Week 7: Knowledge Check Reflection: Visual Rhetorical Analysis around YOU

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A Note about the Cover

Is everything really an argument? Seeing the images on the cover of this book might make you wonder. The “Free Speech Zone” sign, for example, instantly calls to mind the debates across the United States about the limits of free expression, especially on college campuses. The ominous-looking hand coming out of the laptop suggests the ease with which hackers obtain personal data. Does the image of teens playing on cell phones in the back seat of a car argue for or against the ways that technology is shaping how we are communicating with one another? The polar bear on a shrinking ice floe reminds us of the scientific fact of climate change but also invites a discussion of how powerful visuals can sway our opinions and beliefs. As for the “100% vegan” sticker, what’s your impression? Is it a proud proclamation of

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one’s identity or values? A straightforward fact about a food’s origins? A sharp commentary on the influence of advertising on the food industry? What’s your take?

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Eighth Edition

Everything’s an Argument with Readings Andrea A. Lunsford

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

John J. Ruszkiewicz

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Keith Walters

PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

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For Bedford/St. Martin’s

Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill Executive Program Director for English: Leasa Burton Senior Program Manager: John E. Sullivan III Executive Marketing Manager: Joy Fisher Williams Director of Content Development, Humanities: Jane Knetzger Senior Developmental Editor: Rachel Goldberg Associate Editor: Lexi DeConti Editorial Assistant: William Hwang Senior Content Project Manager: Ryan Sullivan Senior Workflow Project Manager: Jennifer Wetzel Production Coordinator: Brianna Lester Media Project Manager: Jodi Isman Media Editor: Julia Domenicucci Editorial Services: Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Composition: Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Cartographer: Mapping Specialists, Ltd. Text Permissions Manager: Kalina Ingham Text Permissions Editor: Arthur Johnson, Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Photo Permissions Editor: Angela Boehler Photo Researcher: Krystyna Borgen, Lumina Datamatics, Inc. Director of Design, Content Management: Diana Blume Text Design: Claire Seng-Niemoeller, Anna Palchik, and Graphic World, Inc. Cover Design: William Boardman Cover Images: (laptop) fStop Images/Epoxydude/Getty Images; (polar

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bear) dagsjo/Getty Images; (vegan label) Good_Studio/Getty Images; (free speech sign) Imfoto/Shutterstock; (kids with cell phones) Hero Images/Getty Images

Copyright © 2019, 2016, 2013, 2010 by Bedford/St. Martin’s.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be permitted by law or expressly permitted in writing by the Publisher.

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For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116

ISBN-13: 978-1-319-21159-2(mobi)

Acknowledgments Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on pages 793–94, which constitute an extension of the copyright page. Art acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the art selections they cover.

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Preface When we began work on this text in 1996 (the first edition came out in 1998), we couldn’t have anticipated all the events of the next two tumultuous decades, or all the changes to public and private discourse, or the current deeply divided state of our nation. But we have tried hard, over these decades, to track such changes and the ways rhetoric and argument have evolved and responded to them.

Certainly, we recognized the increasingly important role digital culture plays in all our lives, and so with each new edition we have included more on the technologies of communication, particularly those associated with social media; and we early on recognized that, like rhetoric itself, social media can be used for good or for ill, to bring people together or to separate them.

We have also carefully tracked the forms that arguments take today, from cartoons and graphic narratives to blogs and other postings to multimodal projects of almost every conceivable kind. While argument has always surrounded us, today it does so in an amazing array of genres and forms, including aural and visual components that strengthen and amplify arguments.

The sheer proliferation of information (not to mention misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies) that bombards all writers led us to reaffirm our commitment to studying and teaching style, since (as Richard Lanham and others argue) in the age of information overload, style is the tool writers possess to try to capture and keep the attention of audiences. Attention to style reveals other changes, such as the

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increasing use of informal registers and conversational styles even in academic arguments.

Perhaps most important, though, a look back over the last twenty-two years reaffirms the crucial role that rhetoric can and should play in personal, work, and school lives. At its best, rhetoric is the art, theory, and practice of ethical communication, needed more sorely today than perhaps ever before. Everything’s an Argument with Readings presents this view of rhetoric and illustrates it with a fair and wide range of perspectives and views, which we hope will inspire student writers to think of themselves as rhetors, as Quintilian’s “good person, speaking well.”

Key Features Two books in one, neatly linked. Up front is a brief guide to Aristotelian, Toulmin, and Rogerian argument; common types of arguments; presenting arguments; and researching arguments. In the back is a thematically organized anthology of readings in a wide range of genres. Handy cross-references in the margins allow students to move easily from the argument chapters to specific examples in the readings and from the readings to appropriate rhetorical instruction.

Short, relatable excerpts weave in the debates that rage around us. From #metoo tweets and protest posters to essays and scholarly writing, boldfaced examples illustrate the arguments happening in politics, economics, journalism, and media, with brief student-friendly analyses.

Five thematic readings chapters that encourage students to explore

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complex arguments. Readings on “How Does Popular Culture Stereotype You?,” “Has the Internet Destroyed Privacy?,” and “How Free Should Campus Speech Be?” demand that students consider the many sides of contemporary issues across the political spectrum, going beyond a simple pro/con stance.

A real-world, full-color design that builds students’ understanding of visual rhetoric. Presenting readings in the style of their original publications helps students recognize and think about the effect that design and visuals have on written and multimodal arguments.

New to This Edition A new section on rhetorical listening in Chapter 1. The very first chapter of the eighth edition now emphasizes the importance of listening rhetorically and respectfully, encouraging readers to move beyond “echo chambers” and build bridges among all viewpoints.

Eight new full-length models in the guide provide engaging, topical arguments of fact, definition, evaluation, cause and effect, proposals, and rhetorical analysis. Legal scholar Stephen L. Carter offers a Toulmin analysis of whether racial epithets should be considered free speech, while New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof presents an op-ed in defense of public wilderness.

Five new annotated student essays address topics students care about, from millennials’ love of food to breaking a social media addiction.

Thirty-one engaging new readings on hot-button issues such as free speech, food, language, privacy, and stereotypes. Selections

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represent a range of genres and span the full gamut of social and political views, including:

excerpts from a recent Gallup poll showing what college students think about First Amendment issues visual arguments and a scholarly essay supporting and critiquing the concept of racial microaggressions best-selling essayist Roxane Gay on the language we use to describe sexual violence an Economist blog post acknowledging that sport shooting can be, well, fun an argument against veganism . . . written by a vegan

A new introduction in the instructor’s notes. Focusing on the teaching of argument, this new introduction gives experienced and first-time instructors a strong pedagogical foundation. Sample syllabi for both semester and quarter courses provide help for pacing all types of courses.

We’re all in. As always. Bedford/St. Martin’s is as passionately committed to the discipline of English as ever, working hard to provide support and services that make it easier for you to teach your course your way.

Find community support at the Bedford/St. Martin’s English Community (community.macmillan.com), where you can follow our Bits blog for new teaching ideas, download titles from our professional resource series, and review projects in the pipeline.

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Choose curriculum solutions that offer flexible custom options, combining our carefully developed print and digital resources, acclaimed works from Macmillan’s trade imprints, and your own course or program materials to provide the exact resources your students need. Our approach to customization makes it possible to create a customized project uniquely suited for your students and, based on your enrollment size, return money to your department and raise your institutional profile with a high-impact author visit through the Macmillan Author Program (“MAP”).

Rely on outstanding service from your Bedford/St. Martin’s sales representative and editorial team. Contact us or visit macmillanlearning.com to learn more about any of the options below.

LaunchPad for Everything’s an Argument with Readings: Where Students Learn LaunchPad provides engaging content and new ways to get the most out of your book. Get an interactive e-book combined with assessment tools in a fully customizable course space; then assign and mix our resources with yours.

Reading comprehension quizzes, to help you quickly gauge your students’ understanding of the assigned reading. Interactive exercises and tutorials for reading, writing, and research. Diagnostics provide opportunities to assess areas for improvement and assign additional exercises based on students’ needs. Visual reports show performance by topic, class, and student as well as improvement over time.

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Pre-built units—including readings, videos, quizzes, and more— are easy to adapt and assign by adding your own materials and mixing them with our high-quality multimedia content and ready- made assessment options, such as LearningCurve adaptive quizzing and Exercise Central. Use LaunchPad on its own or integrate it with your school’s learning management system so that your class is always on the same page.

LaunchPad for Everything’s an Argument with Readings can be purchased on its own or packaged with the print book at a significant discount. An activation code is required. To order LaunchPad for Everything’s an Argument with Readings with the print book, use ISBN 978-1-319-25363-9. For more information, go to launchpadworks.com.

Choose from Alternative Formats of Everything’s an Argument with Readings Bedford/St. Martin’s offers a range of formats. Choose what works best for you and your students:

Paperback brief edition To order the paperback edition of Everything’s an Argument, use ISBN 978-1-319-05627-8. Popular e-book formats For details of our e-book partners, visit macmillanlearning.com/ebooks.

Select Value Packages Add value to your text by packaging a Bedford/St. Martin’s resource, such as Writer’s Help 2.0, with Everything’s an Argument with

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Readings at a significant discount. Contact your sales representative for more information.

Writer’s Help 2.0 is a powerful online writing resource that helps students find answers, whether they are searching for writing advice on their own or as part of an assignment.

Smart search. Built on research with more than 1,600 student writers, the smart search in Writer’s Help 2.0 provides reliable results even when students use novice terms, such as flow and unstuck. Trusted content from our best-selling handbooks. Andrea Lunsford’s user-friendly tone ensures that students have clear advice and examples for all of their writing questions. Diagnostics that help establish a baseline for instruction. Assign diagnostics to identify areas of strength and areas for improvement and to help students plan a course of study. Use visual reports to track performance by topic, class, and student as well as improvement over time. Adaptive exercises that engage students. Writer’s Help 2.0 includes LearningCurve, game-like online quizzing that adapts to what students already know and helps them focus on what they need to learn.

Student access is packaged with Everything’s an Argument with Readings at a significant discount. Order ISBN 978-1-319-25623-4 for Writer’s Help 2.0, Lunsford Version, to ensure your students have easy access to online writing support. Students who rent or buy a used book can purchase access and instructors may request free access at macmillanlearning.com/writershelp2.

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Instructor Resources You have a lot to do in your course. We want to make it easy for you to find the support you need—and to get it quickly.

Instructor’s Notes for Everything’s an Argument with Readings is available as a PDF that can be downloaded from macmillanlearning.com. Visit the instructor resources tab for Everything’s an Argument with Readings. In addition to chapter overviews and teaching tips, the instructor’s manual offers an introduction about teaching the argument course, sample syllabi, correlations to the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outcomes Statement, and potential answers to the “Respond” questions in the book.

Acknowledgments We owe a debt of gratitude to many people for making Everything’s an Argument with Readings possible. Our first thanks must go to the thousands of people we have taught in our writing courses over nearly four decades, particularly students at the Ohio State University, Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Portland State University. Almost every chapter in this book has been informed by a classroom encounter with a student whose shrewd observation or perceptive question sent an ambitious lesson plan spiraling to the ground. (Anyone who has tried to teach claims and warrants on the fly to skeptical first-year writers will surely appreciate why we have qualified our claims in the Toulmin chapter so carefully.) But students have also provided the motive for writing this book. More than ever, they need to know how to read and write arguments effectively if they

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are to secure a place in a world growing ever smaller and more rhetorically challenging.

We are deeply grateful to the editors at Bedford/St. Martin’s who have contributed their formidable talents to this book. In particular, we want to thank the ingenious and efficient Rachel Goldberg for guiding us so patiently and confidently—helping us locate just the right items whenever we needed fresh examples and images and gracefully recasting passage after passage to satisfy permissions mandates. Senior content project manager Ryan Sullivan was relentlessly upbeat and kind in all his communications, making the ever-more-complex stages of production almost a pleasure. We also appreciate the extensive support and help of Lexi DeConti, who kept us attuned to examples and readings that might appeal to students today. We are similarly grateful to senior program manager John Sullivan, whose support was unfailing; Kalina Ingham, Arthur Johnson, and Tom Wilcox, for text permissions; Angela Boehler and Krystyna Borgen, for art permissions; William Boardman, for our cover design; Bridget Leahy, copyeditor; and William Hwang, editorial assistant. All of you made editing the eighth edition feel fresh and creative.

We’d also like to thank the astute instructors who reviewed the seventh edition: Brigitte Anderson, University of Pikeville; Samantha Battrick, Truman State University; Kathryn Bennett, Old Dominion University; Jeanne Bohannon, Kennesaw State University; Rebecca Cepek, Duquesne University; Laura Dumin, University of Central Oklahoma; Tim Engles, Eastern Illinois University; Karen Feldman, Seminole State College of Florida; Africa Fine, Palm Beach State College;

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Darius Frasure, Mountain View College; Erin Gallagher, Washington State University; Ben Graydon, Daytona State College; Joseph Hernandez, Mt. San Jacinto College; Julie Moore-Felux, Northwest Vista College; Laurie Murray, Anderson University; Kolawole Olaiya, Anderson University; Leslie Rapparlie, University of Colorado; Thomas Reynolds, Northwestern State University; Loreen Smith, Isothermal Community College; Benjamin Syn, University of Colorado; Gina Szabady, Lane Community College; Amy Walton, Iowa State University; and Miriam Young, Truman State University.

Thanks, too, to Sherrie Weller of Loyola Chicago University and Valerie Duff-Stroutmann of Newbury College, who updated the instructor’s notes for this eighth edition with a new introduction, new model syllabi, new points for discussion, and new classroom activities. We hope this resource will be useful as instructors build their courses. Finally, we are grateful to the students whose fine argumentative essays or materials appear in our chapters: Cameron Hauer, Kate Beispel, Jenny Kim, Laura Tarrant, Natasha Rodriguez, Caleb Wong, Juliana Chang, George Chidiac, and Charlotte Geaghan-Breiner. We hope that Everything’s an Argument with Readings responds to what students and instructors have said they want and need.

Andrea A. Lunsford

John J. Ruszkiewicz

Keith Walters

Correlation to Council of Writing Program

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Administrators’ (WPA) Outcomes Everything’s an Argument with Readings works with the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outcomes Statement for first-year composition courses (last updated 2014).

2014 WPA Outcomes

Support in Everything’s an Argument with Readings, 8e

Rhetorical Knowledge

Learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts.

Chapter 1, “Understanding Arguments and Reading Them Critically” (pp. 3–31), establishes the central elements of the rhetorical situation and encourages rhetorical listening.

Chapter 6, “Rhetorical Analysis” (pp. 97–132), further develops these concepts and teaches students how to analyze a rhetorical analysis and compose their own.

Each chapter offers dozens of written, visual, and multimodal texts to analyze, in both the guide portion and the thematic reader.

Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’

Everything’s an Argument with Readings provides engaging readings across genres, from academic essays and newspaper editorials to tweets and infographics. “Respond” boxes throughout each chapter (e.g., pp. 56–57) invite students to think critically about the material. For more genre variety, Everything’s an Argument with Readings also contains a five-chapter thematic reader with additional multimodal genres, including an art installation, Web articles, scholarly essays, and political cartoons.

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practices and purposes.

Each chapter on a specific type of argument features project ideas (e.g., p. 186), giving students detailed prompts to write their own arguments of fact, arguments of definition, evaluations, causal arguments, and proposals.

Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts, calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure.

Chapter 13, “Style in Arguments” (pp. 321–45), addresses word choice, tone, sentence structure, punctuation, and figurative language, with engaging examples of each.

The “Cultural Contexts for Argument” boxes throughout the text (e.g., p. 163) address how people from other cultures might respond to different styles or structures of argument. This feature offers suggestions on how to think about argument in an unfamiliar cultural context.

Understand and use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences.

Chapter 16, “Multimodal Arguments” (pp. 381–402), addresses how new media has transformed the array of choices for making arguments and reaching audiences. This chapter teaches how to analyze multimodal arguments as well as how to create them through Web sites, videos, wikis, blogs, social media, memes, posters, and comics.

Match the capacities of different environments (e.g., print & electronic) to varying rhetorical situations.

Chapter 14, “Visual Rhetoric” (pp. 346–62), discusses the power of visual rhetoric and how students can use visuals in their own work.

Chapter 15, “Presenting Arguments” (pp. 363–80), includes material on incorporating various media into presentations and Webcasts.

Chapter 16, “Multimodal Arguments” (pp. 381–402), analyzes the evolving landscape of argument across media platforms.

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Chapter 17, “Academic Arguments” (pp. 405–37), covers the conventions of academic arguments.

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Composing

Use composing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating in various rhetorical contexts.

Chapter 1, “Understanding Arguments and Reading Them Critically” (pp. 3–31), features a section called “Why Listen to Arguments Rhetorically and Respectfully” (pp. 7–8). It teaches students to listen openly and constructively and calls attention to the need to escape “echo chambers,” respectfully consider all viewpoints, and find common ground.

Throughout Everything’s an Argument with Readings, students are invited to delve deeper into current issues in the world around them, considering the various arguments presented in tweets, newspapers, scholarly papers, court rulings, and even bumper stickers. Everything’s an Argument with Readings guides students in asking critical questions about these contexts and learning how to respond to and create their own compositions. Chapters dedicated to central types of argument explain how students might best approach each writing situation. The chapters close with a guide to writing arguments of that type:

Chapter 8, “Arguments of Fact” (pp. 164–96)

Chapter 9, “Arguments of Definition” (pp. 197–223)

Chapter 10, “Evaluations” (pp. 224–54)

Chapter 11, “Causal Arguments” (pp. 255–85)

Chapter 12, “Proposals” (pp. 286–318)

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Chapter 16, “Multimodal Arguments” (pp. 381–402)

Read a diverse range of texts, attending especially to relationships between assertion and evidence, to patterns of organization, to interplay between verbal and nonverbal elements, and how these features function for different audiences and situations.

Chapter 7, “Structuring Arguments” (pp. 135–63), examines making claims and using evidence to support those claims. It delves into the structure of Rogerian and Toulmin arguments, showing how different argument types work for different writing situations.

Each Guide to Writing features sections on “Formulating a Claim” and “Thinking about Organization” (e.g., pp. 212 and 214), emphasizing the use of evidence and the structure of the argument.

Locate and evaluate primary and secondary research materials, including journal articles, essays, books, databases, and informal Internet sources.

Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence” (pp. 438–53), covers locating evidence from print, electronic, and field research sources.

Chapter 19, “Evaluating Sources” (pp. 454–63), addresses how to assess those sources effectively.

Use strategies —  such as interpretation,

Chapter 20, “Using Sources,” provides detailed explanations of summary, paraphrase, and quotation and when to use each approach (pp. 467–73). The

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synthesis, response, critique, and design/redesign  — to compose texts that integrate the writer’s ideas with those from appropriate sources.

chapter discusses framing with introductory phrases and signal verbs, and it presents multiple ways to connect source material to a student’s own ideas — by establishing a context, introducing a term or concept, developing a claim, highlighting differences, and avoiding “patchwriting” (pp. 480–82).

Chapter 21, “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity” (pp. 484–93), highlights the importance of acknowledging another writer’s work.

Chapter 22, “Documenting Sources” (pp. 494–532), concludes the research section of the book with a discussion of MLA and APA documentation, including a wide range of citation models in both formats.

Processes

Develop a writing project through multiple drafts.

Chapter 17, “Academic Arguments” (pp. 405–37), stresses the importance of working through multiple drafts of a project, using revision and peer feedback to improve the document.

Develop flexible strategies for reading, drafting, reviewing, collaboration, revising, rewriting, rereading, and editing.

Writing is a fundamental focus of Everything’s an Argument with Readings, and students learn to critique their own work and the work of others in almost every part of the book. Each Guide to Writing, focusing on a specific type of argument in the Part 2 chapters, contains step-by-step advice on drafting, researching, and organizing, as well as peer review questions about the claim being made, the evidence provided for the claim, and the organization and style of the essay.

The Guide to Writing also asks students to review their spelling, punctuation, mechanics, documentation, and format.

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Use composing processes and tools as a means to discover and reconsider ideas.

Chapter 7, “Structuring Arguments” (pp. 135–63), provides a clear explanation for how to construct an argument and support it effectively, and it includes a brief annotated model from a classic text.

The “Developing an Academic Argument” section (pp. 411–18) in Chapter 17, “Academic Arguments” (pp. 405–37), guides students through the specific process of developing a paper in an academic setting, from selecting a topic and exploring it in depth to entering into the conversation around the chosen topic. Two annotated examples of academic arguments are provided at the end of the chapter.

Experience the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.

Many “Respond” questions have students work in pairs or groups to analyze rhetorical situations, arguments, or appeals. See p. 36, for instance.

In Chapter 21, “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity” (pp. 484–93), students learn the importance of giving credit, getting permission to use the materials of others, citing sources appropriately, and acknowledging collaboration with their peers.

Learn to give and act on productive feedback to works in progress.

Each Guide to Writing, focusing on a specific type of argument in the Part 2 chapters, contains a “Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Review” section (e.g., pp. 183–85) tailored to that argument type. These questions address the claim being made, the evidence provided for the claim, and the organization and style of the essay.

Adapt composing processes for a variety of technologies and modalities.

Awareness of technology runs throughout Everything’s an Argument with Readings, beginning in the first chapter with an exploration of arguments made via Twitter. A particular focus on multimodal arguments is made in Chapter 14, “Visual Rhetoric” (pp. 346–62),

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which covers how effective images can be and instructs students on incorporating them to achieve specific rhetorical purposes, and in Chapter 16, “Multimodal Arguments” (pp. 381–402), which focuses on how technology offers new platforms and opportunities for composition, as well as some new pitfalls to avoid. These chapters provide students with tools for creating their own multimodal compositions.

Reflect on the development of composing practices and how those practices influence their work.

Everything’s an Argument with Readings presents students with an important foundation in the purpose and history of rhetoric (e.g., “Why We Make Arguments,” pp. 8–9; “The Classical Oration,” pp. 136–39) as well as thoughtful reflections on how composition and argument have changed in an increasingly digital world (e.g., “Old Media Transformed by New Media,” pp. 382–83; “Conventions in Academic Argument Are Not Static,” p. 410).

Knowledge of Conventions

Develop knowledge of linguistic structures, including grammar, punctuation, and spelling, through practice in composing and revising.

Chapter 13, “Style in Arguments” (pp. 321–45), covers sentence structure and punctuation.

Chapter 17, “Academic Arguments” (pp. 405–37), discusses drafting, revising, and editing.

The Guide to Writing in each Part 2 chapter asks students to review their spelling, punctuation, mechanics, documentation, and format.

Understand why genre

The argument chapters in Part 2 address genre conventions, discussing how the approach and structure

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conventions for structure, paragraphing, tone, and mechanics vary.

of a document adapt to its genre. Each chapter also includes a Guide to Writing and Sample Arguments, which highlight differing uses of sources and tone (e.g., “Guide to Writing a Proposal,” pp. 300–305).

