Source: Rivkin, David B. Jr., and Foley, Elizabeth Price. “Gay Rights, Religious Freedom and the Law.” The Wall Street Journal 10 April 2015: A11. Print. Schor, Juliet B. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.
Hi. My name is Katie, and today we'll discuss considerations in academic argumentative research writing.
We'll begin today's lesson by outlining some important considerations for writing an argumentative research essay, such as avoiding bias, using engaged reading strategies, considering counterarguments, and being aware of the rhetorical situation of your essay. Next, we'll look at three sample texts and talk about what these considerations look like in a good argument. Let's begin by defining and explaining each of these considerations.
There are several key things to keep in mind when writing an academic argumentative research essay. You want to consider, for example, avoiding bias. Just like when you write in the informative mode, the argumentative mode puts an emphasis on remaining unbiased or at least acknowledging and accounting for any bias in your essay. This means that you should take pains to write objectively, such as presenting the whole picture of your topic and avoiding subjective terminology.
This is sometimes a little bit easier said than done. Often when you're creating an argument, you feel really strongly about one position or the other. However, in academic research writing, you are accountable to the issue of bias. So when you make claims, you need to back them up with evidence. And if you do see bias evident in your paper, you want to explain to your reader why it's there.
You also want to consider engaged reading strategies. This means that as a researcher, you need to use engaged reading strategies to evaluate your sources. And as a writer, you need to demonstrate to your readers that you've been thinking critically about these sources, and you need to show them how the sources interact with your argument. In a way, you want to demonstrate that your argument is in conversation with the rest of the sources about the topic that you're discussing.
It's also very important to consider differing viewpoints and perspectives. When you're creating an argument, the tendency often is just sort of ignore counterarguments or any evidence that might refute your own position. However, you want to address these counterarguments to demonstrate to your reader that your essay is well researched and that your argument is well founded. This improves the credibility of your argument as a whole.
You also always need to be aware of the rhetorical situation of your essay. You need to consider your purpose and your audience. When you're selecting the information that you want to present, when you're organizing your information into the order that you'll present it, and as you're crafting your essay, you need to always consider the way that your readers will interpret the tone of your essay.
I've selected some sample texts here to illustrate the way that these considerations work for both writing and reading arguments. For example, here we have an article titled "Gay Rights, Religious Freedom, and the Law." When we consider the bias of this article, the first word that jumps out at me is this very subjective term "regrettably." This subjective term signals to the reader that there is some bias present in this article.
The concluding sentence for this paragraph clarifies what this bias is. The authors tell us that "This criticism shouldn't be aimed at religious freedom laws." And now we can see that this article is written from the perspective of people who support the Indiana and Arkansas Religious Freedom Restoration Acts.
This article is also a good example of how authors get their readers engaged in a critical assessment of their source information. For example, they urge readers to compare this proposed act to other laws and the way that they impact social structure, such as executive orders from President Obama, the Supreme Court's decision in 1990, and particular terms from that Supreme Court decision that have affected the way that the law is interpreted, such as "compelling" and "least-restrictive means."
These authors also address counterarguments in this article. For example, they reference the fact that "Applying religious freedom laws to private disputes has stirred fears that businesses will be able to defend discriminatory behavior." And then they follow that up with evidence that shows that this fear is greatly overblown. This terminology, "greatly overblown," leads us to our next consideration, which is the rhetorical situation of this argument.
Now, this is an opinion piece written in The Wall Street Journal, so it's pretty easy to know what to expect from your readers. It's a popularly read paper, and there are certain demographics that the paper can let the authors know that they're going to be reaching out to. This term "overblown" is not a term that's commonly used in law or in academia, so you can see that they're reaching out to an everyday reader who uses certain colloquialisms that an average newspaper reader could understand and relate to very readily.
Here's a second example of an argument. In this case, this is a paragraph which answers a question, what does it mean to be an effective world language teacher? The bias is, again, very easy to identify in just the first few sentences of the paragraph. Note this term "personally." That's an immediate signal to the reader that this is someone's personal opinion, so you need to know the background of the author to really understand the bias of the text.
This argument does demonstrate the use of engaged reading strategies. You can see here that, on one hand, I reinforce my credibility by using evidence from sources to support my opinion, and on the other hand, I show how these sources interact with my ideas by aligning my solution with the state standards of the five Cs.
One way that I could strengthen this argument would be to address counterarguments. Right now, I only talk about one way to be an effective world language teacher, but if I gave this argument a setting among other solutions for becoming an effective world language teacher, then my readers could really see the strengths and weaknesses of my argument in comparison to others. This would demonstrate that I had extensive knowledge of my topic and would also highlight the advantages of my solution.
In terms of considering rhetorical situation for this piece, I really want to point out a difference between this text and the one that I showed you before. The audience for The Wall Street Journal is very clear, and one of the conventions of newspaper writing is that text is written from third-person perspective. This paragraph here is a response that I'm crafting for my teacher, and it's important that it's my own opinion. That's why I feel comfortable writing from first-person perspective, even though that's not very common for an academic argumentative essay. Because I'm really considering my purpose and audience, it's OK to step out of those norms.
Here's a third example of an argumentative essay. In this case, it's this introduction to a book called Born to Buy. Let's take a look at bias first.
This author has created an almost impermeable composition when you consider trying to figure out the bias of the author. The objective tone that it's written in is reminiscent of an informative writing mode. Note how it's written from third-person perspective, and it relies heavily on factual information. Although this particular author doesn't provide in-text citations, it is a published book, so we can assume that this data has been gleaned from reliable sources.
Next, we want to consider the way that this author employs engaged reading strategies. In this case, the author's approach is a very logical one. Readers are presented with factual information like, "saving rates are lower," "consumer credit has exploded," "roughly a million and a half households declare bankruptcy every year."
And then that information is compiled with data like, "Americans own more television sets than inhabitants of any other country." So the reader is asked to logically connect these two sets of source information. The correlation between these symptoms of poor economic health and the status of Americans owning more television sets leads the reader to the conclusion that the author intends to argue for.
Another strength of this argument is that even on the first page of this introduction, a counterargument begins to be addressed which will be fully developed later on in the text. See here at the end of the page, it says, "few adults recognize the magnitude of this shift and its consequences for the futures of our children and our culture." So this is a signal to the reader that later on in the text, the counterargument that this is an insignificant problem is going to be addressed.
The rhetorical situation of this text is also quite evident. It's really clear that this is meant for an academic audience. The first signal of this is that it heavily relies on statistics and research-based data, which is a common expectation for academic-level arguments. You can also see that there's a sort of elevated prose here, which presupposes that the reader will have some sort of experience working with this type of vocabulary.
For example, here, the companies that make, market, and advertise consumer products are called "the architects of this culture." That's very lofty terminology. Terms like "epicenter" and "magnitude" are also pretty weighty terms that not everyone will encounter in their daily lives. And then you also see that there's some subject-specific terminology, like "market trends" and "brand strategies." Hopefully, now you can see the way that these considerations can work together to establish an author's credibility for her readers and enhance the effectiveness of the overall argument.
In today's lesson, we discussed considerations in academic argumentative research writing. We began by outlining some important considerations, like avoiding bias, using engaged reading strategies, attending to different viewpoints and perspectives, and making sure to be aware of your rhetorical situation when you're drafting your argument. Then, we looked at three sample arguments and analyzed how these considerations can work together to create a tight, convincing, professional academic argument.
I hope that this overview was helpful. Thank you very much for joining me today.