you to change your mind about the topic you chose, but I am asking you to demonstrate your ability to construct a logical argument by presenting the best evidence against the claim that you made in Paragraph 8.

The purpose of this exercise is to give you experience seriously thinking about "the other side" of an argument. If you chose a topic for P8 that is non-obvious and debatable, you will have a much easier time writing P9. When you revise your draft of Paper 3, I will ask everyone to pay extra attention to beefing up the opposing argument. The experience of writing P9 should help you with that revision assignment.

If it turns out that there is not enough evidence to write against your thesis for P8, you may choose a related topic. You might have written your P8 on a thesis like "X is a good thing," which means the most obvious counter-argument would be "X is a bad thing." But if there isn't any credible evidence to support "X is bad," you might say, "Just because X has good qualities A, B, and C does not mean that X is a good solution to problem Y."

For instance, if you wrote "Hitler was evil" for P8, you would have a very hard time finding evidence that would convince a rational person that "Hitler was not evil." However, you might be able to write, "Although Hitler was undeniably evil, his twisted morality was not the sole cause of World War II; at the end of World War I, Europe created the economic and political conditions that led to World War II."

• A persuasive paper (3-4 pages that defend a statement about your progress towards meeting the course goals -- see the syllabus)
• Demonstrates your ability to SHOW with evidence (a framing story set on a particular day is not necessary, and may in fact squeeze out other, more important content)
• Supports claims with quotations from your own work Use a "before" and "after" quote to demonstrate, for example:
• The lesson on normative thinking showed me that the thesis sentence I wrote for Paragraph 3, "Quote your thesis statement here," was not actually an intellectually arguable position, but it was instead just a passionate statement of my personal preference.  After I learned that normative thinking is [define it here], and I learned that a better thesis statement would [do what?], I tried writing thesis statements that were more [describe your goal here]. For instance, my thesis for Paragraph 10 was "Quote that thesis here."  That's a much better thesis statement, because [explain why it's better than the thesis for Paragraph 3. Although I still find it challenging to [where are you still struggling with thesis statements?], I'm much more confident in my ability to [do what? wrap it up by demonstrating your progress towards meeting the course goals.]