Gain experience negotiating variations in genre conventions.

Each of the Part 2 chapters offers a section on characterizing that particular genre (e.g., “Characterizing Evaluation,” pp. 229–32) as well as a section to guide students to develop a paper in that particular genre (e.g., “Developing an Evaluative Argument,” pp. 233–39). These chapters pay particular attention to the nuances and variations of differing purposes and approaches.

For more genre variety, Everything’s an Argument with Readings also contains a five-chapter thematic reader with additional multimodal genres, including infographics, professional reports, scholarly journal articles, and comic strips.

Learn common formats and/or design features for different kinds of texts.

Part 3, “Style and Presentation in Arguments,” offers four chapters on how to design an argument, paying attention to how these choices will vary depending on the student’s rhetorical purpose (e.g., “Using Images and Visual Design to Create Pathos,” pp. 350–52).

The “Considering Design and Visuals” section (e.g., pp. 238–39) in each Part 2 argument chapter acquaints students with common design features and formats of that type of document.

The Guide to Writing in each Part 2 chapter contains a “Considering Genre and Media” section that invites students to think about how to choose the appropriate format and medium for a particular argument.

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Explore the concepts of intellectual property (such as fair use and copyright) that motivate documentation conventions.

Chapter 20, “Using Sources,” explores the topics of summary, paraphrase, and quotation and when each approach might be most appropriate (pp. 466–73). The chapter discusses framing with introductory phrases and signal verbs, and it presents multiple ways to connect source material to a student’s own ideas by establishing a context, introducing a term or concept, developing a claim, highlighting differences, and avoiding “patchwriting” (pp. 474–82).

Chapter 21, “Plagiarism and Academic Integrity” (pp. 484–93), shines a light on the importance of acknowledging the work of another.

The section on MLA style in Chapter 22, “Documenting Sources” (pp. 496–515), provides guidance on how to get permission for copyrighted material (including Internet sources) and how to navigate Creative Commons and fair use. It also offers an in-depth examination of in-text citations and Works Cited entries, with more than fifty examples of citation types and sample pages from a student essay.

Practice applying citation conventions systematically in their own work.

Chapter 22, “Documenting Sources” (pp. 494–532), examines in-text citations and Works Cited entries for both MLA and APA style, with more than fifty examples of citation types and sample pages from a student essay.

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Brief Contents Preface

Part 1 Reading and Understanding Arguments

1. Understanding Arguments and Reading Them Critically

2. Arguments Based on Emotion: Pathos

3. Arguments Based on Character: Ethos

4. Arguments Based on Facts and Reason: Logos

5. Fallacies of Argument

6. Rhetorical Analysis

Part 2 Writing Arguments

7. Structuring Arguments

8. Arguments of Fact

9. Arguments of Definition

10. Evaluations

11. Causal Arguments

12. Proposals

Part 3 Style and Presentation in Arguments

13. Style in Arguments

14. Visual Rhetoric

15. Presenting Arguments

16. Multimodal Arguments

Part 4 Research and Arguments

17. Academic Arguments

18. Finding Evidence

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19. Evaluating Sources

20. Using Sources

21. Plagiarism and Academic Integrity

22. Documenting Sources

Part 5 Arguments

23. How Does Popular Culture Stereotype You?

24. How Does What We Eat Define Who We Are?

25. How Does Language Influence Our World?

26. Has the Internet Destroyed Privacy?

27. How Free Should Campus Speech Be?

Glossary

Index

Readings by Type of Argument

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Contents Preface

Part 1 Reading and Understanding Arguments

1. Understanding Arguments and Reading Them Critically

Everything Is an Argument

Why Read Arguments Critically and Rhetorically?

Why Listen to Arguments Rhetorically and Respectfully?

Why We Make Arguments

Arguments to Convince and Inform

Arguments to Persuade

Arguments to Make Decisions

Arguments to Understand and Explore

Occasions for Argument

Arguments about the Past

Arguments about the Future

Arguments about the Present

Kinds of Argument

Did Something Happen? Arguments of Fact

What Is the Nature of the Thing? Arguments of Definition

What Is the Quality or Cause of the Thing? Arguments of Evaluation

What Actions Should Be Taken? Proposal Arguments

STASIS QUESTIONS AT WORK

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Appealing to Audiences

Emotional Appeals: Pathos

Ethical Appeals: Ethos

Logical Appeals: Logos

Bringing It Home: Kairos and the Rhetorical Situation

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

2. Arguments Based on Emotion: Pathos

Reading Critically for Pathos

Using Emotions to Build Bridges

Using Emotions to Sustain an Argument

Using Humor

Using Arguments Based on Emotion

3. Arguments Based on Character: Ethos

Thinking Critically about Arguments Based on Character

Establishing Trustworthiness and Credibility

Claiming Authority

Coming Clean about Motives

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

4. Arguments Based on Facts and Reason: Logos

Thinking Critically about Hard Evidence

Facts

Statistics

Surveys and Polls

Testimonies and Narratives

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Using Reason and Common Sense

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Providing Logical Structures for Argument

Degree

Analogies

Precedent

5. Fallacies of Argument

Fallacies of Emotional Argument

Scare Tactics

Either/Or Choices

Slippery Slope

Overly Sentimental Appeals

Bandwagon Appeals

Fallacies of Ethical Argument

Appeals to False Authority

Dogmatism

Ad Hominem Arguments

Stacking the Deck

Fallacies of Logical Argument

Hasty Generalization

Faulty Causality

Begging the Question

Equivocation

Non Sequitur

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Straw Man

Red Herring

Faulty Analogy

Paralipsis

6. Rhetorical Analysis

Composing a Rhetorical Analysis: Reading and Viewing Critically

Understanding the Purpose of Arguments You Are Analyzing

Understanding Who Makes an Argument

Identifying and Appealing to Audiences

Examining Arguments Based on Emotion: Pathos

Examining Arguments Based on Character: Ethos

Examining Arguments Based on Facts and Reason: Logos

Examining the Arrangement and Media of Arguments

Looking at Style

Examining a Rhetorical Analysis

Nicholas Kristof, Fleeing to the Mountains

“When public lands are lost — or mined in ways that scar the landscape — something has been lost forever on our watch. A public good has been privatized, and our descendants have been robbed.”

Cameron Hauer, Appeal, Audience, and Narrative in Kristof’s Wilderness [STUDENT ESSAY]

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“To a liberal readership still reeling from the shock of the 2016 election, the invocation of Trump is an invitation for the audience to adopt Kristof’s pro- wilderness platform as a plank of a broader anti- Trump agenda.”

GUIDE TO WRITING A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Part 2 Writing Arguments

7. Structuring Arguments

The Classical Oration

Rogerian and Invitational Arguments

Toulmin Argument

Making Claims

Offering Evidence and Good Reasons

Determining Warrants

Offering Evidence: Backing

Using Qualifiers

Understanding Conditions of Rebuttal

Outline of a Toulmin Argument

A Toulmin Analysis

Stephen L. Carter, Offensive Speech Is Free Speech. If Only We’d Listen

“The First Amendment protects not admirable speech or good speech or likeable speech. It protects speech.”

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What Toulmin Teaches

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

8. Arguments of Fact

Understanding Arguments of Fact

Characterizing Factual Arguments

Developing a Factual Argument

Identifying an Issue

Researching Your Hypothesis

Refining Your Claim

Deciding Which Evidence to Use

Presenting Your Evidence

Considering Design and Visuals

GUIDE TO WRITING AN ARGUMENT OF FACT

Projects

Two Sample Factual Arguments

Kate Beispel, The Snacktivities and Musings of a Millennial Foodie [STUDENT ESSAY]

“Where there’s a food line, there’s a Millennial waiting: foodie culture is accessible to anyone who wants to be a part of it.”

Michael Hiltzik, Don’t Believe Facebook: The Demise of the Written Word Is Very Far Off

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“Video is a linear medium: You have to allow it to unspool frame by frame to glean what it’s saying. Text can be absorbed in blocks; the eye searches for keywords or names or other pointers such as quotation marks.”

9. Arguments of Definition

Understanding Arguments of Definition

Kinds of Definition

Formal Definitions

Operational Definitions

Definitions by Example

Negative Definitions

Developing a Definitional Argument

Formulating Claims

Crafting Definitions

Matching Claims to Definitions

Considering Design and Visuals

GUIDE TO WRITING AN ARGUMENT OF DEFINITION

Projects

Two Sample Definitional Arguments

Natasha Rodriguez, Who Are You Calling Underprivileged? [STUDENT ESSAY]

“The word made me question how I saw myself

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in the world.”

Rob Jenkins, Defining the Relationship

“I used to think the boundaries and expectations were clear on both sides, but that no longer seems to be the case.”

10. Evaluations

Understanding Evaluations

Criteria of Evaluation

Characterizing Evaluation

Quantitative Evaluations

Qualitative Evaluations

Developing an Evaluative Argument

Formulating Criteria

Making Claims

Presenting Evidence

Considering Design and Visuals

GUIDE TO WRITING AN EVALUATION

Projects

Two Sample Evaluations

Jenny Kim, The Toxicity in Learning [STUDENT ESSAY]

“Across all disciplines, there is an unhealthy infatuation with a 4.0 GPA that detracts from

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true learning.”

Becca Stanek, I took vitamins every day for a decade. Then I found out they’re useless

“At my appointment last Wednesday, my doctor bluntly informed me that my multivitamins weren’t doing a darn thing for me.”

11. Causal Arguments

Understanding Causal Arguments

Arguments That State a Cause and Then Examine Its Effects

Arguments That State an Effect and Then Trace the Effect Back to Its Causes

Arguments That Move through a Series of Links: A Causes B, Which Leads to C and Perhaps to D

Characterizing Causal Arguments

They Are Often Part of Other Arguments

They Are Almost Always Complex

They Are Often Definition Based

They Usually Yield Probable Rather Than Absolute Conclusions

Developing Causal Arguments

Exploring Possible Claims

Defining the Causal Relationships

Supporting Your Point

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Considering Design and Visuals

GUIDE TO WRITING A CAUSAL ARGUMENT

Projects

Two Sample Causal Arguments

Laura Tarrant, Forever Alone (and Perfectly Fine) [STUDENT ESSAY]

“Singleness doesn’t have to be a steppingstone on the way to a relationship, nor does it have to result from some emotional deficiency. Rather, singleness is its own alternative lifestyle.”

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, America’s Birthrate Is Now a National Emergency

“People’s willingness to have children is not only a sign of confidence in the future, but a sign of cultural health.”

12. Proposals

Understanding and Categorizing Proposals

Characterizing Proposals

Developing Proposals

Defining a Need or Problem

Making a Strong and Clear Claim

Showing That the Proposal Addresses the Need or Problem

Showing That the Proposal Is Feasible

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Considering Design and Visuals

GUIDE TO WRITING A PROPOSAL

Projects

Two Sample Proposals

Caleb Wong, Addiction to Social Media: How to Overcome It [STUDENT ESSAY]

“Like tooth-brushing and nail-biting, using social media regularly is a habit.”

Lenore Skenazy, My Free-Range Parenting Manifesto

“We are crippling kids by convincing them they can’t solve any issues on their own.”

Part 3 Style and Presentation in Arguments

13. Style in Arguments

Style and Word Choice

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Sentence Structure and Argument

Punctuation and Argument

Special Effects: Figurative Language

Tropes

Schemes

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

14. Visual Rhetoric

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The Power of Visual Arguments

Using Visuals in Your Own Arguments

Using Images and Visual Design to Create Pathos

Using Images to Establish Ethos

Using Visual Images to Support Logos

15. Presenting Arguments

Class and Public Discussions

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Preparing a Presentation

Assess the Rhetorical Situation

Nail Down the Specific Details

Fashion a Script Designed to Be Heard by an Audience

Choose Media to Fit Your Subject

Deliver a Good Show

A Note about Webcasts: Live Presentations over the Web

16. Multimodal Arguments

Old Media Transformed by New Media

New Content in New Media

New Audiences in New Media

Analyzing Multimodal Arguments

Making Multimodal Arguments

Web Sites

Videos and Video Essays

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Wikis

Blogs

Social Media

Posters

Comics

A Final Note on Time

Part 4 Research and Arguments

17. Academic Arguments

Understanding What Academic Argument Is

Conventions in Academic Argument Are Not Static

Developing an Academic Argument

Two Sample Academic Arguments

Charlotte Geaghan-Breiner, Where the Wild Things Should Be: Healing Nature Deficit Disorder through the Schoolyard [STUDENT ESSAY]

“The most practical solution to this staggering rift between children and nature involves the schoolyard.”

Sidra Montgomery, The Emotion Work of “Thank You for Your Service”

“The well-meaning intent behind TYFYS isn’t always received by post-9/11 veterans in the same way.”

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18. Finding Evidence

Considering the Rhetorical Situation

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Searching Effectively

SEARCHING ONLINE OR IN DATABASES

Collecting Data on Your Own

19. Evaluating Sources

Assessing Print Sources

Assessing Electronic Sources

Practicing Crap Detection

Assessing Field Research

20. Using Sources

Practicing Infotention

Building a Critical Mass

Synthesizing Information

Paraphrasing Sources You Will Use Extensively

Summarizing Sources

Using Quotations Selectively and Strategically

Framing Materials You Borrow with Signal Words and Introductions

Using Sources to Clarify and Support Your Own Argument

Avoiding “Patchwriting”

21. Plagiarism and Academic Integrity

Giving Credit

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Getting Permission for and Using Copyrighted Internet Sources

Acknowledging Your Sources Accurately and Appropriately

Acknowledging Collaboration

22. Documenting Sources

MLA Style

In-Text Citations

Explanatory and Bibliographic Notes

List of Works Cited

Sample First Page for an Essay in MLA Style

Sample List of Works Cited for an Essay in MLA Style

APA Style

In-Text Citations

Content Notes

List of References

Sample Title Page for an Essay in APA Style

Sample First Text Page for an Essay in APA Style

Sample References List for an Essay in APA Style

Part 5 Arguments

23. How Does Popular Culture Stereotype You?

Alli Joseph, With Disney’s Moana, Hollywood Almost Gets It Right: Indigenous People Weigh In [WEB ARTICLE]

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“But the film’s achievements are not enough for some to cite progress toward more accurate, less- stereotypical portrayal of other cultures in film.”

D.K., Shooting Guns: It’s Rather Fun, Actually [MAGAZINE ARTICLE]

“For the majority of gun owners, being told that their harmless hobby is somehow responsible for the deaths of other people must be deeply unpleasant.”

Nicole Pasulka, How a Bible-Belt Evangelical Church Embraced Gay Rights [WEB ARTICLE]

“Despite some opposition from within the congregation, this Bible Belt church is now making a religious argument for gay rights.”

C. Richard King, Redskins: Insult and Brand [BOOK EXCERPT]

“As much a weapon as a word, then, it injures and excludes, denying history and humanity.”

Melinda C. R. Burgess, et al., Playing with Prejudice: The Prevalence and Consequences of Racial Stereotypes in Video Games [JOURNAL ARTICLE]

“[I]magery that associates African American men

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with the negative stereotypes of aggression, hostility, and criminality conditions viewers to associate this constellation of negativity with African American men in general.”

MAKING A VISUAL ARGUMENT: Sonny Assu, Breakfast Series [ARTWORK]

Sara Morrison, Covering the Transgender Community: How Newsrooms Are Moving Beyond the “Coming Out” Story to Report Crucial Transgender Issues [REPORT]

“How do journalists cover a community, which has been for so long maligned and voiceless, in ways that are considerate of that community’s needs as well as those of readers, some of whom need basic concepts explained?”

24. How Does What We Eat Define Who We Are?

Sophie Egan, The American Food Psyche [BOOK EXCERPT]

“Korean tacos and naan pizza and California rolls. Some might consider these horrors. Sullied versions of the true cultural entities. But not us. In America, collisions are commendable.”

MAKING A VISUAL ARGUMENT: United States Department of Agriculture, How Do Your Eating Habits Differ from Your Grandparents’? [GRAPH]

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Rob Greenfield, An Argument against Veganism . . .  from a Vegan [BLOG POST]

“There are cultures of people who eat meat and animal products in a manner that causes less harm to earth and animals than some vegan diets do.”

Jess Kapadia, I Still Don’t Understand the Cultural Appropriation of Food [WEB ARTICLE]

“I’d venture to say that this many years into the age of pop food media and recipe sharing, no food belongs to anyone anymore.”

Briahna Joy Gray, The Question of Cultural Appropriation [MAGAZINE ARTICLE]

“I think when we talk about appropriation, we’re really talking about two separate issues: first, an issue of cultural exploitation, and second, an issue of cultural disrespect.”

James Dubick, Brandon Mathews, and Clare Cady, Hunger on Campus: The Challenge of Food Insecurity for College Students [REPORT]

“One in five students surveyed had the very lowest levels of food security. Thirteen percent were homeless.”

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25. How Does Language Influence Our World?

Ernie Smith, They Should Stop: In Defense of the Singular They [BLOG POST]

“It may be the most controversial word use in the English language — because it highlights a hole in the language where a better-fitting word should go.”

John McWhorter, Thick of Tongue [WEB ARTICLE]

“I am not referring to black slang. Plenty of black people use little street slang and yet still have a black sound. The question is why you could tell most black people were black if they read you a shopping list over the phone.”

Japanese American Citizens League, from The Power of Words [HANDBOOK]

“During WWII, the U.S. government used euphemistic language to control public perceptions about the forced removal of Japanese American citizens from their West Coast homes to desolate American concentration camps further inland.”

MAKING A VISUAL ARGUMENT: Census Data, English and Languages other Than English in the United States [MAPS AND CHART]

Roxane Gay, The Careless Language of Sexual Violence [BOOK EXCERPT]

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“It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her.”

Jorge Encinas, How Latino Players Are Helping Major League Baseball Learn Spanish [BLOG POST]

“Spanish-speaking fans, millions of whom watch Spanish-language broadcasts of baseball games, will have little idea of the lingering challenge some Latino players in the States have long faced.”

26. Has the Internet Destroyed Privacy?

Lindsay McKenzie, Getting Personal about Cybersecurity [WEB ARTICLE]

“Today’s students may be digital natives, but that doesn’t mean institutions can count on them to protect themselves from cyberattacks.”

MAKING A VISUAL ARGUMENT: The Issue of Privacy [CARTOONS]

Brian Crane, Oh, My Gosh! When Did Facebook Start with Mind Infiltration?

Chris Slane, Window on the Internet

Chris Wildt, Impressive Résumé …

Mike Smith, I Agree with Apple . . .

J. D. Crowe, Congress Kills Internet Privacy

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Lauren Salm, 70 Percent of Employers Are Snooping Candidates’ Social Media Profiles [WEB ARTICLE]

“The bottom line? Think before you post, because there’s always someone watching.”

Deanna Hartley, Creative Ways to Get Noticed by Employers on Social Media [WEB ARTICLE]

“[S]ocial media could work in your favor if you’re looking for a job—if you do it right.”

Lauren Carroll, Congress Let Internet Providers “Spy On” Your Underwear Purchases, Advocacy Group Says [WEB ARTICLE]

“Beyond shopping habits, ISPs and advertisers can glean more significant personal information about their customers from Internet browsing patterns.”

Franklin Foer, from World without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech [BOOK EXCERPT]

“Data provides an X-ray of the soul. Companies turn that photograph of the inner self into a commodity to be traded on a market, bought and sold without our knowledge.”

Amanda Hess, How Privacy Became a Commodity for the Rich and Powerful [WEB ARTICLE]

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“We’ve come to understand that privacy is the currency of our online lives, paying for petty conveniences with bits of personal information.”

27. How Free Should Campus Speech Be?

John Palfrey, Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces [BOOK EXCERPT]

“While diversity and free expression are too often pitted against one another as competing values, they are more compatible than they are opposing.”

Gallup/Knight Foundation, Free Speech on Campus: What Students Think about First Amendment Issues [REPORT]

“College students generally endorse First Amendment ideals in the abstract. The vast majority say free speech is important to democracy and favor an open learning environment that promotes the airing of a wide variety of ideas.”

Ben Schwartz, Shutting Up [WEB ARTICLE]

“Comedy isn’t supposed to be anything, except what the comedian tries to make it—harmless, mean, political, dirty, dumb.”

MAKING A VISUAL ARGUMENT: Racial Microaggressions

Turner Consulting Group, Racial Microaggressions

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[POSTER]

Alexandra Dal, Questions [CARTOON]

Scott O. Lilienfeld, Why a Moratorium on Microaggressions Is Needed [SCHOLARLY ARTICLE]

“Distributing lists of ‘forbidden’ phrases to campus administrators or faculty members or mandating microaggression training for employees are unlikely to be helpful.”

Sarah Brown, Activist Athletes [WEB ARTICLE]

“Since athletes are at the mercy of their coaches in terms of playing time and scholarships, coaches and team managers exercise a great deal of influence over their players’ choices.”

Catherine Nolan-Ferrell, Balancing Classroom Civility and Free Speech [MAGAZINE ARTICLE]

“I cannot claim complete neutrality about the subject matter, but I do promise students that I will discuss multiple perspectives and explain how and why I reached my point of view.”

Glossary

Index

Readings by Type of Argument

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PART 1 READING AND UNDERSTANDING arguments

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CHAPTER 1 Understanding Arguments and Reading Them Critically

On October 15, 2017, actor and activist Alyssa Milano took to Twitter to issue a call to action:

Milano was joining the conversation surrounding a spate of revelations about very high-profile and powerful men accused of sexual

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harassment: Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Harvey Weinstein. Milano’s tweet argues for standing up and speaking out—in big numbers—and her message certainly hit a nerve: within 24 hours, 4.7 million people around the world had joined the “me too” conversation, with over 12 million posts and comments. Some of these comments pointed out that the “me too” movement is actually more than ten years old: it began with activist Tarana Burke, who was directing a Girls for Gender Equity program in Brooklyn, aimed at giving voice to young women of color. As Burke told CNN after Milano’s tweet went viral: “It’s not about a viral campaign for me. It’s about a movement.”

Burke’s reaction to the 2017 meme makes an important point, one that was echoed in some of the responses Milano received and further elaborated by Jessi Hempel, the editorial director of Backchannel, in “The Problem with #metoo and Viral Outrage.” Hempel says that “on its surface,” #metoo has what looks to be the makings of an “earnest and effective social movement.” But like Burke, Hempel wonders whether #metoo will actually have the power and longevity of a true social movement. She’s concerned that while millions of people are weighing in, at last, on a long-ignored issue, the campaign may not culminate in real change:

In truth, however, #MeToo is a too-perfect meme. It harnesses social media’s mechanisms to drive users (that’s you and me) into escalating states of outrage while exhausting us to the point where we cannot meaningfully act.

Hempel cites extensive research by Yale professor Molly Crockett that

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suggests that “digital technologies may be transforming the way we experience outrage, and limiting how much we can actually change social realities.” In other words, expressing outrage online lets us talk the talk but not walk the walk of actual change.

In spite of these caveats, the work begun by Tarana Burke over a decade ago and given new urgency by Alyssa Milano has led to a series of high-profile firings, and some criminal convictions, in many sectors of society, from the Hollywood film industry (Weinstein’s company had to declare bankruptcy) to New York’s cultural scene (the Metropolitan Opera fired its conductor, James Levine) to Congress (Senator Al Franken was forced to resign his seat) to the world of sports (Olympics team doctor Larry Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for assaulting as many as 160 women athletes). In short, it now looks as though #metoo does constitute a genuine movement that will continue to lead to actual, concrete changes in cultural attitudes and practices. Certainly, the argument over its effectiveness and reach will continue, much of it playing out on social media platforms.

As this example shows, arguments on social media occur on crowded, two-way channels, with claims and counterclaims whizzing by, fast and furious. Such tools reach audiences (like the 4.7 million who initially responded to #metoo) and they also create them, offering an innovative way to make and share arguments. Just as importantly, anyone, anywhere, with access to a phone, tablet, or other electronic device, can launch arguments that circle the globe in seconds. Social networking and digital tools are increasingly available to all—for

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better or for worse, as shown by the recent example of Facebook’s allowing data from 50 million users to be used for political purposes.

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Everything Is an Argument As you know from your own experiences with social media, arguments are all around us, in every medium, in every genre, in everything we do. There may be an argument on the T-shirt you put on in the morning, in the sports column you read on the bus, in the prayers you utter before an exam, in the off-the-cuff political remarks of a teacher lecturing, on the bumper sticker on the car in front of you, in the assurances of a health center nurse that “This won’t hurt one bit.”

The clothes you wear, the foods you eat, and the groups you join make nuanced, sometimes unspoken assertions about who you are and what you value. So an argument can be any text—written, spoken, aural, or visual—that expresses a point of view. In fact, some theorists claim that language is inherently persuasive. When you say, “Hi, how’s it going?” in one sense you’re arguing that your hello deserves a response. Even humor makes an argument when it causes readers to recognize—through bursts of laughter or just a faint smile—how things are and how they might be different.

More obvious as arguments are those that make direct claims based on or drawn from evidence. Such writing often moves readers to recognize problems and to consider solutions. Persuasion of this kind is usually easy to recognize:

The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress [in 1984], is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the

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military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant.

—Camille Paglia, “The Drinking Age Is Past Its Prime”

We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, a society that looks forward every second to an immediate replication of what it has just done, but one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

—Christine Rosen, “The Image Culture”

RESPOND● Can an argument really be any text that expresses a point of view?

What kinds of arguments—if any—might be made by the following

items?

a Golden State Warriors cap

Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 34

the “explicit lyrics” label on a best-selling rap CD

the health warnings on a package of cigarettes

a Tesla Model 3 electric car

a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses

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Why Read Arguments Critically and Rhetorically? More than two millennia ago, Aristotle told students that they needed to know and understand and use the arts of rhetoric for two major reasons: to be able to get their ideas across effectively and persuasively and to protect themselves from being manipulated by others. Today, we need these abilities more than ever before: as we are inundated with “alternative facts,” “fake news,” mis- and disinformation, and often even outright lies, the ability to read between the lines, to become fact- checkers, to practice what media critic Howard Rheingold calls “crap detection” (see “Practicing Crap Detection” in Chapter 19), and to read with careful attention are now survival skills.

This need is so acute that new courses are springing up on college

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campuses, such as one at the University of Washington named (provocatively) “Calling Bullshit,” which Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West define as “language, statistical figures, graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.” (Search for “The Fine Art of Sniffing Out Crappy Science” on the Web.) These professors are particularly interested in the use of statistics and visual representation of data to misinform or confuse, and in showing how “big data” especially can often obscure rather than reveal valid claims, although they acknowledge the power of verbal misinformation as well.

You can practice self-defense against such misrepresentation by following some sound advice:

Pay attention, close attention, to what you are reading or viewing. While it’s tempting to skim, avoid the temptation, especially when the stakes are high. Keep focused on the text at hand, with your critical antenna up! Keep an eye out for “click bait,” those subject lines or headings that scream “read me, read me” but usually lead to little information. Be skeptical. Check the author, publisher, sources: how reliable are they? Look for unstated assumptions behind claims—and question them. Distinguish between facts that have verifiable support and claims and those which may or may not be completely empty. Learn to triangulate: don’t take the word of a single source but look for corroboration from other reliable sources.

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Become a fact checker! Get familiar with nonpartisan fact- checkers like Politifact, FactCheck.org, the Sunlight Foundation, and Snopes.com.

You will find additional information about reading attentively and critically throughout this book, especially in Chapters 6 and 19.

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Why Listen to Arguments Rhetorically and Respectfully? Rhetorician Krista Ratcliffe recommends that we all learn to listen rhetorically, which she defines as “a stance of openness” you can take in relation to any person, text, or culture. Taking such a stance is not easy, especially when emotions and disagreements run high, but doing so is a necessary step in understanding where other people are coming from and in acknowledging that our own stances are deeply influenced by forces we may not even be aware of. Even when we stand on the shoulders of giants, our view is limited and partial, and it’s good to remember that this maxim is true for everyone.

Amid the extreme divisions in the United States today, amid the charges and countercharges, the ongoing attacks of one group on another, it’s especially important to learn to listen to others, even others with whom we drastically disagree. Scholars and pundits alike have written about the “echo chambers” we often inhabit, especially online, where we hear only from people who think as we do, act as we act, believe as we believe. Such echo chambers are dangerous to a democracy. As a result, some are advocating for rhetorical listening. Oprah Winfrey, for example, brought together a group of women, half of whom supported Trump and half of whom supported Clinton, over “croissants and great jam.” At first no one wanted to participate, but once Winfrey got them together and they started listening to one

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another’s stories, the women began to find small patches of common ground. Listening openly and respectfully was the key. So it is with the website and app “Hi from the Other Side,” where people can sign up to be paired with someone on another side of an issue, get guidance on how to begin a conversation, and eventually meet to pursue common ground and common interests (see https://www.hifromtheotherside.com for more information).

You can begin to practice rhetorical listening as you get to know people who differ from you on major issues, listening to their views carefully and respectfully, asking them for that same respect, and beginning to search for some common ground, no matter how small. Arguments are never won by going nowhere except “Yes I can”/“No you can’t” over and over again, yet that’s the way many arguments are conducted today. Learning to listen rhetorically and beginning to find some small commonality is usually a better way to argue constructively than plunging right in with accusations or dramatic claims.

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Why We Make Arguments As this discussion suggests, in the politically divided and entertainment-driven culture of the United States today, the word argument may well call up negative images: the hostile scowl, belligerent tweet, or shaking fist of a politician or news pundit who wants to drown out other voices and prevail at all costs. This winner- take-all view has a long history, but it often turns people off to the whole process of using reasoned conversation to identify, explore, and solve problems. Hoping to avoid perpetual standoffs with people on “the other side,” many people now sidestep opportunities to speak their minds on issues shaping their lives and work. We want to counter this attitude throughout this book: we urge you to examine your values and beliefs, to understand where they come from, and to voice them clearly and cogently in arguments you make, all the while respecting the values and beliefs of others.

Some arguments, of course, are aimed at winning, especially those related to politics, business, and law. Two candidates for office, for example, vie for a majority of votes; the makers of one smartphone try to outsell their competitors by offering more features at a lower price; and two lawyers try to outwit each other in pleading to a judge and jury. In your college writing, you may also be called on to make arguments that appeal to a “judge” and “jury” (perhaps your instructor and classmates). You might, for instance, argue that students in every field should be required to engage in service learning projects. In doing so, you will need to offer better arguments or more convincing evidence than those with other perspectives—such as those who might

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regard service learning as a politicized or coercive form of education. You can do so reasonably and responsibly, no name-calling required.

There are many reasons to argue and principled ways to do so. We explore some of them in this section.

Arguments to Convince and Inform We’re stepping into an argument ourselves in drawing what we hope is a useful distinction between convincing and—in the next section —persuading. (Feel free to disagree with us!) Arguments to convince lead audiences to accept a claim as true or reasonable—based on information or evidence that seems factual and reliable; arguments to persuade then seek to move people beyond conviction to action. Academic arguments often combine both elements.

Many news reports and analyses, white papers, and academic articles aim to convince audiences by broadening what they know about a subject. Such fact-based arguments might have no motives beyond laying out what the facts are. Here’s an opening paragraph from a 2014 news story by Anahad O’Connor in the New York Times that itself launched a thousand arguments (and lots of huzzahs) simply by reporting the results of a recent scientific study:

Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat

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increased heart attacks and other cardiac events.

—Anahad O’Connor, “Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link”

Wow. You can imagine how carefully the reporter walked through the scientific data, knowing how this new information might be understood and repurposed by his readers.

Similarly, in a college paper on the viability of nuclear power as an alternative source of energy, you might compare the health and safety record of a nuclear plant to that of other forms of energy. Depending upon your findings and your interpretation of the data, the result of your fact-based presentation might be to raise or alleviate concerns readers have about nuclear energy. Of course, your decision to write the argument might be driven by your conviction that nuclear power is much safer than most people believe.

Today, images offer especially powerful arguments designed both to inform and to convince. For example, David Plunkert’s cover art for the August 28, 2017, issue of the New Yorker is simple yet very striking. Plunkert, who doesn’t often involve himself with political subjects, said he was prompted to do so in response to what he saw as President Trump’s “weak pushback” against the hateful violence on exhibit in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11, 2017: “A picture does a better job showing my thoughts than words do; it can have a light touch on a subject that’s extremely scary.”

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In the excerpt from his scholarly journal article, Scott O. Lilienfeld aims to persuade psychologists and other academics to put aside the term “microaggressions” because—though they may be offensive—these slights and insults aimed at minorities have not been proven to be psychologically harmful.

LINK TO Lilienfeld, “Why a Moratorium on Microaggressions Is Needed,” in Chapter 27

Arguments to Persuade

Today, climate change may be the public issue that best illustrates the chasm that sometimes separates conviction from persuasion. Although the weight of scientific research attests to the fact that the earth is

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warming and that humans are responsible for a good bit of that warming, convincing people to accept this evidence and persuading them to act on it still doesn’t follow easily. How then does change occur? Some theorists suggest that persuasion—understood as moving people to do more than nod in agreement—is best achieved via appeals to emotions such as fear, anger, envy, pride, sympathy, or hope. We think that’s an oversimplification. The fact is that persuasive arguments, whether in advertisements, political blogs, YouTube videos, tweets, or newspaper editorials, draw upon all the appeals of rhetoric (see Appealing to Audiences in Chapter 10) to motivate people to act—whether it be to buy a product, pull a lever for a candidate, or volunteer for a civic organization. Here, once again, is Camille Paglia driving home her argument that the 1984 federal law raising the drinking age in the United States to 21 was a catastrophic decision in need of reversal:

What this cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs—Ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer)— surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay male circuit scene.

Paglia chooses to dramatize her argument by sharply contrasting a

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safer, more supportive past with a vastly more dangerous present when drinking was forced underground and young people turned to highly risky behaviors. She doesn’t hesitate to name them either: binge drinking, club drugs, raves, and, most seriously, date rape. This highly rhetorical, one might say emotional, argument pushes readers hard to endorse a call for serious action—the repeal of the current drinking age law.

Admit it, Duchess of Cornwall. You knew abandoned dogs need homes, but it was heartrending photos on the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home Web site that persuaded you to visit the shelter.

RESPOND●

Apply the distinction made here between convincing and

persuading to the way people respond to two or three current

political or social issues. Is there a useful distinction between being

convinced and being persuaded? Explain your position.

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Arguments to Make Decisions Closely allied to arguments to convince and persuade are arguments to examine the options in important matters, both civil and personal— from managing out-of-control deficits to choosing careers. Arguments to make decisions occur all the time in the public arena, where they are often slow to evolve, caught up in electoral or legal squabbles, and yet driven by a genuine desire to find consensus. In recent years, for instance, Americans have argued hard to make decisions about health care, the civil rights of same-sex couples, and the status of more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Subjects so complex aren’t debated in straight lines. They get haggled over in every imaginable medium by thousands of writers, politicians, and ordinary citizens working alone or via political organizations to have their ideas considered.

For college students, choosing a major can be an especially momentous personal decision, and one way to go about making that decision is to argue your way through several alternatives. By the time you’ve explored the pros and cons of each alternative, you should be a little closer to a reasonable and defensible decision.

Sometimes decisions, however, are not so easy to make.

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In the excerpt from her professional report “Covering the Transgender Community,” Sara Morrison explores how journalists are working to incorporate correct terminology, respect the preferred gender pronouns and identities of their transgender subjects, and address the issues that matter to transgender individuals.

LINK TO Morrison, “Covering the Transgender Community,” in Chapter 23

Arguments to Understand and Explore

Arguments to make decisions often begin as choices between opposing positions already set in stone. But is it possible to examine important

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issues in more open-ended ways? Many situations, again in civil or personal arenas, seem to call for arguments that genuinely explore possibilities without constraints or prejudices. If there’s an “opponent” in such situations at all (often there is not), it’s likely to be the status quo or a current trend which, for one reason or another, puzzles just about everyone. For example, in trying to sort through the extraordinary complexities of the 2011 budget debate, philosophy professor Gary Gutting was able to show how two distinguished economists—John Taylor and Paul Krugman—drew completely different conclusions from the exact same sets of facts. Exploring how such a thing could occur led Gutting to conclude that the two economists were arguing from the same facts, all right, but that they did not have all the facts possible. Those missing or unknown facts allowed them to fill in the blanks as they could, thus leading them to different conclusions. By discovering the source of a paradox, Gutting potentially opened new avenues for understanding.

Exploratory arguments can also be personal, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s ironic exploration of racism and of her own identity in the essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” If you keep a journal or blog, you have no doubt found yourself making arguments to explore issues near and dear to you. Perhaps the essential argument in any such piece is the writer’s realization that a problem exists—and that the writer or reader needs to understand it and respond constructively to it if possible.

Explorations of ideas that begin by trying to understand another’s perspective have been described as invitational arguments by

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researchers Sonja Foss, Cindy Griffin, and Josina Makau. Such arguments are interested in inviting others to join in mutual explorations of ideas based on discovery and respect. Another kind of argument, called Rogerian argument (after psychotherapist Carl Rogers), approaches audiences in similarly nonthreatening ways, finding common ground and establishing trust among those who disagree about issues. Writers who take a Rogerian approach try to see where the other person is coming from, looking for “both/and” or “win/win” solutions whenever possible. (For more on Rogerian strategies, see Chapter 7.)

The risks of Rogerian argument

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RESPOND● What are your reasons for making arguments? Keep notes for two

days about every single argument you make, using our broad

definition to guide you. Then identify your reasons: How many times

did you aim to convince? To inform? To persuade? To explore? To

understand?

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Occasions for Argument In a fifth-century BCE textbook of rhetoric (the art of persuasion), the philosopher Aristotle provides an ingenious strategy for classifying arguments based on their perspective on time—past, future, and present. His ideas still help us to appreciate the role arguments play in society in the twenty-first century. As you consider Aristotle’s occasions for argument, remember that all such classifications overlap (to a certain extent) and that we live in a world much different than his.

Arguments about the Past Debates about what has happened in the past, what Aristotle called forensic arguments, are the red meat of government, courts, businesses, and academia. People want to know who did what in the past, for what reasons, and with what liability. When you argue a speeding ticket in court, you are making a forensic argument, claiming perhaps that you weren’t over the limit or that the officer’s radar was faulty. A judge will have to decide what exactly happened in the past in the unlikely case you push the issue that far.

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many researchers both in and

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outside the government devoted themselves to trying to understand the effects of hacking on the election and, more specifically, the extent to which Russia was involved in such activities. Cybersecurity experts from agencies such as the CIA, FBI, and Homeland Security argued that they had extensive evidence to show that Russia had conducted a number of hacking expeditions and had manipulated messages on social media to try to disrupt the American elections. Others inside the Trump administration argued that the evidence wasn’t convincing; the president even declared that it had been “made up.” As this book goes to press, the argument over what happened is still raging. What hacks actually occurred in the run-up to the election? Which state voting procedures, if any, were violated? What part did the Russian government play? These are all forensic questions to be carefully investigated, argued, and answered by agencies and special counsels currently at work.

Some forensic arguments go on . . . and on and on. Consider, for example, the lingering arguments over Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America. Are his expeditions cause for celebration or notably unhappy chapters in human history? Or some of both? Such arguments about past actions—heated enough to spill over into the public realm—are common in disciplines such as history, philosophy, and ethics.

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In his 2016 blog post at Tedium, Ernie Smith argues that the plural pronoun they will and should continue to be used to represent a subject in a gender-neutral way, even though it defies conventional grammar.

LINK TO Smith, “They Should Stop: In Defense of the Singular They,” in Chapter 25

James B. Comey, former director of the FBI who was fired by President Trump, testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, 2017.

Arguments about the Future

Debates about what will or should happen in the future— deliberative arguments—often influence policies or legislation for the future. Should local or state governments allow or even encourage the use of self-driving cars on public roads? Should colleges and universities

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lend support to more dual-credit programs so that students can earn college credits while still in high school? Should coal-fired power plants be phased out of our energy grid? These are the sorts of deliberative questions that legislatures, committees, or school boards routinely address when making laws or establishing policies.

But arguments about the future can also be speculative, advancing by means of projections and reasoned guesses, as shown in the following passage from an essay by media analyst Marc Prensky. He argues that while professors and colleges will always be responsible for teaching students to learn from the knowledge provided by print texts, it’s about time for some college or university to be the first to ban physical, that is to say paper, books on its campus, a controversial proposal to say the least:

So, as counterintuitive as it may sound, eliminating physical books from college campuses would be a positive step for our 21st-century students, and, I believe, for 21st-century scholarship as well. Academics, researchers, and particularly teachers need to move to the tools of the future. Artifacts belong in museums, not in our institutions of higher learning.

—Marc Prensky, “In the 21st-Century University, Let’s Ban Books”

Arguments about the Present Arguments about the present—what Aristotle terms epideictic or ceremonial arguments—explore the current values of a society,

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affirming or challenging its widely shared beliefs and core assumptions. Epideictic arguments are often made at public and formal events such as inaugural addresses, sermons, eulogies, memorials, and graduation speeches. Members of the audience listen carefully as credible speakers share their wisdom. For example, as the selection of college commencement speakers has grown increasingly contentious, Ruth J. Simmons, the first African American woman to head an Ivy League college, used the opportunity of such an address (herself standing in for a rejected speaker) to offer a timely and ringing endorsement of free speech. Her words perfectly illustrate epideictic rhetoric:

Universities have a special obligation to protect free speech, open discourse and the value of protest. The collision of views and ideologies is in the DNA of the academic enterprise. No collision avoidance technology is needed here. The noise from this discord may cause others to criticize the legitimacy of the academic enterprise, but how can knowledge advance without the questions that overturn misconceptions, push further into previously impenetrable areas of inquiry and assure us stunning breakthroughs in human knowledge? If there is anything that colleges must encourage and protect it is the persistent questioning of the status quo. Our health as a nation, our health as women, our health as an industry requires it.

—Ruth J. Simmons, Smith College, 2014

Perhaps more common than Smith’s impassioned address are values

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arguments that examine contemporary culture, praising what’s admirable and blaming what’s not. In the following argument, student Latisha Chisholm looks at the state of rap music after Tupac Shakur:

With the death of Tupac, not only did one of the most intriguing rap rivalries of all time die, but the motivation for rapping seems to have changed. Where money had always been a plus, now it is obviously more important than wanting to express the hardships of Black communities. With current rappers, the positive power that came from the desire to represent Black people is lost. One of the biggest rappers now got his big break while talking about sneakers. Others announce retirement without really having done much for the soul or for Black people’s morale. I equate new rappers to NFL players that don’t love the game anymore. They’re only in it for the money. . . . It looks like the voice of a people has lost its heart.

—Latisha Chisholm, “Has Rap Lost Its Soul?”

As in many ceremonial arguments, Chisholm here reinforces common values such as representing one’s community honorably and fairly.

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Are rappers since Tupac—like Jay Z—only in it for the money? Many epideictic arguments either praise or blame contemporary culture in this way.

RESPOND●

In a recent magazine, newspaper, or blog, find three editorials—one

that makes a forensic argument, one a deliberative argument, and

one a ceremonial argument. Analyze the arguments by asking these

questions: Who is arguing? What purposes are the writers trying to

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achieve? To whom are they directing their arguments? Then decide

whether the arguments’ purposes have been achieved and how you

know.

Occasions for Argument Past Future Present

What is it called?

Forensic Deliberative Epideictic

What are its concerns?

What happened in the past? What should be done in the future?

Who or what deserves praise or blame?

What does it look like?

Court decisions, legal briefs, legislative hearings, investigative reports, academic studies

White papers, proposals, bills, regulations, mandates

Eulogies, graduation speeches, inaugural addresses, roasts

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Kinds of Argument Yet another way of categorizing arguments is to consider their status or stasis—that is, the specific kinds of issues they address. This approach, called stasis theory, was used in ancient Greek and Roman civilizations to provide questions designed to help citizens and lawyers work their way through legal cases. The status questions were posed in sequence because each depended on answers from the preceding ones. Together, the queries helped determine the point of contention in an argument—where the parties disagreed or what exactly had to be proven. A modern version of those questions might look like the following:

Did something happen? What is its nature? What is its quality or cause? What actions should be taken?

Each stasis question explores a different aspect of a problem and uses different evidence or techniques to reach conclusions. You can use these questions to explore the aspects of any topic you’re considering. You’ll discover that we use the stasis issues to define key types of argument in Part 2.

Did Something Happen? Arguments of Fact There’s no point in arguing a case until its basic facts are established. So an argument of fact usually involves a statement that can be

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proved or disproved with specific evidence or testimony. For example, the question of pollution of the oceans—is it really occurring?—might seem relatively easy to settle. Either scientific data prove that the oceans are being dirtied as a result of human activity, or they don’t. But to settle the matter, writers and readers need to ask a number of other questions about the “facts”:

Where did the facts come from? Are they reliable? Is there a problem with the facts? Where did the problem begin and what caused it?

For more on arguments based on facts, see Chapters 4 and 8.

What Is the Nature of the Thing? Arguments of Definition Some of the most hotly debated issues in American life today involve questions of definition: we argue over the nature of the human fetus, the meaning of “amnesty” for immigrants, the boundaries of sexual assault. As you might guess, issues of definition have mighty consequences, and decades of debate may nonetheless leave the matter unresolved. Here, for example, is how one type of sexual assault is defined in an important 2007 report submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice by the National Institute of Justice:

We consider as incapacitated sexual assault any unwanted sexual contact occurring when a victim is unable to provide consent or stop what is happening because she is passed out,

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drugged, drunk, incapacitated, or asleep, regardless of whether the perpetrator was responsible for her substance use or whether substances were administered without her knowledge. We break down incapacitated sexual assault into four subtypes. . . .

—“The Campus Sexual Assault (CSA) Study: Final Report”

The specifications of the definition go on for another two hundred words, each of consequence in determining how sexual assault on college campuses might be understood, measured, and addressed.

Of course many arguments of definition are less weighty than this, though still hotly contested: Is playing video games a sport? Can Batman be a tragic figure? Is LeBron James a hero for our age? (For more about arguments of definition, see Chapter 9.)

What Is the Quality or Cause of the Thing? Arguments of Evaluation Arguments of evaluation present criteria and then measure individual people, ideas, or things against those standards. For instance, a 2017 article in the Atlantic examined “How Pixar Lost Its Way,” arguing that “The golden age of Pixar is over.” Chronicling the company’s success from the first Toy Story (1995), the writer identifies what Pixar accomplished so well:

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The theme that the studio mined with greatest success during its first decade and a half was parenthood, whether real (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) or implicit (Monsters, Inc., Up). Pixar’s distinctive insight into parent-child relations stood out from the start, in Toy Story, and lost none of its power in two innovative and unified sequels.

—Christopher Orr, “How Pixar Lost Its Way”

As we read this article, we are bound to ask what happened: why and how did Pixar lose its way? And Christopher Orr probes further, suggesting that the sale of Pixar to Disney and the dependence on sequel after sequel led to the downturn. As he concludes his analysis of Pixar’s evolution, Orr distressingly notes the announcement of plans for Toy Story 4, which unravels the trilogy’s neat arc.

Although evaluations differ from causal analyses, in practice the boundaries between stasis questions are often porous: particular arguments have a way of defining their own issues.

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For much more about arguments of evaluation, see Chapter 10; for causal arguments, see Chapter 11.

What Actions Should Be Taken? Proposal Arguments After facts in a controversy have been confirmed, definitions agreed on, evaluations made, and causes traced, it may be time for a proposal argument answering the question Now, what do we do about all this? For example, in developing an argument about out-of-control student fees at your college, you might use all the prior stasis questions to study the issue and determine exactly how much and for what reasons these costs are escalating. Only then will you be prepared to offer knowledgeable suggestions for action. In examining a nationwide move to eliminate remedial education in four-year colleges, John Cloud offers a notably moderate proposal to address the problem:

Students age twenty-two and over account for 43 percent of those in remedial classrooms, according to the National Center for Developmental Education. . . . [But] 55 percent of those needing remediation must take just one course. Is it too much to ask them to pay extra for that class or take it at a community college?

—John Cloud, “Who’s Ready for College?”

For more about proposal arguments, see Chapter 12.

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The No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2002 with great hopes and bipartisan support, but it did not lead to the successes those proposing it had hoped for.

STATIS QUESTIONS AT WORK

Suppose you have an opportunity to speak at a student conference on the impact of climate change. You are tentatively in favor of strengthening industrial pollution standards aimed at reducing global warming trends. But to learn more about the issue, you use the stasis questions to get started.

Did something happen? Does global warming exist? Maybe not, say many in the oil and gas industry; at best, evidence for global warming is inconclusive. Yes, say most scientists and governments; climate change is real and even seems to be accelerating. To come to your conclusion, you’ll weigh the facts carefully and identify problems with opposing arguments. What is the nature of the thing? Skeptics define climate change

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as a naturally occurring event; most scientists base their definitions on change due to human causes. You look at each definition carefully: How do the definitions foster the goals of each group? What’s at stake for each group in defining it that way? What is the quality or cause of the thing? Exploring the differing assessments of damage done by climate change leads you to ask who will gain from such analysis: Do oil executives want to protect their investments? Do scientists want government money for grants? Where does evidence for the dangers of global warming come from? Who benefits if the dangers are accepted as real and present, and who loses? What actions should be taken? If climate change is occurring naturally or causing little harm, then arguably nothing needs to be or can be done. But if it is caused mainly by human activity and dangers, action is definitely called for (although not everyone may agree on what such action should be). As you investigate the proposals being made and the reasons behind them, you come closer to developing your own argument.

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Appealing to Audiences Exploring all the occasions and kinds of arguments available will lead you to think about the audience(s) you are addressing and the specific ways you can appeal to them. Audiences for arguments today are amazingly diverse, from the flesh-and-blood person sitting across a desk when you negotiate a student loan to your “friends” on social media, to the “ideal” reader you imagine for whatever you are writing, to the unknown people around the world who may read a blog you have posted. The figure below suggests just how many dimensions an audience can have as writers and readers negotiate their relationships with a text, whether it be oral, written, or digital.

As you see there, texts usually have intended readers, the people writers hope and expect to address—let’s say, routine browsers of a newspaper’s op-ed page. But writers also shape the responses of these actual readers in ways they imagine as appropriate or desirable—for example, maneuvering readers of editorials into making focused and knowledgeable judgments about politics and culture. Such audiences, as imagined and fashioned by writers within their texts, are called invoked readers.

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Readers and writers in context

Making matters even more complicated, readers can respond to writers’ maneuvers by choosing to join the invoked audiences, to resist them, or maybe even to ignore them. Arguments may also attract “real” readers from groups not among those that writers originally imagined or expected to reach. You may post something on the Web, for instance, and discover that people you did not intend to address are commenting on it. (For them, the experience may be like reading private email intended for someone else: they find themselves drawn to and fascinated by your ideas!) As authors of this book, we think about students like you whenever we write: you are our intended readers. But notice how in dozens of ways, from the images we choose to the tone of our language, we also invoke an audience of people who take writing arguments seriously. We want you to become that kind of reader.

So audiences are very complicated and subtle and challenging, and yet you somehow have to attract and even persuade them. As always, Aristotle offers an answer. He identified three time-tested appeals that

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speakers and writers can use to reach almost any audience, labeling them pathos, ethos, and logos—strategies as effective today as they were in ancient times, though we usually think of them in slightly different terms. Used in the right way and deployed at the right moment, emotional, ethical, and logical appeals have enormous power, as we’ll see in subsequent chapters.

RESPOND● You can probably provide concise descriptions of the intended

audience for most textbooks you have encountered. But can you

detect their invoked audiences—that is, the way their authors are

imagining (and perhaps shaping) the readers they would like to

have? Carefully review this entire first chapter, looking for signals

and strategies that might identify the audience and readers invoked

by the authors of Everything’s an Argument.

Emotional Appeals: Pathos Emotional appeals, or pathos, generate emotions (fear, pity, love, anger, jealousy) that the writer hopes will lead the audience to accept a claim. Here is an alarming sentence from a book by Barry B. LePatner arguing that Americans need to make hard decisions about repairing the country’s failing infrastructure:

When the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis shuddered, buckled, and collapsed during the evening rush hour on Wednesday, August 1, 2007, plunging 111 vehicles into the Mississippi River and sending thirteen people to their deaths, the sudden,

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apparently inexplicable nature of the event at first gave the appearance of an act of God.

—Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward

If you ever drive across a bridge, LePatner has probably gotten your attention. His sober and yet descriptive language helps readers imagine the dire consequence of neglected road maintenance and bad design decisions. Making an emotional appeal like this can dramatize an issue and sometimes even create a bond between writer and readers. (For more about emotional appeals, see Chapter 2.)

Ethical Appeals: Ethos When writers or speakers come across as trustworthy, audiences are likely to listen to and accept their arguments. That trustworthiness (along with fairness and respect) is a mark of ethos, or credibility. Showing that you know what you are talking about exerts an ethical appeal, as does emphasizing that you share values with and respect your audience. Once again, here’s Barry LePatner from Too Big to Fall, shoring up his authority for writing about problems with America’s roads and bridges by invoking the ethos of people even more credible:

For those who would seek to dismiss the facts that support the thesis of this book, I ask them to consult the many professional engineers in state transportation departments who face these problems on a daily basis. These professionals

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understand the physics of bridge and road design, and the real problems of ignoring what happens to steel and concrete when they are exposed to the elements without a strict regimen of ongoing maintenance.

It’s a sound rhetorical move to enhance credibility this way. For more about ethical appeals, see Chapter 3.

Logical Appeals: Logos Appeals to logic, or logos, are often given prominence and authority in U.S. culture: “Just the facts, ma’am,” a famous early TV detective on Dragnet used to say. Indeed, audiences respond well to the use of reasons and evidence—to the presentation of facts, statistics, credible testimony, cogent examples, or even a narrative or story that embodies a sound reason in support of an argument. Following almost two hundred pages of facts, statistics, case studies, and arguments about the sad state of American bridges, LePatner can offer this sober, logical, and inevitable conclusion:

We can no longer afford to ignore the fact that we are in the midst of a transportation funding crisis, which has been exacerbated by an even larger and longer-term problem: how we choose to invest in our infrastructure. It is not difficult to imagine the serious consequences that will unfold if we fail to address the deplorable conditions of our bridges and roads, including the increasingly higher costs we will pay for goods and services that rely on that transportation network, and a concomitant reduction in our standard of living.

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For more about logical appeals, see Chapter 4.

Bringing It Home: Kairos and the Rhetorical Situation In Greek mythology, Kairos—the youngest son of Zeus—was the god of opportunity. He is most often depicted as running, and his most unusual characteristic is a shock of hair on his forehead. As Kairos dashes by, you have a chance to seize that lock of hair, thereby seizing the opportune moment; once he passes you by, however, you’ve missed your chance.

Time as Occasion (Kairos) by Italian Renaissance painter Francesco de’ Rossi

Kairos is also a term used to describe the most suitable time and place for making an argument and the most opportune ways of expressing it. It is easy to point to rhetorical moments, when speakers find exactly the right words to stir—and stir up—an audience: Franklin Roosevelt’s

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“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and of course Martin Luther King Jr.’s majestic “I have a dream. . . .” But kairos matters just as much in less dramatic situations, whenever speakers or writers must size up the core elements of a rhetorical situation to decide how best to make their expertise and ethos work for a particular message aimed at a specific audience. The diagram below hints at the dynamic complexity of the rhetorical situation.

But rhetorical situations are embedded in contexts of enormous social complexity. The moment you find a subject, you inherit all the knowledge, history, culture, and technological significations that surround it. To lesser and greater degrees (depending on the subject), you also bring personal circumstances into the field—perhaps your gender, your race, your religion, your economic class, your habits of language. And all those issues weigh also upon the people you write to and for.

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The rhetorical situation

So considering your rhetorical situation calls on you to think hard about the notion of kairos. Being aware of your rhetorical moment means being able to understand and take advantage of dynamic, shifting circumstances and to choose the best (most timely) proofs and evidence for a particular place, situation, and audience. It means seizing moments and enjoying opportunities, not being overwhelmed by them. Doing so might even lead you to challenge the title of this text: is everything an argument?

That’s what makes writing arguments exciting.

RESPOND●

Take a look at the bumper sticker below, and then analyze it. What

is its purpose? What kind of argument is it? Which of the stasis

questions does it most appropriately respond to? To what

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audiences does it appeal? What appeals does it make and how?

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Considering What’s “Normal” If you want to communicate effectively with people across cultures, then learn about the traditions in those cultures and examine the norms guiding your own behavior:

Explore your assumptions! Most of us regard our ways of thinking as “normal” or “right.” Such assumptions guide our judgments about what works in persuasive situations. But just because it may seem natural to speak bluntly in arguments, consider that others may find such aggression startling or even alarming. Remember: ways of arguing differ widely across cultures. Pay attention to how people from groups or cultures other than your own argue, and be sensitive to different paths of thinking you’ll

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encounter as well as to differences in language. Don’t assume that all people share your cultural values, ethical principles, or political assumptions. People across the world have different ways of defining family, work, or happiness. As you present arguments to them, consider that they may be content with their different ways of organizing their lives and societies. Respect the differences among individuals within a given group. Don’t expect that every member of a community behaves—or argues—in the same way or shares the same beliefs. Avoid thinking, for instance, that there is a single Asian, African, or Hispanic culture or that Europeans are any less diverse or more predictable than Americans or Canadians in their thinking. In other words, be skeptical of stereotypes.

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CHAPTER 2 Arguments Based on Emotion: Pathos

Emotional appeals (appeals to pathos) are powerful tools for influencing what people think and believe. We all make decisions— even including the most important ones—based on our feelings. That’s what many environmental advocates are counting on when they use images like those above to warn of the catastrophic effects of global warming on the earth and its peoples. The first image shows a boy and his boat on what used to be a lake but is now cracked dry earth; the second, a polar bear stranded on a small ice floe as the oceans rise around it; and the third, a graphic design of a melting earth.

Of course, some people don’t believe the warnings about climate change, arguing instead that they represent a hoax and that even if the climate is changing, it is not a result of human activities. And, as we would expect, this opposite side of the argument also uses emotionally persuasive images, like the following one from American Patriot, a news commentary YouTube channel.

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The arguments packed into these four images all appeal to emotion, and research has shown us that we often make decisions based on just such appeals. So when you hear that formal or academic arguments should rely solely on facts to convince us, remember that facts alone often won’t carry the day, even for a worthy cause. The largely successful case made for same-sex marriage provides a notable example of a movement that persuaded people equally by virtue of the reasonableness and the passion of its claims. Like many political and social debates, though, the issue provoked powerful emotions on every side—feelings that sometimes led to extreme words and tactics.

Recent research also shows that images that evoke fear are less effective than those that arouse interest, worry, or hope. When the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication asked both supporters and deniers of climate change what they felt when they thought about this topic, they got the following results:

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In spite of the findings from such research, we don’t have to look hard for arguments that appeal to fear, hatred, envy, and greed, or for campaigns intended to drive wedges between economic or social groups, making them fearful or resentful. For that reason alone, writers should not use emotional appeals rashly or casually. But used carefully and ethically, appeals to emotions—especially ones like worry or hope —can be very helpful in moving an audience to action. (For more about emotional fallacies, see “Fallacies of Emotional Argument” in Chapter 5.)

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Reading Critically for Pathos On February 24, 2014, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, fresh from two fact-finding trips to Cuba, described his experiences on the Senate floor in a speech praising that island nation’s accomplishments in health care and education and urging a normalization of Cuban– American relationships, a recommendation taken up by then-President Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, who announced on December 17, 2014, that such normalization would begin. Many in the United States applauded this move, but others, including many Cuban Americans in the Miami area, objected strenuously. Florida senator Marco Rubio was one of those speaking most passionately against normalization of relationships. Shortly after Senator Harkin’s talk about the “fascinating” socialist experiment ninety miles from the coast of the United States, Rubio delivered a fifteen-minute rejoinder to Harkin without a script or teleprompter. After a sarcastic taunt (“Sounded like he had a wonderful trip visiting what he described as a real paradise”), Rubio quickly turned serious, even angry, as he offered his take on the country Harkin had toured:

I heard him also talk about these great doctors that they have in Cuba. I have no doubt they’re very talented. I’ve met a bunch of them. You know where I met them? In the United States because they defected. Because in Cuba, doctors would rather drive a taxi cab or work in a hotel than be a doctor. I wonder if they spoke to him about the outbreak of cholera

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that they’ve been unable to control, or about the three-tiered system of health care that exists where foreigners and government officials get health care much better than that that’s available to the general population.

Language this heated and pointed has risks, especially when a young legislator is taking on a far more experienced colleague. But Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, isn’t shy about allowing his feelings to show: in the following passage, he uses the kind of emotion-stirring verbal repetition common in oratory to drive home his major concern about Cuba, its influence on other nations:

Let me tell you what the Cubans are really good at, because they don’t know how to run their economy, they don’t know how to build, they don’t know how to govern a people. What they are really good at is repression. What they are really good at is shutting off information to the Internet and to radio and television and social media. That’s what they’re really good at. And they’re not just good at it domestically, they’re good exporters of these things.

When the Obama administration indeed loosened restrictions on travel to Cuba and began establishing diplomatic relations, Rubio stuck to his guns, consistently and emotionally arguing against this move. And while he was a bitter primary campaign rival of Donald Trump, who ridiculed Rubio during the campaign as “little Marco” who was always sweating (“It looked like he had just jumped into a swimming pool with his clothes on”), once Trump was elected president Rubio continued his impassioned campaign to reverse policy on Cuba. So in

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June 2017, when President Trump announced tightening of restrictions on travel to Cuba and other changes to the Obama policy, Rubio spoke glowingly of the president, saying that “A year and a half ago, an American president landed in Havana and outstretched his hand to a regime. Today, a new president lands in Miami to reach out his hand to the people of Cuba.” It’s likely that we have not heard the end of this debate, and that we will continue to hear emotion-filled arguments on all sides of this contentious issue.

Senator Rubio with President Trump

RESPOND● Working with a classmate, find a speech or a print editorial that you

think uses emotional appeals effectively but sparingly, in an

understated way. Make a list of those appeals and briefly explain

how each one appeals to an audience. What difference would it

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have made if the emotional appeals had been presented more

forcefully and dramatically? Would doing so have been likely to

appeal more strongly to the audience—and why or why not? What is

at stake for the writer or speaker in such situations, in terms of

credibility and ethos? What are the advantages of evoking emotions

in support of your claims or ideas?

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Using Emotions to Build Bridges You may sometimes want to use emotions to connect with readers to assure them that you understand their experiences or “feel their pain,” to borrow a sentiment popularized by President Bill Clinton. Such a bridge is especially important when you’re writing about matters that readers regard as sensitive. Before they’ll trust you, they’ll want assurances that you understand the issues in depth. If you strike the right emotional note, you’ll establish an important connection. That’s what Apple founder Steve Jobs does in a much-admired 2005 commencement address in which he tells the audience that he doesn’t have a fancy speech, just three stories from his life:

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz [Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over four thousand employees. We’d just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I’d just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and

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so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. . . .

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

—Steve Jobs, “You’ve Got to Find What You Love, Jobs Says”

In no obvious way is Jobs’s recollection a formal argument. But it prepares his audience to accept the advice he’ll give later in his speech, at least partly because he’s speaking from meaningful personal experiences.

A more obvious way to build an emotional tie is simply to help readers identify with your experiences. If, like Georgina Kleege, you were blind and wanted to argue for more sensible attitudes toward blind people, you might ask readers in the first paragraph of your argument to confront their prejudices. Here Kleege, a writer and college instructor who in July 2017 was featured on PBS’s “Brief but Spectacular” video series, makes an emotional point by telling a story:

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Alexandra Dal’s cartoon “Questions” offers insight into what it feels like to be on the receiving end of racial microaggressions on a regular basis.

LINK TO Alexandra Dal, “Questions,” in Chapter 27

I tell the class, “I am legally blind.” There is a pause, a collective intake of breath. I feel them look away uncertainly and then look back. After all, I just said I couldn’t see. Or did I? I had managed to get there on my own—no cane, no dog, none of the usual trappings of blindness. Eyeing me askance now, they might detect that my gaze is not quite focused. . . . They watch me glance down, or towards the door where someone’s coming in late. I’m just like anyone else.

—Georgina Kleege, “Call It Blindness”

Given the way she narrates the first day of class, readers are as likely to identify with the students as with Kleege, imagining themselves sitting in a classroom, facing a sightless instructor, confronting their own prejudices about the blind. Kleege wants to put her audience on the edge emotionally.

Let’s consider another rhetorical situation: how do you win over an audience when the logical claims that you’re making are likely to go against what many in the audience believe? Once again, a slightly risky appeal to emotions on a personal level may work. That’s the tack that Michael Pollan takes in bringing readers to consider that “the great

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moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.” In introducing his lengthy exploratory argument, Pollan uses personal experience to appeal to his audience:

The first time I opened Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.

—Michael Pollan, “An Animal’s Place”

A visual version of Michael Pollan’s rhetorical situation

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In creating a vivid image of his first encounter with Singer’s book, Pollan’s opening builds a bridge between himself as a person trying to enter into the animal rights debate in a fair and open-minded, if still skeptical, way and readers who might be passionate about either side of this argument.

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Using Emotions to Sustain an Argument You can also use emotional appeals to make logical claims stronger or more memorable. In a TV political attack ad, a video clip of a scowling, blustering candidate talking dismissively about an important issue has the potential to damage that candidate considerably. In contrast, a human face smiling or showing honest emotion can sell just about any product—that’s why so many political figures now routinely smile at any camera they see. Using emotion is tricky, however, and it can sometimes backfire. Lay on too much feeling—especially sentiments like outrage, pity, or shame, which make people uncomfortable—and you may offend the very audiences you hoped to convince.

Still, strong emotions can add energy to a passage or an entire argument, as they do in Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. In this passage, Parry describes in vivid detail the scene that greeted one mother the day the 2011 earthquake hit:

On the near side was Hitomi’s home village of Magaki and then an expanse of paddies stretching to the Fuji lake; the polished blue and red roofs of other hamlets glittered at the edges of the hills. It was an archetypal view of the Japanese countryside: abundant nature, tamed and cultivated by man. But now she struggled to make sense of what she saw.

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Everything up to and in between the hills was water. There was only water: buildings and fields had gone. The water was black in the early light; floating on it were continents and trailing archipelagos of dark scummy rubble, brown in color and composed of tree trunks. Every patch of land that was not elevated had been absorbed by the river, which had been annexed in turn by the sea.

In this new geography, the Fuji lake was no longer a lake. . . . The river was no longer a river. . . . Okawa Elementary School was invisible, hidden from view by the great shoulder of hills from which Hitomi looked down. But the road, the houses, and Magaki, where Hitomi’s home and family had been, were washed from the earth.

A wrecked car lies submerged in floodwaters after the earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima prefecture, Japan.

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As this example suggests, it can be difficult to gauge how much emotion will work in a given argument. Some issues—such as racism, immigration, abortion, and gun control—provoke strong feelings and, as a result, are often argued on emotional terms. But even issues that seem deadly dull—such as reform of federal student loan programs— can be argued passionately when proposed changes in these programs are set in human terms: reduce support for college loans and Kai, Riley, and Jayden end up in dead-end, low-paying jobs; don’t reform the program and we’re looking at another Wall Street–sized loan bailout and subsequent recession. Both alternatives might scare people into paying enough attention to take political action.

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Using Humor Humor has always played an important role in argument, sometimes as the sugar that makes the medicine go down. You can slip humor into an argument to put readers at ease, thereby making them more open to a proposal you have to offer. It’s hard to say no when you’re laughing. Humor also makes otherwise sober people suspend their judgment and even their prejudices, perhaps because the surprise and naughtiness of wit are combustive: they provoke laughter or smiles, not reflection. Who can resist a no-holds-barred attack on a famous personality, such as this assessment of model/actor Cara Delevingne in the 2017 sci-fi flop Valerian:

As played by model Cara Delevingne with a smirk that just won’t quit, Laureline is way ballsier than Valerian, who still looks in need of a mother’s love. She can pose and preen like an expert in her space gear—and those eyebrows!—but there’s no there there.

—Peter Travers, in Rolling Stone

Humor deployed cleverly may be why TV shows like South Park and Modern Family became popular with mainstream audiences, despite their willingness to explore controversial themes. Similarly, it’s possible to make a point through humor that might not work that well in more academic writing. The subject of standardized testing, for instance, has generated much heat and light, as researchers and teachers and policy makers argue endlessly over whether it is helpful— or not. TV talk show host and satirist John Oliver took a crack at the

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subject in a segment of Last Week Tonight, arguing that the testing business in America has gotten way out of hand and that it does not help students but rather funnels money into the coffers of companies such as Pearson, who dominate the testing market.

After introducing the subject, Oliver goes on one of his signature humorous rampages, skewering the country’s obsession with testing:

Look, standardized tests are the fastest way to terrify any child with five letters outside of just whispering the word “clown.”

After showing a video clip of kids rapping about the joys of testing, Oliver continues:

Standardized tests look like amazing fun. I wish I could take one right now: bring me a pencil please—a number 2 pencil! But it just gets better, because an elementary school in Texas

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even held a test-themed pep rally featuring a monkey mascot.

Fade to a monkey cavorting around the auditorium stage, swooning over testing fun and yelling “here comes the monkey.” Then after a video clip showing teachers describing how many students get physically sick while taking tests (“Something is wrong with our system when we just assume that a certain number of kids will vomit”), Oliver asks,

Is it any wonder that students are sick of tests? . . . If standardized tests are bad for teachers and bad for kids, who exactly are they good for? Well, it turns out, they’re operated by companies like Pearson, who control forty percent of the testing market.

Pearson, Oliver says, is

the equivalent of Time Warner Cable: either you never had an interaction with them and don’t care, or they ruined your [entire] life.

Viewers may not agree with Oliver’s claims about standardized testing, but his use of humor and satire certainly gets him a large viewing audience and keeps them listening to the end.

A writer or speaker can even use humor to deal with sensitive issues. For example, sports commentator Bob Costas, given the honor of eulogizing the great baseball player Mickey Mantle, couldn’t ignore problems in Mantle’s life. So he argues for Mantle’s greatness by

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admitting the man’s weaknesses indirectly through humor:

It brings to mind a story Mickey liked to tell on himself and maybe some of you have heard it. He pictured himself at the pearly gates, met by St. Peter, who shook his head and said, “Mick, we checked the record. We know some of what went on. Sorry, we can’t let you in. But before you go, God wants to know if you’d sign these six dozen baseballs.”

—Bob Costas, “Eulogy for Mickey Mantle”

Similarly, politicians may use humor to deal with issues they couldn’t acknowledge in any other way. Here, for example, is former president George W. Bush at the 2004 Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner discussing his much-mocked intellect:

Those stories about my intellectual capacity do get under my skin. You know, for a while I even thought my staff believed it. There on my schedule first thing every morning it said, “Intelligence briefing.”

—George W. Bush

Not all humor is well-intentioned or barb-free. In fact, among the most powerful forms of emotional argument is ridicule—humor aimed at a particular target. Eighteenth-century poet and critic Samuel Johnson was known for his stinging and humorous put-downs, such as this comment to an aspiring writer: “Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is

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original is not good.” (Expect your own writing teachers to be kinder.) In our own time, the Onion has earned a reputation for its mastery of both ridicule and satire, the art of using over-the-top humor to make a serious point.

But because ridicule is a double-edged sword, it requires a deft hand to wield it. Humor that reflects bad taste discredits a writer completely, as does satire that misses its mark. Unless your target deserves riposte and you can be very funny, it’s usually better to steer clear of such humor.

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Using Arguments Based on Emotion You don’t want to play puppet master with people’s emotions when you write arguments, but it’s a good idea to spend some time early in your work thinking about how you want readers to feel as they consider your persuasive claims. For example, would readers of your editorial about campus traffic policies be more inclined to agree with you if you made them envy faculty privileges, or would arousing their sense of fairness work better? What emotional appeals might persuade meat eaters to consider a vegan diet—or vice versa? Would sketches of stage props on a Web site persuade people to buy a season ticket to the theater, or would you spark more interest by featuring pictures of costumed performers?

Consider, too, the effect that a story can have on readers. Writers and journalists routinely use what are called human-interest stories to give presence to issues or arguments. You can do the same, using a particular incident to evoke sympathy, understanding, outrage, or amusement. Take care, though, to tell an honest story.

RESPOND●

1. To what specific emotions do the following slogans, sales pitches, and maxims appeal?

“Make America Great Again” (Donald Trump rallying cry)

“Just do it.” (ad for Nike)

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“Think different.” (ad for Apple computers)

“Reach out and touch someone.” (ad for AT&T)

“There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.” (slogan for MasterCard)

“Have it your way.” (slogan for Burger King)

“The ultimate driving machine.” (slogan for BMW)

“It’s everywhere you want to be.” (slogan for Visa)

“Don’t mess with Texas!” (anti-litter campaign slogan)

“American by Birth. Rebel by Choice.” (slogan for Harley- Davidson)

2. Bring a magazine to class, and analyze the emotional appeals in as many full-page ads as you can. Then practice your critical reading skills by classifying those ads by types of emotional appeal, and see whether you can connect the appeals to the subject or target audience of the magazine. Compare your results with those of your classmates, and discuss your findings. For instance, how exactly are the ads in publications such as Cosmopolitan, Wired, Sports Illustrated, Motor Trend, and Smithsonian adapted to their specific audiences?

3. How do arguments based on emotion work in different media? Are such arguments more or less effective in books, articles, television (both news and entertainment shows), films, brochures, magazines, email, Web sites, the theater, street protests, and so on? You might explore how a single medium handles emotional appeals or compare different media. For example, why do the comments sections of blogs seem to

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encourage angry outbursts? Are newspapers an emotionally colder source of information than television news programs? If so, why?

4. Spend some time looking for arguments that use ridicule or humor to make their point: check out your favorite Twitter feeds or blogs; watch for bumper stickers, posters, or advertisements; and listen to popular song lyrics. Bring one or two examples to class, and be ready to explain how the humor makes an emotional appeal and whether it’s effective.

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CHAPTER 3 Arguments Based on Character: Ethos

Whenever you read anything—whether it’s a news article, an advertisement, a speech, or a tweet—you no doubt subconsciously analyze the message for a sense of the character and credibility of the sender: Is this someone I know and trust? Does the Fox News reporter —or the Doctors Without Borders Web site—seem biased, and if so, how? Why should I believe an advertisement for a car? Is this scholar really an authority on the subject? Our culture teaches us to be skeptical of most messages, especially those that bombard us with slogans, and such reasonable doubt is a crucial skill in reading and evaluating arguments.

For that reason, people and institutions that hope to influence us do everything they can to establish their character and credibility, what ancient rhetors referred to as ethos. And sometimes slogans such as “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” “The Most Trusted Name in News,” or “Lean In” can be effective. At the very least, if a phrase is repeated often enough, it begins to sound plausible. Maybe Fox News really IS the most watched and most trusted news source!

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But establishing character usually takes more than repetition, as marketers of all kinds know. It arises from credentials actually earned in some way. In the auto industry, for instance, Subaru builds on its customer loyalty by telling buyers that love makes a Subaru, and companies such as Toyota, General Motors, and Nissan are hustling to present themselves as environmentally responsible producers of fuel- efficient, low-emission cars—the Prius, Bolt, and Leaf. BMW, maker of “the ultimate driving machine,” points to its fuel-sipping i3 and i8 cars as evidence of its commitment to “sustainable mobility.” And Elon Musk (who builds rockets as well as Tesla cars) polishes his good-citizenship bona fides by releasing an affordable mass market electric car and by sharing his electric vehicle patents with other manufacturers. All of these companies realize that their future success is linked to an ability to project a convincing ethos for themselves and their products.

If corporations and institutions can establish an ethos, consider how much character matters when we think about people in the public arena. Perhaps no individual managed a more exceptional assertion of personal ethos than Jorge Mario Bergoglio did after he became Pope Francis on March 13, 2013, following the abdication of Benedict XVI —a man many found scholarly, cold, and out of touch with the modern world. James Carroll, writing for the New Yorker, identifies the precise moment when the world realized that it was dealing with a new sort of pope:

“Who am I to judge?” With those five words, spoken in late July [2013] in reply to a reporter’s question about the status

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of gay priests in the Church, Pope Francis stepped away from the disapproving tone, the explicit moralizing typical of popes and bishops.

—James Carroll, “Who Am I to Judge?”

Carroll goes on to explain that Francis quickly established his ethos with a series of specific actions, decisions, and moments of identification with ordinary people, marking him as someone even nonbelievers might listen to and respect:

As pope, Francis has simplified the Renaissance regalia of the papacy by abandoning fur-trimmed velvet capes, choosing to live in a two-room apartment instead of the Apostolic Palace, and replacing the papal Mercedes with a Ford Focus. Instead of the traditional red slip-ons, Francis wears ordinary black shoes. . . . Yet Francis didn’t criticize the choices of other prelates. “He makes changes without attacking people,” a Jesuit official told me. In his interview with La Civiltà Cattolica, Francis said, “My choices, including those related to the day-to-day aspects of life, like the use of a modest car, are related to a spiritual discernment that responds to a need that arises from looking at things, at people, and from reading the signs of the times.”

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In that last sentence, Francis acknowledges that ethos is gained, in part, through identification with one’s audience and era. And this man, movingly photographed embracing the sick and disfigured, also posed for selfies!

You can see, then, why Aristotle treats ethos as a powerful argumentative appeal. Ethos creates quick and sometimes almost irresistible connections between readers and arguments. We observe people, groups, or institutions making and defending claims all the time and inevitably ask ourselves, Should we pay attention to them? Can we rely on them? Do we dare to trust them? Consider, though, that the same questions will be asked about you and your work, especially in academic settings.

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Thinking Critically about Arguments Based on Character Put simply, arguments based on character (ethos) depend on trust. We tend to accept arguments from those we trust, and we trust them (whether individuals, groups, or institutions) in good part because of their reputations. Three main elements—credibility, authority, and unselfish or clear motives—add up to ethos.

To answer serious and important questions, we often turn to professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, pastors) or to experts (those with knowledge and experience) for good advice. Based on their backgrounds, such people come with their ethos already established. Thus, appeals or arguments about character often turn on claims like these:

A person (or group or institution) is or is not trustworthy or credible on this issue. A person (or group or institution) does or does not have the authority to speak to this issue. A person (or group or institution) does or does not have unselfish or clear motives for addressing this subject.

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The UMass Amherst Information Security department uses humor in its posters reminding students that their pets’ names are not the best choice for a secure password.

Establishing Trustworthiness and Credibility Trustworthiness and credibility speak to a writer’s honesty, respect for an audience and its values, and plain old likability. Sometimes a sense of humor can play an important role in getting an audience to listen to or “like” you. It’s no accident that all but the most serious speeches begin with a joke or funny story: the humor puts listeners at ease and helps them identify with the speaker. Writer J. K. Rowling, for example, puts her audience (and herself) at ease early in the commencement address she delivered at Harvard by getting real about such speeches, recalling her own commencement:

The speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said.

—J. K. Rowling, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination”

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LINK TO McKenzie, “Getting Personal about Cybersecurity,” in Chapter 26

In just two sentences, Rowling pokes fun at herself and undercuts the expectation that graduation addresses change people’s lives. For an audience well disposed toward her already, Rowling has likely lived up to expectations.

But using humor to enhance your credibility may be more common in oratory than in the kind of writing you’ll do in school. Fortunately, you have many options, one being simply to make plausible claims and then back them up with evidence. Academic audiences appreciate a reasonable disposition; we will discuss this approach at greater length in the next chapter.

You can also establish trustworthiness by connecting your own beliefs to core principles that are well established and widely respected. This strategy is particularly effective when your position seems to be—at first glance, at least—a threat to traditional values. For example, when former Smith College president Ruth J. Simmons describes her professional self to a commencement audience, she presents her acquired reputation in terms that align perfectly with contemporary values:

For my part, I was cast as a troublemaker in my early career and accepted the disapproval that accompanies the expression of unpopular views: unpopular views about disparate pay for women and minorities; unpopular views about sexual harassment; unpopular views about exclusionary practices in

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our universities.

—Ruth J. Simmons

It’s fine to be a rebel when you are on the right side of history.

Writers who establish their credibility seem trustworthy. But sometimes, to be credible, you have to admit limitations, too, as New York Times columnist Frank Bruni does as he positions himself in relation to issues of oppression and deep-seated bias in an editorial titled “I’m a White Man: Hear Me Out.” First acknowledging his racial and socioeconomic privilege as a white man from an upper-class background (private school, backyard swimming pool), Bruni then addresses another, less-privileged facet of his identity:

But wait. I’m gay. . . . Gay from a different, darker day, . . . when gay stereotypes went unchallenged, gay jokes drew hearty laughter and exponentially more Americans were closeted than out. . . . Then AIDS spread, and . . . our rallying cry, “silence = death,” defined marginalization as well as any words could.

—Frank Bruni, “I’m a White Man: Hear Me Out”

Making such concessions to readers sends a strong signal that you’ve looked critically at your own position and can therefore be trusted when you turn to arguing its merits. Speaking to readers directly, using I or you or us, can also help you connect with them, as can using contractions and everyday or colloquial language—both strategies

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employed by Bruni. In other situations, you may find that a more formal tone gives your claims greater credibility. You’ll be making such choices as you search for the ethos that represents you best.

In fact, whenever you write an essay or present an idea, you are sending signals about your credibility, whether you intend to or not. If your ideas are reasonable, your sources are reliable, and your language is appropriate to the project, you suggest to academic readers that you’re someone whose ideas might deserve attention. Details matter: helpful graphs, tables, charts, or illustrations may carry weight with readers, as will the visual attractiveness of your text, whether in print or digital form. Obviously, correct spelling, grammar, and mechanics are important too. And though you might not worry about it now, at some point you may need letters of recommendation from instructors or supervisors. How will they remember you? Often chiefly from the ethos you have established in your work. Think about that.

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Rob Greenfield establishes his ethos right in the title of his blog post, “An Argument against Veganism . . . from a Vegan.”

LINK TO Greenfield, “An Argument against Veganism . . . from a Vegan,” in Chapter 24

Claiming Authority

When you read or listen to an argument, you have every right to ask about the writer’s authority: What does he know about the subject? What experiences does she have that make her especially knowledgeable? Why should I pay attention to this person? When you offer an argument yourself, you have to anticipate and be prepared to answer questions like these, either directly or indirectly.

How does someone construct an authoritative ethos? In an essay about John McCain’s decision to vote against a Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, AP reporter Laurie Kellman notes some of McCain’s experiences that help build his credibility:

Longtime colleagues . . . say [McCain] developed his fearlessness as a navy aviator held as a prisoner for more than five years in Vietnam. Resilience, they say, has fueled his long Senate career and helped him overcome two failed presidential campaigns. For some, McCain has become the moral voice of the Republican Party.

—Laurie Kellman, “Cancer Isn’t Silencing McCain”

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Here Kellman stresses McCain’s length of service in the Senate as well as his military service and prisoner of war status, and she refers to him as a “standard bearer” and “moral voice” of the Republican Party. In doing so, she indicates that McCain’s ethos is hard won and to be taken seriously.

Senator John McCain

Of course, writers establish their authority in various ways. Sometimes the assertion of ethos will be bold and personal, as it is when writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams attacks those who poisoned the Utah deserts with nuclear radiation. What gives her the right to speak on this subject? Not scientific expertise, but gut-wrenching personal experience:

I belong to the Clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of

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chemotherapy and radiation.

I’ve had my own problems: two biopsies for breast cancer and a small tumor between my ribs diagnosed as a “borderline malignancy.”

—Terry Tempest Williams, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women”

We are willing to listen to Williams because she has lived with the nuclear peril she will deal with in the remainder of her essay.

Other means of claiming authority are less dramatic. By simply attaching titles to their names, writers assert that they hold medical or legal or engineering degrees, or some other important credentials. Or they may mention the number of years they’ve worked in a given field or the distinguished positions they have held. As a reader, you’ll pay more attention to an argument about sustainability offered by a professor of ecology and agriculture at the University of Minnesota than one by your Uncle Sid, who sells tools. But you’ll prefer your uncle to the professor when you need advice about a reliable rotary saw.

In our current political climate, the ethos of experts—such as scientists or other academics with deep knowledge about a subject—is being questioned. Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, professors of public policy and political science, identify this trend particularly at the right end of the political spectrum:

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Data from the General Social Survey demonstrate that declining public faith in science is concentrated among conservatives. Compared to Democrats, Republicans are significantly less likely to trust what scientists say, more critical of political bias in academe and less confident in colleges and universities. Negative attitudes toward science and the media also intersect, with one-third of Republicans reporting no trust in journalists to accurately report scientific studies.

—Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, “How Information Became Ideological”

Like the attacks on “fake news,” here Grossmann and Hopkins identify an assault on the ethos of scientists and other academic experts.

When readers might be skeptical of both you and your claims, you may have to be even more specific about your credentials. That’s exactly the strategy Richard Bernstein uses to establish his right to speak on the subject of “Asian culture.” What gives a New York writer named Bernstein the authority to write about Asian peoples? Bernstein tells us in a sparkling example of an argument based on character:

The Asian culture, as it happens, is something I know a bit about, having spent five years at Harvard striving for a Ph.D. in a joint program called History and East Asian Languages and, after that, living either as a student (for one year) or a journalist (six years) in China and Southeast Asia. At least I know enough to know there is no such thing as the “Asian

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culture.”

—Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue

When you write for readers who trust you and your work, you may not have to make such an open claim to authority. But making this type of appeal is always an option.

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Coming Clean about Motives When people are trying to convince you of something, it’s important (and natural) to ask: Whose interests are they serving? How will they profit from their proposal? Such questions go to the heart of ethical arguments.

In a hugely controversial 2014 essay published in the Princeton Tory, Tal Fortgang, a first-year student at the Ivy League school, argues that those on campus who used the phrase “Check your privilege” to berate white male students like him for the advantages they enjoy are, in fact, judging him according to gender and race, and not for “all the hard work I have done in my life.” To challenge stereotypical assumptions about the “racist patriarchy” that supposedly paved his way to Princeton, Fortgang writes about the experiences of his ancestors, opening the paragraphs with a striking parallel structure:

Perhaps it’s the privilege my grandfather and his brother had to flee their home as teenagers when the Nazis invaded Poland, leaving their mother and five younger siblings behind, running and running. . . .

Or maybe it’s the privilege my grandmother had of spending weeks upon weeks on a death march through Polish forests in subzero temperatures, one of just a handful to survive. . . .

Perhaps my privilege is that those two resilient individuals

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came to America with no money and no English, obtained citizenship, learned the language and met each other. . . .

Perhaps it was my privilege that my own father worked hard enough in City College to earn a spot at a top graduate school, got a good job, and for 25 years got up well before the crack of dawn, sacrificing precious time he wanted to spend with those he valued most—his wife and kids—to earn that living.

—Tal Fortgang, “Checking My Privilege: Character as the Basis of Privilege”

Fortgang thus attempts to establish his own ethos and win the argument against those who make assumptions about his roots by dramatizing the ethos of his ancestors:

That’s the problem with calling someone out for the “privilege” which you assume has defined their narrative. You don’t know what their struggles have been, what they may have gone through to be where they are. Assuming they’ve benefitted from “power systems” or other conspiratorial imaginary institutions denies them credit for all they’ve done, things of which you may not even conceive. You don’t know whose father died defending your freedom. You don’t know whose mother escaped oppression. You don’t know who conquered their demons, or may still [be] conquering them now.

As you might imagine, the pushback to “Checking My Privilege” was

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enormous, some of the hundreds of comments posted to an online version accusing Fortgang himself of assuming the very ethos of victimhood against which he inveighs. Peter Finocchiaro, a reviewer on Slate, is especially brutal: “Only a few short months ago he was living at home with his parents. His life experience, one presumes, is fairly limited. So in that sense, he doesn’t really know any better. . . . He is an ignorant 19-year-old white guy from Westchester.” You can see in this debate how ethos quickly raises issues of knowledge and motives. Fortgang tries to resist the stereotype others would impose on his character, but others regard the very ethos he fashions in his essay as evidence of his naïveté about race, discrimination, and, yes, privilege.

We all, of course, have connections and interests that bind us to other human beings. It makes sense that a young man would explore his social identity, that a woman might be concerned with women’s issues, that members of minority groups might define social and cultural conditions on their own terms—or even that investors might look out for their investments. It’s simply good strategy, not to mention ethical, to let your audiences know where your loyalties lie when such information does, in fact, shape your work.

Using Ethos in Your Own Writing

Establish your credibility by listening carefully to and acknowledging your audience’s values, showing respect for them, and establishing common ground where (and if) possible. How will you convince your audience you are trustworthy? What will you admit about your own limitations?

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Establish your authority by showing you have done your homework and know your topic well. How will you show that you know your topic well? What appropriate personal experience can you draw on? Examine your motives for writing. What, if anything, do you stand to gain from your argument? How can you explain those advantages to your audience?

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Ethos In the United States, students are often asked to establish authority by drawing on personal experiences, by reporting on research they or others have conducted, and by taking a position for which they can offer strong evidence. But this expectation about student authority is by no means universal.

Some cultures regard student writers as novices who can most effectively make arguments by reflecting on what they’ve learned from their teachers and elders—those who hold the most important knowledge and, hence, authority. When you’re arguing a point with people from cultures other than your own, ask questions like:

Whom are you addressing, and what is your relationship with that person? What knowledge are you expected to have? Is it appropriate or expected for you to demonstrate that knowledge—and if so, how? What tone is appropriate? And remember: politeness is rarely, if ever, inappropriate.

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RESPOND●

1. Consider the ethos of these public figures. Then describe one or two products that might benefit from their endorsements as well as several that would not.

Edward Snowden—whistleblower

Beyoncé—singer, dancer, actress

Denzel Washington—actor

Tom Brady—football player

Rachel Maddow—TV news commentator

Ariana Grande—singer

Seth Meyers—late-night TV host

Lin-Manuel Miranda—hip hop artist and playwright

Venus Williams—tennis player

2. Opponents of Richard Nixon, the thirty-seventh president of the United States, once raised doubts about his integrity by asking a single ruinous question: Would you buy a used car from this man? Create your own version of the argument of character. Begin by choosing an intriguing or controversial person or group and finding an image online. Then download the image into a word-processing file. Create a caption for the photo that is modeled after the question asked about Nixon: Would you give this woman your email password? Would you share a campsite with this couple? Would you eat lasagna that this guy fixed? Finally, write a serious 300-word argument that explores

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the character flaws or strengths of your subject(s). 3. Practice reading rhetorically and critically by taking a close

look at your own Facebook page (or your page on any other social media site). What are some aspects of your character, true or not, that might be conveyed by the photos, videos, and messages you have posted online? Analyze the ethos or character you see projected there, using the advice in this chapter to guide your analysis.

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CHAPTER 4 Arguments Based on Facts and Reason: Logos

In 2018, it feels like facts are under siege, as these three images suggest. Cartoonists are having a field day with a “post-fact” world, while serious scientists are hard at work trying to understand “why facts don’t change our minds.” From Kellyanne Conway’s evocation of “alternative facts” to Donald Trump’s tendency to label reports that do not support his views as “fake news,” we are witnessing a world in which the statement by Through the Looking-Glass’s White Queen that “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast” seems, well, unremarkable. After the 2016 election, for example, President Trump declared that there was “serious voter fraud” in Virginia, in New Hampshire, in California, and elsewhere, although researchers could find no evidence to back up his claim, and fact- checkers across the board found the “fact” to be baseless. In June 2017, three CNN employees resigned after the network retracted a story that claimed Congress was investigating a “Russian investment fund with ties to Trump officials”; the journalists had used only one unreliable source to back up this supposedly factual claim. We could go on and

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on with such examples from across the political spectrum, and no doubt you could add your own to the list.

In “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds,” Elizabeth Kolbert surveys cognitive science research that’s trying to understand why this is so, pointing to a series of experiments at Stanford University that found that “Even after the evidence for their beliefs had been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions to those beliefs”:

Thousands of subsequent experiments have confirmed (and elaborated on) this finding. As everyone who’s followed the research—or even occasionally picked up a copy of Psychology Today—knows, any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational. Rarely has this insight seemed more relevant than it does now.

Scientists working on this issue point to the “confirmation” or “myside” bias, the strong tendency to accept information that supports our beliefs and values and to reject information that opposes them, as well as to our tendency to think we know a whole lot more than we actually do. A study at Yale asked graduate students to rate their knowledge of everyday items, including toilets, and to write up an explanation of how such devices worked. While the graduate students rated their knowledge/understanding as high before they wrote up the explanations, that exercise showed them that they didn’t really know how toilets worked, and their self-assessment dropped significantly. The researchers, Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, call this effect the “illusion of explanatory depth” and find that it is very widespread.

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“Where it gets us into trouble,” they say, is in “the political domain.” As Kolbert writes, “It’s one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I’m talking about.” Sloman and Fernbach explain: “As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding. . . . This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous.”

Such findings are important to all of us, and they suggest several steps all writers, readers, and speakers should take as they deal with arguments based on facts and reason. First, examine your own beliefs in particular facts and pieces of information: do you really know what you’re talking about or are you simply echoing what others you know say or think? Second, you need to become a conscientious fact- checker, digging deep to make sure claims are backed by evidence. Doing so is especially important with information you get from social media, where misinformation, disinformation, and even outright lies may be presented as “facts” that you might retweet or post, thus perpetuating false or questionable information.

Finally, don’t give up on facts. The researchers discussed above also show that, when given a choice, most people still say they respect and even prefer appeals to claims based on facts, evidence, and reason. Just make sure that the logical appeals you are using are factually correct and ethical as well.

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Thinking Critically about Hard Evidence Aristotle helps us out in classifying arguments by distinguishing two kinds:

Artistic Proofs

Arguments the writer/speaker creates

Constructed arguments

Appeals to reason; common sense

Inartistic Proofs

Arguments the writer/speaker is given

Hard evidence

Facts, statistics, testimonies, witnesses, contracts, documents

We can see these different kinds of logical appeals at work in a passage from a statement made on September 5, 2017, by Attorney General Jeff Sessions:

Good morning. I am here today to announce that the program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama Administration is being rescinded. The DACA program was implemented in 2012 and essentially provided a legal status for recipients for a renewable two-year term, work authorization and other benefits, including participation in the social security program, to 800,000 mostly-adult illegal aliens. This policy was implemented unilaterally to great controversy and legal concern after Congress rejected legislative proposals to extend similar benefits on numerous occasions to this same group of illegal aliens.

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In other words, the executive branch, through DACA, deliberately sought to achieve what the legislative branch specifically refused to authorize on multiple occasions. Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch. The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.

Jeff Sessions announcing that DACA would be rescinded by the Trump administration

Sessions opens his statement with a simple “good morning” and a direct announcement of his purpose: to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program initiated by the Obama

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administration in 2012. In the next sentence, he uses “inartistic” evidence of what DACA provided (it was renewable and provided work authorization and other benefits) for “800,000 mostly-adult illegal aliens.” Noting that Congress had refused on several occasions to extend benefits to the “same group of illegal aliens,” Sessions offers the constructed argument that Obama’s “open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority.” Presumably now drawing on hard evidence, Sessions argues that DACA led to “a surge of unaccompanied minors,” that it denied jobs to “hundreds of thousands” of Americans, and, by neglecting the “rule of law,” it subjected the United States to “the risk of crime, violence, and even terrorism.”

Sessions says early on in his statement that DACA was implemented amidst “great controversy,” and indeed that fact checks out. Other claims made in the statement, however, were quickly challenged. The nonpartisan FactCheck.org, for example, calls out Sessions’s description of DACA recipients as “mostly-adult illegal aliens” (a label he uses several times), citing research by Professor Tom Wong of the University of California, San Diego, whose national survey of 3,063 DACA holders in summer 2017 found that “on average they were six and a half years old when they arrived in the U.S. Most of them—54 percent—were under the age of 7.” So while they are adults today, they were not adults when they were brought to the United States. Likewise, FactCheck.org points out that Sessions’s claim that DACA contributed to a “surge of unaccompanied minors” is, at best, misleading and out of context:

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It is true that there was a surge of unaccompanied children that caught the Obama administration off guard in fiscal 2012. The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border peaked in fiscal 2014 at 68,541, dropping 42 percent to 39,970 in fiscal 2015 before rising again in fiscal year 2016 to 59,692.

But the children who crossed the border illegally were not eligible for DACA. As we said earlier, the criteria for DACA is continuous residence in the United States since June 15, 2007.

If you were reading or listening to this statement and wanted to do some fact-checking of your own, you might well begin by determining whether DACA really led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. In today’s political climate, in fact, it’s important that every one of us read with a critical eye, refusing to accept claims without proof, constructed arguments, or even “hard evidence” that we can’t fact- check for ourselves.

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Two DACA “Dreamers” protesting near Trump Tower in New York the day after Sessions’s statement rescinding the program

RESPOND● Discuss whether the following statements are examples of hard

evidence or constructed arguments. Not all cases are clear-cut.

1. Drunk drivers are involved in more than 50 percent of traffic deaths.

2. DNA tests of skin found under the victim’s fingernails suggest that the defendant was responsible for the assault.

3. A psychologist testified that teenage violence could not be blamed on video games.

4. The crowds at President Trump’s inauguration were the largest on record.

5. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” 6. Air bags ought to be removed from vehicles because they can

kill young children and small-framed adults.

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Facts Gathering factual information and transmitting it faithfully practically define what we mean by professional journalism and scholarship. Carole Cadwalladr, a reviewer for the British newspaper the Guardian, praises the research underlying It’s Complicated: The Networked Lives of Teens. Drawing on almost a decade of research by assistant professor danah boyd of New York University,

the book is grounded in hard academic research: proper interviews conducted with actual teenagers. What comes across most strongly, more so than the various “myths” and “panics” that the author describes, is just how narrow and circumscribed many of these teenagers’ lives have become.

Here the “hard academic research” the reviewer mentions is the ethnographic research that yields an accurate description of these young people’s lives.

When your facts are compelling, they might stand on their own in a low-stakes argument, supported by little more than saying where they come from. Consider the power of phrases such as “reported by the Wall Street Journal” or “according to FactCheck.org.” Such sources gain credibility if they have reported facts accurately and reliably over time. Using such credible sources in an argument can also reflect positively on you.

In scholarly arguments, which have higher expectations for accuracy, what counts is drawing sober conclusions from the evidence turned up

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through detailed research or empirical studies. The language of such material may seem dryly factual to you, even when the content is inherently interesting. But presenting new knowledge dispassionately is (ideally at least) the whole point of scholarly writing, marking a contrast between it and the kind of intellectual warfare that occurs in many media forums, especially news programs and blogs. Here for example is a portion of a lengthy opening paragraph in the “Discussion and Conclusions” section of a scholarly paper arguing that people who spend a great deal of time on Facebook often frame their lives by what they observe there:

As expected in the first hypothesis, the results show that the longer people have used Facebook, the stronger was their belief that others were happier than themselves, and the less they agreed that life is fair. Furthermore, as predicted in the second hypothesis, this research found that the more “friends” people included on their Facebook whom they did not know personally, the stronger they believed that others had better lives than themselves. In other words, looking at happy pictures of others on Facebook gives people an impression that others are “always” happy and having good lives, as evident from these pictures of happy moments.

—Hui-Tzu Grace Chou, PhD, and Nicholas Edge, BS, “‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives Than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives”

There are no fireworks in this conclusion, no slanted or hot language, no unfair or selective reporting of data, just a careful attention to the

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Lindsay McKenzie cites statistics in her Web article about how secure students feel in protecting themselves from cyberattacks.

LINK TO McKenzie, “Getting Personal about Cybersecurity,” in Chapter 26

facts and behaviors uncovered by the study. But one can easily imagine these facts being subsequently used to support overdramatized claims about the dangers of social networks. That’s often what happens to scholarly studies when they are read and interpreted in the popular media.

Of course, arguing with facts can involve challenging even the most reputable sources if they lead to unfair or selective reporting or if the stories are presented or “framed” unfairly.

In an ideal world, good information—no matter where it comes from— would always drive out bad. But you already know that we don’t live in an ideal world, so all too often bad information gets repeated in an echo chamber that amplifies the errors.

Statistics

You’ve probably heard the old saying “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” and it is certainly possible to lie with numbers, even those that are accurate, because numbers rarely speak for themselves. They need to be interpreted by writers—and writers almost always have agendas that shape the interpretations.

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Of course, just because they are often misused doesn’t mean that statistics are meaningless, but it does suggest that you need to use them carefully and to remember that your careful reading of numbers is essential. Consider the attention-grabbing map below that went viral in June 2014. Created by Mark Gongloff of the Huffington Post in the wake of a school shooting in Oregon, it plotted the location of all seventy-four school shootings that had occurred in the United States since the Sandy Hook tragedy in December 2012, when twenty elementary school children and six adults were gunned down by a rifle- wielding killer. For the graphic, Gongloff drew on a list assembled by the group Everytown for Gun Safety, an organization formed by former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg to counter the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA). Both the map and Everytown’s sobering list of shootings received wide attention in the media, given the startling number of incidents it recorded.

It didn’t take long before questions were raised about their accuracy.

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Were American elementary and secondary school children under such frequent assault as the map based on Everytown’s list suggested? Well, yes and no. Guns were going off on and around school campuses, but the firearms weren’t always aimed at children. The Washington Post, CNN, and other news outlets soon found themselves pulling back on their initial reporting, offering a more nuanced view of the controversial number. To do that, the Washington Post began by posing an important question:

What constitutes a school shooting?

That five-word question has no simple answer, a fact underscored by the backlash to an advocacy group’s recent list of school shootings. The list, maintained by Everytown, a group that backs policies to limit gun violence, was updated last week to reflect what it identified as the 74 school shootings since the massacre in Newtown, Conn., a massacre that sparked a national debate over gun control.

Multiple news outlets, including this one, reported on Everytown’s data, prompting a backlash over the broad methodology used. As we wrote in our original post, the group considered any instance of a firearm discharging on school property as a shooting—thus casting a broad net that includes homicides, suicides, accidental discharges and, in a handful of cases, shootings that had no relation to the schools themselves and occurred with no students apparently present.

—Niraj Chokshi, “Fight over School Shooting List

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Underscores Difficulty in Quantifying Gun Violence”

CNN followed the same path, re-evaluating its original reporting in light of criticism from groups not on the same page as Everytown for Gun Safety:

Without a doubt, that number is startling.

So . . . CNN took a closer look at the list, delving into the circumstances of each incident Everytown included. . . .

CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Newtown or Oregon —a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school. That works out to about one such shooting every five weeks, a startling figure in its own right.

Some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals.

—Ashley Fantz, Lindsey Knight, and Kevin Wang, “A Closer Look: How Many Newtown-like School Shootings since Sandy Hook?”

Other news organizations came up with their own revised numbers, but clearly the interpretation of a number can be as important as the statistic itself. And what were Mark Gongloff’s Twitter reactions to these reassessments? They made an argument as well:

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Arguments over gun violence in schools reached a new peak in 2018 after seventeen students and staff members were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, leading to a nationwide student walkout on March 14 and massive protests at eight hundred sites around the world on March 24 (including over half a million in Washington, D.C., alone), all organized and led by students. Articulate and media savvy, the student leaders knew to rely on “hard evidence” and solid, fact-checked statistics, and they conducted the research necessary to do so. Students across the United States learned a lesson well: when you rely on statistics in your arguments, make sure you understand where they come from, what they mean, and what their limitations might be. Check and double-check them or get help in doing so: you don’t want to be accused of using fictitious data based on questionable assumptions.

RESPOND●

Statistical evidence becomes useful only when interpreted fairly and

reasonably. Go to the Business Insider Australia Web site and look

for one or more charts of the day

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(www.businessinsider.com/au/category/chart-of-the-day). Choose

one, and use the information in it to support three different claims,

at least two of which make very different points. Share your claims

with classmates. (The point is not to learn to use data dishonestly

but to see firsthand how the same statistics can serve a variety of

arguments.)

Surveys and Polls When they verify the popularity of an idea or a proposal, surveys and polls provide strong persuasive appeals because they come as close to expressing the will of the people as anything short of an election—the most decisive poll of all. However, surveys and polls can do much more than help politicians make decisions. They can be important elements in scientific research, documenting the complexities of human behavior. They can also provide persuasive reasons for action or intervention. When surveys show, for example, that most American sixth-graders can’t locate France or Wyoming on a map—not to mention Ukraine or Afghanistan—that’s an appeal for better instruction in geography. It always makes sense, however, to question poll numbers, especially when they support our own point of view. Ask who commissioned the poll, who is publishing its outcome, who was surveyed (and in what proportions), and what stakes these parties might have in its outcome.

Are we being too suspicious? Not at all, and especially not today. In fact, this sort of scrutiny is exactly what you might anticipate from your readers whenever you use (or create) surveys to explore an issue.

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You should be confident that enough subjects have been surveyed to be accurate, that the people chosen for the study were representative of the selected population as a whole, and that they were chosen randomly— not selected because of what they were likely to say. In a splendid article on how women can make research-based choices during pregnancy, economist Emily Oster explores, for example, whether an expectant mother might in fact be able to drink responsibly. She researches not only the results of the data, but also who was surveyed, and how their participation might have influenced the results. One 2001 study of pregnant women’s drinking habits and their children’s behavior years later cautioned that even a single drink per day while pregnant could cause behavioral issues. However, Oster uncovered a serious flaw in the study, noting that

18% of the women who didn’t drink at all and 45% of the women who had one drink a day reported using cocaine during pregnancy. . . . [R]eally? Cocaine? Perhaps the problem is that cocaine, not the occasional glass of Chardonnay, makes your child more likely to have behavior problems.

—Emily Oster, “Take Back Your Pregnancy”

Clearly, polls, surveys, and studies need to be examined critically. You can’t take even academic research at face value until you have explored its details.

The meaning of polls and surveys is also affected by the way that questions are posed. In the past, research revealed, for example, that

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polling about same-sex unions got differing responses according to how questions were worded. When people were asked whether gay and lesbian couples should be eligible for the same inheritance and partner health benefits that heterosexual couples receive, a majority of those polled said yes—unless the word marriage appeared in the question; then the responses were primarily negative. If anything, the differences here reveal how conflicted people may have been about the issue and how quickly opinions might shift—as they have clearly done. Remember, then, to be very careful in reviewing the wording of survey or poll questions.

Finally, always keep in mind that the date of a poll may strongly affect the results—and their usefulness in an argument. In 2014, for example, a Reuters poll found that 20 percent of California residents said they supported “CalExit,” a proposal for California to secede from the United States and become a country in its own right. In 2017, however, the same poll found that figure had jumped from 20 percent to 32 percent. The pollsters note, however, that the “margin of error for the California answers was plus or minus 5 percentage points.” On public and political issues, you need to be sure that you are using the most timely information you can get.

RESPOND●

Choose an important issue and design a series of questions to evoke

a range of responses in a poll. Try to design a question that would

make people strongly inclined to agree, another question that

would lead them to oppose the same proposition, and a third that

tries to be more neutral. Then try out your questions on your

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In his article “Thick of Tongue,” linguist John McWhorter shares his personal experience as a black man whom others insist “sounds white.”

LINK TO McWhorter, “Thick of Tongue,” in Chapter 25

classmates and note what you learn about how to improve your

questions.

Testimonies and Narratives

Writers often support arguments by presenting human experiences in the form of narrative or testimony—particularly if those experiences are their own. When Republican Senator Orrin Hatch condemned KKK, neo-Nazi, and white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he did so by calling on personal experience:

In courts, judges and juries often take into consideration detailed descriptions and narratives of exactly what occurred. In the case of Doe v. City of Belleville, the judges of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decided, based on the testimony presented, that a man (known as H.)

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had been sexually harassed by other men in his workplace. The narrative, in this case, supplies the evidence, noting that one coworker

constantly referred to H. as “queer” and “fag” and urged H. to “go back to San Francisco with the rest of the queers.” . . . The verbal taunting of H. turned physical one day when [a coworker] trapped [him] against a wall, proceeded to grab H. by the testicles and, having done so, announced to the assemblage of co-workers present, “Well, I guess he’s a guy.”

Personal perspectives can support a claim convincingly and logically, especially if a writer has earned the trust of readers. In arguing that Tea Party supporters of a government shutdown had no business being offended when some opponents described them as “terrorists,” Froma Harrop, one of the writers who used the term, argued logically and from experience why the characterization was appropriate:

[T]he hurt the tea party writers most complained of was to their feelings. I had engaged in name-calling, they kept saying. One professing to want more civility in our national conversation, as I do, should not be flinging around the terrorist word.

May I presume to disagree? Civility is a subjective concept, to be sure, but hurting people’s feelings in the course of making solid arguments is fair and square. The decline in the quality of our public discourse results not so much from an excess of spleen, but a deficit of well-constructed arguments. Few things upset partisans more than when the other side makes a case

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that bats home.

“Most of us know that effectively scoring on a point of argument opens us to the accusation of mean-spiritedness,” writes Frank Partsch, who leads the National Conference of Editorial Writers’ Civility Project. “It comes with the territory, and a commitment to civility should not suggest that punches will be pulled in order to avoid such accusations.”

—Froma Harrop, “Hurt Feelings Can Be a Consequence of Strong Arguments”

This narrative introduction gives a rationale for supporting the claim Harrop is making: we can expect consequences when we argue ineffectively. (For more on establishing credibility with readers, see Chapter 3.)

RESPOND●

Bring to class a full review of a recent film that you either enjoyed or

did not enjoy. Using testimony from that review, write a brief

argument to your classmates explaining why they should see that

movie (or why they should avoid it), being sure to use evidence from

the review fairly and reasonably. Then exchange arguments with a

classmate, and decide whether the evidence in your peer’s

argument helps to change your opinion about the movie. What’s

convincing about the evidence? If it doesn’t convince you, why

doesn’t it?

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Using Reason and Common Sense If you don’t have “hard facts,” you can turn to those arguments Aristotle describes as “constructed” from reason and common sense. The formal study of such reasoning is called logic, and you probably recognize a famous example of deductive reasoning, called a syllogism:

All human beings are mortal.

Socrates is a human being.

Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

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In valid syllogisms, the conclusion follows logically—and technically —from the premises that lead up to it. Many have criticized syllogistic reasoning for being limited, and others have poked fun at it, as in the cartoon above.

But we routinely see something like syllogistic reasoning operating in public arguments, particularly when writers take the time to explain key principles. Consider the step-by-step reasoning Michael Gerson uses to explain why exactly it was wrong for the Internal Revenue Service in 2010–2011 to target specific political groups, making it more difficult for them to organize politically:

Why does this matter deserve heightened scrutiny from the

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rest of us? Because crimes against democracy are particularly insidious. Representative government involves a type of trade. As citizens, we cede power to public officials for important purposes that require centralized power: defending the country, imposing order, collecting taxes to promote the common good. In exchange, we expect public institutions to be evenhanded and disinterested. When the stewards of power— biased judges or corrupt policemen or politically motivated IRS officials—act unfairly, it undermines trust in the whole system.

—Michael Gerson, “An Arrogant and Lawless IRS”

Gerson’s criticism of the IRS actions might be mapped out by the following sequence of statements.

Crimes against democracy undermine trust in the system.

Treating taxpayers differently because of their political beliefs is a crime against democracy.

Therefore, IRS actions that target political groups undermine the American system.

Few writers, of course, think about formal deductive reasoning when they support their claims. Even Aristotle recognized that most people argue perfectly well using informal logic. To do so, they rely mostly on habits of mind and assumptions that they share with their readers or listeners—as Gerson essentially does in his paragraph.

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In Chapter 7, we describe a system of informal logic that you may find useful in shaping credible appeals to reason—Toulmin argument. Here, we briefly examine some ways that people use informal logic in their everyday lives. Once again, we begin with Aristotle, who used the term enthymeme to describe an ordinary kind of sentence that includes both a claim and a reason but depends on the audience’s agreement with an assumption that is left implicit rather than spelled out. Enthymemes can be very persuasive when most people agree with the assumptions they rest on. The following sentences are all enthymemes:

We’d better cancel the picnic because it’s going to rain.

Flat taxes are fair because they treat everyone the same.

I’ll buy a PC instead of a Mac because it’s cheaper.

Sometimes enthymemes seem so obvious that readers don’t realize that they’re drawing inferences when they agree with them. Consider the first example:

We’d better cancel the picnic because it’s going to rain.

Let’s expand the enthymeme a bit to say more of what the speaker may mean:

We’d better cancel the picnic this afternoon because the weather bureau is predicting a 70 percent chance of rain for the remainder of the day.

Embedded in this brief argument are all sorts of assumptions and

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fragments of cultural information that are left implicit but that help to make it persuasive:

Picnics are ordinarily held outdoors.

When the weather is bad, it’s best to cancel picnics.

Rain is bad weather for picnics.

A 70 percent chance of rain means that rain is more likely to occur than not.

When rain is more likely to occur than not, it makes sense to cancel picnics.

For most people, the original statement carries all this information on its own; the enthymeme is a compressed argument, based on what audiences know and will accept.

But sometimes enthymemes aren’t self-evident:

Be wary of environmentalism because it’s religion disguised as science.

iPhones are undermining civil society by making us even more focused on ourselves.

It’s time to make all public toilets unisex because to do otherwise is discriminatory.

In these cases, you’ll have to work much harder to defend both the

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claim and the implicit assumptions that it’s based on by drawing out the inferences that seem self-evident in other enthymemes. And you’ll likely also have to supply credible evidence; just calling something a fact doesn’t make it one, so a simple declaration of fact won’t suffice.

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Logos In the United States, student writers are expected to draw on “hard facts” and evidence as often as possible in supporting their claims: while ethical and emotional appeals are increasingly important and often used in making decisions, logical appeals still tend to hold sway in academic writing. So statistics and facts speak volumes, as does reasoning based on time-honored values such as fairness and equity. In writing to global audiences, you need to remember that not all cultures value the same kinds of appeals. If you want to write to audiences across cultures, you need to know about the norms and values in those cultures. Chinese culture, for example, values authority and often indirect allusion over “facts” alone. Some African cultures value cooperation and community over individualism, and still other cultures value religious texts as providing compelling evidence. So think carefully about what you consider strong evidence, and pay attention to what counts as evidence to others. You can begin by asking yourself questions like:

What evidence is most valued by your audience: Facts? Concrete examples? Firsthand experience? Religious or philosophical texts? Something else? Will analogies count as support? How about precedents? Will the testimony of experts count? If so, what kinds of experts

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are valued most?

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Providing Logical Structures for Argument Some arguments depend on particular logical structures to make their points. In the following pages, we identify a few of these logical structures.

Degree Arguments based on degree are so common that people barely notice them, nor do they pay much attention to how they work because they seem self-evident. Most audiences will readily accept that more of a good thing or less of a bad thing is good. In her novel The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand asks: “If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit?” Most readers immediately comprehend the point Rand intends to make about slavery of the spirit because they already know that physical slavery is cruel and would reject any forms of slavery that were even crueler on the principle that more of a bad thing is bad. Rand still needs to offer evidence that “servility of the spirit” is, in fact, worse than bodily servitude, but she has begun with a logical structure readers can grasp. Here are other arguments that work similarly:

If I can get a ten-year warranty on an inexpensive Kia, shouldn’t I get the same or better warranty from a more expensive Lexus?

The health benefits from using stem cells in research will

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surely outweigh the ethical risks.

Better a conventional war now than a nuclear confrontation later.

A demonstrator at an immigrants’ rights rally in New York City in 2007. Arguments based on values that are widely shared within a society—such as the idea of equal rights in American culture—have a strong advantage with audiences.

Analogies Analogies, typically complex or extended comparisons, explain one

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Alli Joseph discusses the portrayal of Pacific Islanders in Disney’s Moana and compares it to the studio’s previous depictions of ethnic minorities.

LINK TO Joseph, “With Disney’s Moana, Hollywood Almost Gets It Right,” in Chapter 23

idea or concept by comparing it to something else.

Here, writer and founder of literacy project 826 Valencia, Dave Eggers, uses an analogy in arguing that we do not value teachers as much as we should:

When we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. . . . No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition. And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers.

—Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari, “The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries”

Precedent

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Arguments from precedent and arguments of analogy both involve comparisons. Consider an assertion like this one, which uses a comparison as a precedent:

If motorists in most other states can pump their own gas safely, surely the state of Oregon can trust its own drivers to be as capable. It’s time for Oregon to permit self-service gas stations.

You could tease out several inferences from this claim to explain its reasonableness: people in Oregon are as capable as people in other states; people with equivalent capabilities can do the same thing; pumping gas is not hard; and so forth. But you don’t have to because most readers get the argument simply because of the way it is put together. In any case, that argument has begun to have traction: as of January 2018, Oregon began permitting self-service pumps in fifteen rural counties, though doing so called forth virulent pushback on social media. So the debate goes on!

Here is an excerpt from an analytical argument by Kriston Capps that examines attempts by the sculptor of Wall Street’s Charging Bull to have a new, competing sculpture, Fearless Girl, removed on the basis of legal precedents supporting the rights of visual artists. Sculptor Arturo Di Modica’s assertion,

that Visbal’s work infringes on his own, is unlikely to hold sway, under recent readings of the Visual Artists Rights Act. . . . The argument that Fearless Girl modifies or destroys Charging Bull by blocking its path would represent a leap that

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courts have been reluctant to take even in clearer cases.

—Kriston Capps, “Why Wall Street’s Charging Bull Sculptor Has No Real Case against Fearless Girl”

You’ll encounter additional kinds of logical structures as you create your own arguments. You’ll find some of them in Chapter 5, “Fallacies of Argument,” and still more in Chapter 7 on Toulmin argument.

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CHAPTER 5 Fallacies of Argument

Do these cartoons ring a bell with you? The first panel skewers slippery slope arguments, which aim to thwart action by predicting dire consequences: “occupy” enough spaces and the Occupy movement looks just like the Tea Party. In the second item, an example of a straw man argument, the first author of an academic paper puts down his coauthor by shifting the subject, saying that the coauthor is an egotist who cares only for fame, not what the coauthor had said at all. And the third image provides an example of a very common fallacy, the ad hominem argument, in which a speaker impugns the character of an opponent rather than addressing the arguments that person raises. Rather than argue the point that human cloning is wrong, the bird says, simply, “you’re an idiot.”

Candidate Donald Trump made something of a specialty of the ad hominem argument. Rather than address their arguments directly, he attacked the characters of his opponents: Marco Rubio was always “little Marco,” Hillary Clinton was always “crooked,” Elizabeth Warren was “goofy,” and Cruz was always “Lyin’ Ted.” Early on in the campaign, when asked about rival candidate Carly Fiorina’s plans,

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he said, “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really, folks, come on.” Classic ad hominem, and oftentimes such tactics work all too well!

Fallacies are argumentative moves flawed by their nature or structure. Because such tactics can make principled argument more difficult, they potentially hurt everyone involved, including the people responsible for them. The worst sorts of fallacies muck up the frank but civil conversations that people should be able to have, regardless of their differences.

Yet it’s hard to deny the power in offering audiences a compelling either/or choice or a vulnerable straw man in an argument: these fallacies can have great persuasive power. For exactly that reason, it’s important that you can recognize and point out fallacies in the work of others—and avoid them in your own writing. This chapter aims to help you meet these goals: here we’ll introduce you to fallacies of argument classified according to the emotional, ethical, and logical appeals we’ve discussed earlier (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4).

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Fallacies of Emotional Argument Emotional arguments can be powerful and suitable in many circumstances, and most writers use them frequently. However, writers who pull on their readers’ heartstrings or raise their blood pressure too often—or who oversentimentalize—can violate the good faith on which legitimate argument depends.

Scare Tactics Politicians, advertisers, and public figures sometimes peddle their ideas by frightening people and exaggerating possible dangers well beyond their statistical likelihood. Such ploys work because it’s easier to imagine something terrible happening than to appreciate its rarity.

Scare tactics can also be used to stampede legitimate fears into panic or prejudice. Laborers who genuinely worry about losing their jobs can be persuaded to fear immigrants who might work for less money. Seniors living on fixed incomes can be convinced that minor changes to entitlement programs represent dire threats to their well-being. Such tactics have the effect of closing off thinking because people who are scared often act irrationally. Even well-intended fear campaigns—like those directed against smoking, unprotected sex, or the use of illegal drugs—can misfire if their warnings prove too shrill or seem hysterical. People just stop listening.

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Either/or choices can be well-intentioned strategies to get something accomplished. Parents use them all the time (“Eat your broccoli, or you won’t get dessert”). But they become fallacious arguments when they reduce a complicated issue to excessively simple terms (e.g., “You’re either for me or against me”) or when they’re designed to obscure legitimate alternatives. Here, for example, is Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative to the United Nations, offering the nation of Israel just such a choice in an interview on PBS in January 2014:

It is up to them [the Israelis] to decide what kind of a state they want to be. Do they want to be a democratic state where Israel will be the state for all of its citizens? Or do they want to be a state for the Jewish people, therefore excluding 1.6 million Palestinian Arabs who are Israelis from their society? That debate is not our debate. That debate is their debate.

But Joel B. Pollak, writing for Breitbart News Network, describes Mansour’s claim as a “false choice” since Israel already is a Jewish state that nonetheless allows Muslims to be full citizens. The either/or argument Mansour presents, according to Pollack, does not describe the realities of this complex political situation.

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A false choice?

Slippery Slope The slippery slope fallacy portrays today’s tiny misstep as tomorrow’s slide into disaster. Some arguments that aim at preventing dire consequences do not take the slippery slope approach (for example, the parent who corrects a child for misbehavior now is acting sensibly to prevent more serious problems as the child grows older). A slippery slope argument becomes wrongheaded when a writer exaggerates the likely consequences of an action, usually to frighten readers. As such, slippery slope arguments are also scare tactics. In recent years, the issue of gun ownership in America has evoked many slippery slope

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arguments. Here are two examples:

“Universal background checks will inevitably be followed by a national registry of gun-owners which will inevitably be followed by confiscation of all their guns.” Or, “A ban on assault-style weapons and thirty+ round magazines will inevitably be followed by a ban on hand guns with ten-round magazines….”

—Michael Wolkowitz, “Slippery Slopes, Imagined and Real”

Social and political ideas and proposals do have consequences, but they aren’t always as dire as writers fond of slippery slope tactics would have you believe.

Overly Sentimental Appeals Overly sentimental appeals use tender emotions excessively to distract readers from facts. Often, such appeals are highly personal and individual and focus attention on heartwarming or heartrending situations that make readers feel guilty if they challenge an idea, a policy, or a proposal. Emotions can become an impediment to civil discourse when they keep people from thinking clearly.

Such sentimental appeals are a major vehicle of television news, where tugging at viewers’ heartstrings can mean high ratings. For example, when a camera documents the day-to-day sacrifices of a single parent trying to meet mortgage payments and keep her kids in college, the woman’s on-screen struggles can seem to represent the plight of an entire class of people threatened by callous bankers and college

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administrators. But while such human interest stories stir genuine emotions, they seldom give a complete picture of complex social or economic issues.

The first image, taken from a gun control protest, is designed to elicit sympathy by causing the viewer to think about the dangers guns pose to innocent children and, thus, support the cause. The second image supports the other side of the debate.

Bandwagon Appeals Bandwagon appeals urge people to follow the same path everyone else is taking. Such arguments can be relatively benign and seem harmless. But they do push people to take the easier path rather than think independently about what choices to make or where to go.

Many American parents seem to have an innate ability to refute

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bandwagon appeals. When their kids whine, Everyone else is going camping without chaperones, the parents reply, And if everyone else jumps off a cliff (or a railroad bridge or the Empire State Building), you will too? The children groan—and then try a different line of argument.

Advertisers use bandwagon appeals frequently, as this example of a cellphone ad demonstrates:

Unfortunately, not all bandwagon approaches are so transparent. In recent decades, bandwagon issues have included a war on drugs, the nuclear freeze movement, campaigns against drunk driving—and for freedom of speech, campaigns for immigration reform, bailouts for banks and businesses, and many fads in education. All these issues are

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too complex to permit the suspension of judgment that bandwagon tactics require.

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Fallacies of Ethical Argument Because readers give their closest attention to authors they respect or trust, writers usually want to present themselves as honest, well- informed, likable, or sympathetic. But not all the devices that writers use to gain the attention and confidence of readers are admirable. (For more on appeals based on character, see Chapter 3.)

Appeals to False Authority Many academic research papers find and reflect on the work of reputable authorities and introduce these authorities through direct quotations or citations as credible evidence. (For more on assessing the reliability of sources, see Chapter 19.) False authority, however, occurs when writers offer themselves or other authorities as sufficient warrant for believing a claim:

Claim X is true because I say so.

Warrant What I say must be true.

Claim X is true because Y says so.

Warrant What Y says must be true.

Though they are seldom stated so baldly, claims of authority drive many political campaigns. American pundits and politicians are fond of citing the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights (Canadians have their Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and Britain has had its Bill of Rights since the seventeenth century) as ultimate authorities, a reasonable

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practice when the documents are interpreted respectfully. However, the rights claimed sometimes aren’t in the texts themselves or don’t mean what the speakers think they do. And most constitutional matters are debatable—as volumes of court records prove. Likewise, religious believers often base arguments on books or traditions that wield great authority in a particular religious community. But the power of such texts is often limited to that group and less capable of persuading others solely on the grounds of authority.

In short, you should pay serious attention to claims supported by respected authorities, such as the Centers for Disease Control, the National Science Foundation, or the Globe and Mail. But don’t accept information simply because it is put forth by such offices and agencies. To quote a Russian proverb made famous by Ronald Reagan, “Trust, but verify.”

Dogmatism A writer who asserts or assumes that a particular position is the only one that is conceivably acceptable is expressing dogmatism, a fallacy of character that undermines the trust that must exist between those who make and listen to arguments. When people or organizations write dogmatically, they imply that no arguments are necessary: the truth is self-evident and needs no support. Here is an extreme example of such an appeal, quoted in an Atlantic story by Tracy Brown Hamilton and describing an anti-smoking appeal made by the Third Reich:

“Brother national socialist, do you know that your Fuhrer is against smoking and thinks that every German is responsible

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to the whole people for all his deeds and omissions, and does not have the right to damage his body with drugs?”

—Tracy Brown Hamilton, “The Nazis’ Forgotten Anti- Smoking Campaign”

Subjects or ideas that can be defended with facts, testimony, and good reasons ought not to be off the table in a free society. In general, whenever someone suggests that even raising an issue for debate is totally unacceptable—whether on the grounds that it’s racist, sexist, unpatriotic, blasphemous, insensitive, or offensive in some other way —you should be suspicious.

Ad Hominem Arguments Ad hominem (Latin for “to the man”) arguments attack the character of a person rather than the claims he or she makes: when you destroy the credibility of your opponents, you either destroy their ability to present reasonable appeals or distract from the successful arguments they may be offering. During the 2016 presidential primary, Marco Rubio criticized rival candidate Ted Cruz for not speaking Spanish: was that a valid argument for why Cruz would not make a good president? Such attacks, of course, aren’t aimed at men only, as columnist Jamie Stiehm proved when she criticized Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor for delaying an Affordable Care Act mandate objected to by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic religious order. Stiehm directly targets Sotomayor’s religious beliefs:

Et tu, Justice Sonia Sotomayor? Really, we can’t trust you on

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women’s health and human rights? The lady from the Bronx just dropped the ball on American women and girls as surely as she did the sparkling ball at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Or maybe she’s just a good Catholic girl.

—Jamie Stiehm, “The Catholic Supreme Court’s War on Women”

Stiehm then widens her ad hominem assault to include Catholics in general:

Sotomayor’s blow brings us to confront an uncomfortable reality. More than WASPs, Methodists, Jews, Quakers or Baptists, Catholics often try to impose their beliefs on you, me, public discourse and institutions. Especially if “you” are female.

Arguably, ad hominem tactics like this turn arguments into two-sided affairs with good guys and bad guys (or gals), and that’s unfortunate, since character often really does matter in argument. Even though the norms of civic discourse were strained to the limit during and after the 2016 presidential election, most people still expect the proponent of peace to be civil, a secretary of the treasury to pay his or her taxes, the champion of family values to be a faithful spouse, and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to advocate for protecting the environment. But it’s fallacious to attack any of these people for their traits, backgrounds, looks, or other irrelevant information.

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Stacking the Deck Just as gamblers try to stack the deck by arranging cards so they are sure to win, writers stack the deck when they show only one side of the story—the one in their favor. In a 2016 New Yorker article, writer Kathryn Schulz discusses the Netflix series Making a Murderer. Schulz notes that the filmmakers have been accused of limiting their evidence in order to convince viewers that the accused, Steven Avery, had been framed for the crime:

Ricciardi and Demos have dismissed the idea, claiming that they simply set out to investigate Avery’s case and didn’t have a position on his guilt or innocence. Yet . . . the filmmakers minimize or leave out many aspects of Avery’s less than savory past, including multiple alleged incidents of physical and sexual violence. They also omit important evidence against him, . . . evidence that would be nearly impossible to plant. . . . Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit.

—Kathryn Schulz, “Dead Certainty: How Making a Murderer Goes Wrong”

In the same way, reviewers have been critical of documentaries by Michael Moore and Dinesh D’Souza that resolutely show only one side of a story or prove highly selective in their coverage. When you stack the deck, you take a big chance that your readers will react like Schulz and decide not to trust you: that’s one reason it’s so important to show

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that you have considered alternatives in making any argument.

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Look closely at Alexandra Dal’s and the Turner Consulting Group’s visual arguments showing how damaging microaggressions can be. Then compare them to Scott O. Lilienfeld’s argument against the use of microaggressions. Do you see any fallacies in the trio of selections?

LINK TO Turner Consulting Group, “Racial Microaggressions”; Dal, “Questions”; and Lilienfeld, “Why a Moratorium on Microaggressions Is Needed,” in Chapter 27

Fallacies of Logical Argument

You’ll encounter a problem in any argument when the claims, warrants, or proofs in it are invalid, insufficient, or disconnected. In theory, such problems seem easy enough to spot, but in practice, they can be camouflaged by a skillful use of words or images. Indeed, logical fallacies pose a challenge to civil argument because they often seem reasonable and natural, especially when they appeal to people’s self-interests.

Hasty Generalization A hasty generalization is an inference drawn from insufficient evidence: because my Fiat broke down, then all Fiats must be junk. It also forms the basis for most stereotypes about people or institutions: because a few people in a large group are observed to act in a certain

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way, all members of that group are inferred to behave similarly. The resulting conclusions are usually sweeping claims of little merit: women are bad drivers; men are slobs; English teachers are nitpicky; computer jocks are . . . ; and on and on.

To draw valid inferences, you must always have sufficient evidence (see Chapter 18) and you must qualify your claims appropriately. After all, people do need generalizations to make reasonable decisions in life. Such claims can be offered legitimately if placed in context and tagged with sensible qualifiers—some, a few, many, most, occasionally, rarely, possibly, in some cases, under certain circumstances, in my limited experience.

Faulty Causality In Latin, faulty causality is known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which translates as “after this, therefore because of this”—the faulty assumption that because one event or action follows another, the first causes the second. Consider a lawsuit commented on in the Wall Street Journal in which a writer sued Coors (unsuccessfully), claiming that drinking copious amounts of the company’s beer had kept him from writing a novel. This argument is sometimes referred to as the “Twinkie defense,” referring to a claim that the person who shot and killed San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk had eaten so many Twinkies and other sugary foods that his reasoning had been impaired. The phrase is now sometimes used to label the claims of criminals that their acts were caused by something beyond their control.

Of course, some actions do produce reactions. Step on the brake pedal

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in your car, and you move hydraulic fluid that pushes calipers against disks to create friction that stops the vehicle. In other cases, however, a supposed connection between cause and effect turns out to be completely wrong. For example, doctors now believe that when an elderly person falls and breaks a hip or leg, the injury usually caused the fall rather than the other way around.

That’s why overly simple causal claims should always be subject to scrutiny. In summer 2008, writer Nicholas Carr posed a simple causal question in a cover story for the Atlantic: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr essentially answered yes, arguing that “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens” and that the more one is online the less he or she is able to concentrate or read deeply.

But others, like Jamais Cascio (senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies), soon challenged that causal connection: rather than making us stupid, Cascio argues, Internet tools like Google will lead to the development of “‘fluid intelligence’—the ability to find meaning in confusion and to solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge.” The final word on this contentious causal relationship—the effects on the human brain caused by new technology—has yet to be written, and will probably be available only after decades of complicated research.

Begging the Question Most teachers have heard some version of the following argument: You can’t give me a C in this course; I’m an A student. A member of

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Congress accused of taking kickbacks can make much the same argument: I can’t be guilty of accepting such bribes; I’m an honest person. In both cases, the claim is made on grounds that can’t be accepted as true because those grounds themselves are in question. How can the accused bribe-taker defend herself on grounds of honesty when that honesty is in doubt? Looking at the arguments in Toulmin terms helps to see the fallacy:

Claim You can’t give me a C in this course . . .

Reason . . . because I’m an A student.

Warrant An A student is someone who can’t receive Cs.

Claim Representative X can’t be guilty of accepting bribes . . .

Reason . . . because she’s an honest person.

Warrant An honest person cannot be guilty of accepting bribes.

With the warrants stated, you can see why begging the question— assuming as true the very claim that’s disputed—is a form of circular argument that goes nowhere. (For more on Toulmin argument, see Chapter 7.)

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Equivocation Equivocations—half truths or arguments that give lies an honest appearance—are usually based on tricks of language. Consider the plagiarist who copies a paper word for word from a source and then declares that “I wrote the entire paper myself”—meaning that she physically copied the piece on her own. But the plagiarist is using wrote equivocally and knows that most people understand the word to mean composing and not merely copying words.

Parsing words carefully can sometimes look like equivocation or be the thing itself. For example, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was asked regularly (some would say she was hounded) about her use of a private email server and about whether any of the emails contained classified information. Here’s what she said on February 1, 2016:

The emails that I was received were not marked classified. Now, there are disagreements among agencies on what should have been perhaps classified retroactively, but at the time that doesn’t change the fact that they were not marked classified.

—NPR Morning Edition, February 1, 2016

Many commentators at the time felt that this statement was a clear equivocation, and this controversy continued to haunt Clinton throughout her campaign.

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A non sequitur is an argument whose claims, reasons, or warrants don’t connect logically. You’ve probably detected a non sequitur when you react to an argument with a puzzled, “Wait, that doesn’t follow.” Children are adept at framing non sequiturs like this one: You don’t love me or you’d buy me a new bike. It doesn’t take a parental genius to realize that love has little connection with buying children toys.

Non sequiturs often occur when writers omit steps in an otherwise logical chain of reasoning. For example, it might be a non sequitur to argue that since postsecondary education now costs so much, it’s time to move colleges and university instruction online. Such a suggestion may have merit, but a leap from brick-and-mortar schools to virtual ones is extreme. Numerous issues and questions must be addressed step-by-step before the proposal can be taken seriously.

Politicians sometimes resort to non sequiturs to evade thorny issues or questions. Here, for example, is Donald Trump replying to questions in a 2017 interview with Michael Scherer of Time Magazine:

Scherer: Mitch McConnell has said he’d rather you stop tweeting, that he sees it as a distraction.

Trump: Mitch will speak for himself. Mitch is a wonderful man. Mitch should speak for himself.

Here Trump does not respond to the claim the interviewer says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made, but instead abruptly changes the subject, commenting instead on McConnell, saying he is a “wonderful man.”

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Straw Man Those who resort to the straw man fallacy attack arguments that no one is really making or portray opponents’ positions as more extreme or far less coherent than they actually are. The speaker or writer thus sets up an argument that is conveniently easy to knock down (like a man of straw), proceeds to do so, and then claims victory over an opponent who may not even exist.

Straw men are especially convenient devices for politicians who want to characterize the positions of their opponents as more extreme than they actually are: consider obvious memes such as “war on women” and “war on Christmas.” But straw man arguments are often more subtle. For instance, Steven Novella of Yale University argues that political commentator Charles Krauthammer slips into the fallacy when he misconstrues the meaning of “settled science” in a column on climate change. Novella rebuts Krauthammer’s assertion that “There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge” by explaining why such a claim is deceptive:

Calling something an established scientific fact means that it is reasonable to proceed with that fact as a premise, for further research or for policy. It does not mean “static, impervious to challenge.” That is the straw man. Both evolution deniers and climate change deniers use this tactic to misinterpret scientific confidence as an anti-scientific resistance to new evidence or arguments. It isn’t.

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—Steven Novella, NeuroLogica Blog, February 25, 2014

In other words, Krauthammer’s definition of science is not one that most scientists use.

Red Herring This fallacy gets its name from the old British hunting practice of dragging a dried herring across the path of the fox in order to throw the hounds off the trail. A red herring fallacy does just that: it changes the subject abruptly or introduces an irrelevant claim or fact to throw readers or listeners off the trail. For example, people skeptical about climate change will routinely note that weather is always changing and point to the fact that Vikings settled in Greenland one thousand years ago before harsher conditions drove them away. True, scientists will say, but the point is irrelevant to arguments about worldwide global warming caused by human activity.

The red herring is not only a device writers and speakers use in the arguments they create, but it’s also a charge used frequently to undermine someone else’s arguments. Couple the term “red herring” in a Web search to just about any political or social cause and you’ll come up with numerous articles complaining of someone’s use of the device.

climate change + red herring

white supremacy + red herring

immigration reform + red herring

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“Red herring” has become a convenient way of saying “I disagree with your argument” or “your point is irrelevant.” And perhaps making a too-easy rebuttal like that can itself be a fallacy?

Faulty Analogy Comparisons can help to clarify one concept by measuring it against another that is more familiar. Consider the power and humor of this comparison attributed to Mark Twain, an implicit argument for term limits in politics:

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

When comparisons such as this one are extended, they become analogies—ways of understanding unfamiliar ideas by comparing them with something that’s better known (see Analogies in Chapter 4). But useful as such comparisons are, they may prove false if either taken on their own and pushed too far, or taken too seriously. At this point, they turn into faulty analogies—inaccurate or inconsequential comparisons between objects or concepts. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos found herself in a national controversy following a statement she made after meeting with Historically Black Colleges and Universities presidents in Washington, when she made an analogy between HCBUs and her advocacy of “school choice” today:

They [African Americans] saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution. HBCUs are

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real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.

What commentators immediately pointed out was that this statement included a false analogy. HBCUs were not created to provide more choice for African American students (and thus be analogous to DeVos’s push for charter schools and school “choice”) but rather because these students had little to no choice; after the Civil War, African American students were barred from most white public institutions.

Paralipsis This fallacy (sometimes spelled paralepsis and often compared with occultatio) has been so predominant in the last two years that we think it’s worthy of inclusion here. Basically, this fallacy occurs when speakers or writers say they will NOT talk about something, thus doing the very thing they say they’re not going to do. It’s a way of getting a point into an argument obliquely, of sneaking it in while saying that you are not doing so. Although paralipsis is rampant today, it is not new: Socrates famously used it in his trial when he said he would not mention his grieving wife and children who would suffer so mightily at his death. In the 2016 presidential campaign and in the first years of his presidency, Donald Trump used paralipsis repeatedly. Here, for instance, he is at a campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, speaking about rival candidate Marco Rubio:

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I will not call him a lightweight, because I think that’s a derogatory term, so I will not call him a lightweight. Is that OK with you people? I refuse to say that he’s a lightweight.

Although he is the most conspicuous user of paralipsis today, Trump is by no means the only politician to use this fallacy. Here’s a commentator reporting on presidential candidate Bernie Sanders at a 2016 town hall meeting in Iowa:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Friday called Bill Clinton’s sexual scandals “totally disgraceful and unacceptable” but

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said he would not use the former president’s infidelities against Hillary Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is not Bill Clinton. What Bill Clinton did, I think we can all acknowledge was totally, totally, totally disgraceful and unacceptable.”

—Reporter Lisa Hagen, The Hill

In saying he would not use the former president’s scandalous behavior against Hillary Clinton, he in fact does just the opposite.

Finally, you may run across the use of paralipsis anywhere, even at the movies, as spoken here by Robert Downey Jr.’s character Tony Stark:

I’m not saying I’m responsible for this country’s longest run of uninterrupted peace in 35 years! I’m not saying that from the ashes of captivity, never has a phoenix metaphor been more personified! I’m not saying Uncle Sam can kick back on a lawn chair, sipping on an iced tea, because I haven’t come across anyone man enough to go toe to toe with me on my best day. It’s not about me!

—Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man 2 (2010)

You may be tempted to use this fallacy in your own writing, but beware: it is pretty transparent and may well backfire on you. Better to say what you believe to be the truth—and stick to it.

RESPOND●

1. Examine each of the following political slogans or phrases for

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logical fallacies.

“Resistance is futile.” (Borg message on Star Trek: The Next Generation)

“It’s the economy, stupid.” (sign on the wall at Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters)

“Make love, not war.” (antiwar slogan popularized during the Vietnam War)

“Build bridges, not walls.” (attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.)

“Stronger Together” (campaign slogan)

“Guns don’t kill, people do.” (NRA slogan)

“Dog Fighters Are Cowardly Scum.” (PETA T-shirt)

“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.” (attributed to Harry S Truman)

2. Hone your critical reading skills by choosing a paper you’ve written for a college class and analyze it for signs of fallacious reasoning. Then find an editorial, a syndicated column, and a news report on the same topic and look for fallacies in them. Which has the most fallacies—and what kind? What may be the role of the audience in determining when a statement is fallacious? How effective do you think the fallacies were in speaking to their intended audience?

3. Find a Web site that is sponsored by an organization (the Future of Music Coalition, perhaps), a business (Coca-Cola, Pepsi), or another group (the Democratic or Republican National Committee), and analyze the site for fallacious reasoning. Among other considerations, look at the

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relationship between text and graphics and between individual pages and the pages that surround or are linked to them.

4. Political blogs such as Mother Jones and InstaPundit typically provide quick responses to daily events and detailed critiques of material in other media sites, including national newspapers. Study one such blog for a few days to see whether and how the site critiques the articles, political commentary, or writers it links to. Does the blog ever point out fallacies of argument? If so, does it explain the problems with such reasoning or just assume readers will understand the fallacies? Summarize your findings in a brief oral report to your class.

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CHAPTER 6 Rhetorical Analysis

If you watched the 2016 Super Bowl between the Carolina Panthers and the Denver Broncos, you may remember the commercial in which the images above appeared. For a full 60 seconds, “Portraits” — which celebrates the seventy-fifth birthday of Jeep — shows still photographs of the faces of a wide range of people, all of whom have had some connection with the iconic Jeep. B. B. King, one of the most influential blues musicians of all time, recorded a cover of the famous Duke Ellington song, “Jeep’s Blues,” and Marilyn Monroe rode in a Jeep when she visited troops in 1954. One of the noncelebrities in the commercial is a young woman holding her hands in front of her face; who knows what her connection might be? This advertisement, which won the Super Clio for the best ad of the 2016 Super Bowl, plays in black and white, flashing from one memorable face to another, as a voice speaks to viewers:

I’ve seen things no man should bear and those that every man should dare, from the beaches of Normandy to the farthest reaches of the earth. In my life, I’ve lived millions of lives. I’ve outrun robots and danced with dinosaurs. I’ve faced the faces

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of fear, and of fortitude, and witnessed great beauty in the making. I’ve kept the company of kings — and queens. But I’m no royalty or saint. I’ve traveled, trekked, wandered, and roamed only to find myself right where I belong.

As the portraits are shown, they are occasionally joined by an image of a Jeep, and the ad closes with these lines:

Within seconds of its showing, the ad had been viewed on YouTube over 15,000 times. So how do we account for the power of such advertisements? That would be the work of a rhetorical analysis, the close, critical reading of a text or, in this case, a video commercial, to figure out exactly how it functions. Certainly, Iris, the ad agency that created “Portraits,” counted on the strong emotional appeal of the photographs, assuming that the faces represented would stir strong sentiments, along with the lyrical words of the voiceover.

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The ad’s creators pushed the envelope of convention, too, by rejecting the over-the-top, schmaltzy, or super-cute techniques of other advertisements and by the muted product connection. As Super Clio commissioner Rob Reilly put it, “I liked the restraint it showed for the Super Bowl, to not use the typical tricks. Jeep could have easily shown driving footage . . . but they chose to show very little product and tell a great story.” Another Clio juror found that the ad “credits people with intelligence and asks you to decode it.” (For more information on analyzing images, see Chapter 14.)

Rhetorical analysis and critical reading also probe the contexts that surround any argument or text — its impact on a society, its deeper implications, or even what it lacks or whom it excludes. Predictably, the widely admired Jeep commercial found its share of critics. In a review of the ad for Wired, Jenna Garrett helps viewers understand some of the choices made by the advertisers, such as the decision to show the ad in portrait format (and thus using only a third of the TV screen) in recognition that many would be watching on cell phones and tablets (indeed, she reports, the ad looks very fine on those devices). But she then turns to faults she finds with the ad:

Some of the photos are legitimately great, taken by the likes of celebrity photographer Martin Schoeller. But others look like vacation snapshots, and many of the Jeep images were “fan photos” taken by people doing, well, whatever. Although the photos make the point that Jeep has been everywhere and loved by everyone, the ad doesn’t feel cohesive. The pictures of Terminator and T-rex, for example, were jarring, particularly

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the Terminator’s red eyes (the only splash of color in the entire ad). And speaking from a strictly technical perspective, the photos are all over the map in terms of contrast, and some of the crops are entirely too tight.

— Jenna Garrett, “Why Jeep’s $10M Super Bowl Ad Only Used a Third of the Screen”

Other reviewers found the advertisement over-sentimental, even saccharine; still others noted some lack of diversity.

Whenever you undertake a rhetorical analysis, do what these reviewers did: read (and view) critically, noting every detail and asking yourself how those details affect the audience, how they build agreement or adherence to the argument — or how they do not do so. And ask plenty of questions: Why does an ad for a cell phone or breakfast sandwich make people want one immediately? How does an op-ed piece in the Washington Post suddenly change your long-held position on immigration? Critical reading and rhetorical analysis can help you understand and answer these questions. Dig as deep as you can into the context of the item you are analyzing, especially when you encounter puzzling, troubling, or unusually successful appeals — ethical, emotional, or logical. Ask yourself what strategies a speech, editorial, opinion column, film, or ad uses to move your heart, win your trust, and change your mind — or why, maybe, it fails to do so.

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Composing a Rhetorical Analysis: Reading and Viewing Critically You perform a rhetorical analysis by analyzing how well the components of an argument work together to persuade or move an audience. You can study arguments of any kind — advertisements (as we’ve seen), Web sites, editorials, political cartoons, and even songs, movies, photographs, buildings, or shopping malls. In every case, you’ll need to focus your rhetorical analysis on elements that stand out or make the piece intriguing or problematic. You could begin by exploring some of the following issues:

What is the purpose of this argument? What does it hope to achieve? Who is the audience for this argument? Who is ignored or excluded? What appeals or techniques does the argument use — emotional, logical, ethical? What type of argument is it, and how does the genre affect the argument? (You might challenge the lack of evidence in editorials, but you wouldn’t make the same complaint about bumper stickers.) Who is making the argument? What ethos does it create, and how does it do so? What values does the ethos evoke? How does it make the writer or creator seem trustworthy? What authorities does the argument rely on or appeal to?

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What facts, reasoning, and evidence are used in the argument? How are they presented? Can you detect the use of misinformation, disinformation, “fake” news, or outright lies? What claims does the argument make? What issues are raised — or ignored or evaded? What are the contexts — social, political, historical, cultural — for this argument? Whose interests does it serve? Who gains or loses by it? Can you identify fallacies in the argument — emotional, ethical, or logical? (See Chapter 5.) How is the argument organized or arranged? What media does the argument use and how effectively? How does the language and style of the argument work to persuade an audience?

In answering questions like these, try to show how the key devices in an argument actually make it succeed or fail. Quote freely from a written piece, or describe the elements in a visual argument. (Annotating a visual text is one option.) Let readers know where and why an argument makes sense and where it falls apart. If you believe that an argument startles, challenges, insults, or lulls audiences, explain why that is the case and provide evidence. Don’t be surprised when your rhetorical analysis itself becomes an argument. That’s what it should be.

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Understanding the Purpose of Arguments You Are Analyzing To understand how well any argument works, begin with its purpose: Is it to sell running shoes? To advocate for limits to college tuition? To push a political agenda? In many cases, that purpose may be obvious. A conservative blog will likely advance right-wing causes; ads from a baby food company will likely show happy infants delighted with stewed prunes.

But some projects may hide their persuasive intentions. Perhaps you’ve responded to a mail survey or telephone poll only to discover that the questions are leading you to switch your cable service or buy apartment insurance. Do such stealthy arguments succeed? Do consumers resent the intrusion? Answering questions like these provides material for useful rhetorical analyses that assess the strengths, risks, and ethics of such strategies.

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Understanding Who Makes an Argument Knowing who is claiming what is key to any rhetorical analysis. That’s why persuasive appeals usually have a name attached to them. Remember the statements included in TV ads during the last federal election: “Hello, I’m X — and I approve this ad”? Federal law requires such statements so we can tell the difference between ads a candidate endorses and ones sponsored by groups not even affiliated with the campaigns. Their interests and motives might be very different.

Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsing Kamala Harris, who won the 2016 race to replace long-time California senator Barbara Boxer

But knowing a name is just a starting place for analysis. You need to dig deeper, and you could do worse than to Google such people or groups to discover more about them. What else have they produced? Who publishes them: the Wall Street Journal, the blog The Daily Kos, or even a Live-Journal celebrity gossip site such as Oh No They Didn’t? Check out related Web sites for information about goals,

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policies, contributors, and funding.

RESPOND● Describe a persuasive moment that you can recall from a speech, an

editorial, an advertisement, a YouTube clip, or a blog posting. Or

research one of the following famous persuasive moments and

describe the circumstances—the historical situation, the issues at

stake, the purpose of the argument—that make it so memorable.

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments at the

Seneca Falls Convention (1848)

Chief Tecumseh’s address to General William Henry Harrison

(1810)

Winston Churchill’s radio addresses to the British people during

World War II (1940)

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963)

Ronald Reagan’s tribute to the Challenger astronauts (1986)

Toni Morrison’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize (1993)

Former President Obama’s eulogy in memory of the

worshippers killed at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston

(2015)

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Sara Morrison’s report “Covering the Transgender Community” has a clear audience: journalists and others interested in how transgender individuals are represented in the media.

LINK TO Morrison, “Covering the Transgender Community,” in Chapter 23

Identifying and Appealing to Audiences

Most arguments are composed with specific audiences in mind, and their success depends, in part, on how well their strategies, content, tone, and language meet the expectations of that audience. So your rhetorical analysis of an argumentative piece should identify its target readers or viewers (see Appealing to Audiences in Chapter 1) if possible, or make an educated guess about the audience, since most arguments suggest whom they intend to reach and in what ways.

Both a flyer stapled to a bulletin board in a college dorm (“Why you shouldn’t drink and drive”) and a forty-foot billboard for Bud Light might be aimed at the same general population — college students. But each will adjust its appeals for the different moods of that group in different moments. For starters, the flyer will appeal to students in a serious vein, while the beer ad will probably be visually stunning and virtually text-free.

You might also examine how a writer or an argument establishes

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credibility with an audience. One effective means of building credibility is to show respect for your readers or viewers, especially if they may not agree with you. In introducing an article on problems facing African American women in the workplace, editor-in-chief of Essence Diane Weathers considers the problems that she faced with respecting all her potential readers:

We spent more than a minute agonizing over the provocative cover line for our feature “White Women at Work.” The countless stories we had heard from women across the country told us that this was a workplace issue we had to address. From my own experience at several major magazines, it was painfully obvious to me that Black and White women are not on the same track. Sure, we might all start out in the same place. But early in the game, most sisters I know become stuck — and the reasons have little to do with intelligence or drive. At some point we bump our heads against that ceiling. And while White women may complain of a glass ceiling, for us, the ceiling is concrete.

So how do we tell this story without sounding whiny and paranoid, or turning off our White-female readers, staff members, advertisers and girlfriends? Our solution: Bring together real women (several of them highly successful senior corporate executives), put them in a room, promise them anonymity and let them speak their truth.

— Diane Weathers, “Speaking Our Truth”

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Retailers like Walmart build their credibility by simple “straight talk” to shoppers: we always have low prices. Here the use of red, white, and blue says “we’re all-American,” while the simple layout and direct statement (a promise, really) say they are talking the talk as well as walking the walk.

Both paragraphs affirm Weathers’s determination to treat audiences fairly and to deal honestly with a difficult subject. The strategy would merit attention in any rhetorical analysis.

Look, too, for signals that writers share values with readers or at least understand an audience. In the following passage, writer Jack Solomon is clear about one value that he hopes readers have in common — a preference for “straight talk”:

There are some signs in the advertising world that Americans are getting fed up with fantasy advertisements and want to hear some straight talk. Weary of extravagant product claims . . . , consumers trained by years of advertising to distrust what they hear seem to be developing an immunity to commercials.

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— Jack Solomon, “Masters of Desire: The Culture of American Advertising”

But straight talk still requires common sense. If ever a major television ad seriously misread its audience, it may have been a spot that ran during the 2014 Winter Olympics for Cadillac’s pricey new plug-in hybrid, the ELR. The company seemed to go out of its way to offend a great many people, foreign and domestic. As is typical strategy in rhetorical analyses, Huffington Post’s Carolyn Gregoire takes care to describe in detail the item she finds offensive — a shot of a man overlooking the pool in his backyard and asking why we work so hard, “For this? For stuff?”:

[I]t becomes clear that the answer to this rhetorical question is actually a big fat YES. And it gets worse. “Other countries, they work,” he says. “They stroll home. They stop by the cafe. They take August off. Off.”

Then he reveals just what it is that makes Americans better than all those lazy, espresso-sipping foreigners.

“Why aren’t you like that?” he says. “Why aren’t we like that? Because we’re crazy, driven, hard-working believers, that’s why.”

— Carolyn Gregoire, “Cadillac Made a Commercial about the American Dream, and It’s a Nightmare”

Her conclusion then is blistering, showing how readily a rhetorical

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analysis becomes an argument — and subject to criticism itself:

Cadillacs have long been a quintessentially American symbol of wealth and status. But as this commercial proves, no amount of wealth or status is a guarantee of good taste. Now, the luxury car company is selling a vision of the American Dream at its worst: Work yourself into the ground, take as little time off as possible, and buy expensive sh*t (specifically, a 2014 Cadillac ELR).

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Examining Arguments Based on Emotion: Pathos Some emotional appeals are just ploys to win over readers with a pretty face, figurative or real. You’ve seen ads promising an exciting life and attractive friends if only you drink the right soda or wear a particular brand of clothes. Are you fooled by such claims? Probably not, if you pause to think about them. But that’s the strategy — to distract you from thought just long enough to make a bad choice. It’s a move worth commenting on in a rhetorical analysis.

Yet emotions can add real muscle to arguments, too, and that’s worth noting. For example, persuading people not to drink and drive by making them fear death, injury, or arrest seems like a fair use of an emotional appeal. Public service announcements often use emotion- laden images to remind drivers to think of the consequences.

In analyzing emotional appeals, judge whether the emotions raised — anger, sympathy, fear, envy, joy, love, lust — advance the claims offered. Look, for example, at these photographs of protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the possible removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee.

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This photo shows proud members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, some carrying Confederate flags. What emotions do you think these protesters wanted to appeal to? What emotions does the photo stir in you?

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Or how about this photo, from the same rally, showing counterprotesters: again, what emotions are being appealed to? How effective do you find either of these photos in appealing to your emotions?

The August 2017 rally in Charlottesville stirred emotions across the country, as ordinary people, commentators, and politicians weighed in on issues of white supremacy, neo-Nazism, fascism, race-based hatred, and bigotry. President Trump at first suggested that there was plenty of blame on “all sides,” but later adjusted that statement when many accused him of drawing a false equivalency between those advocating for Nazism and those who were protesting against it.

But arguments that appeal to emotions don’t have to be as highly charged — and dangerous — as the Charlottesville event was. Consider, for example, how columnist Ron Rosenbaum makes the reasonable argument he offers for fatty foods all the more attractive by loading it with emotional language:

The foods that best hit that sweet spot and “overwhelm the brain” with pleasure are high-quality fatty foods. They discourage us from overeating. A modest serving of short ribs or Peking duck will be both deeply pleasurable and self- limiting. As the brain swoons into insensate delight, you won’t have to gorge a still-craving cortex with mediocre sensations. “Sensory-specific satiety” makes a slam-dunk case (it’s science!) for eating reasonable servings of superbly satisfying fatty foods.

— Ron Rosenbaum, “Let Them Eat Fat”

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Does the use of evocative language (“swoons,” “insensate delight,” “superbly satisfying,” “slam-dunk”) convince you, or does it distract from considering the scientific case for “sensory-specific satiety”? Your task in a rhetorical analysis is to study an author’s words, the emotions they evoke, and the claims they support and then to make this kind of judgment.

Short ribs: health food? Who does this photo appeal to — and who might it turn off?

RESPOND● Browse YouTube or another Web site to find an example of a

powerful emotional argument that’s made visually, either alone or

using words as well. In a paragraph, defend a claim about how the

argument works. For example, does an image itself make a claim, or

does it draw you in to consider a verbal claim? What emotion does

the argument generate? How does that emotion work to persuade

you?

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Examining Arguments Based on Character: Ethos It should come as no surprise: readers believe writers who seem honest, wise, and trustworthy. So in analyzing the effectiveness of an argument, look for evidence of these traits. Does the writer have the experience or authority to write on this subject? Are all claims qualified reasonably? Is evidence presented in full, not tailored to the writer’s agenda? Are important objections to the author’s position acknowledged and addressed? Are sources documented? Above all, does the writer sound trustworthy?

When a Norwegian anti-immigration extremist killed seventy-six innocent people in July 2011, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg addressed the citizens of Norway (and the world), and in doing so evoked the character or ethos of the entire nation:

We will not let fear break us! The warmth of response from people in Norway and from the whole world makes me sure of this one thing: evil can kill a single person, but never defeat a whole people. The strongest weapon in the world — that is freedom of expression and democracy.

In analyzing this speech, you would do well to look at the way this passage deploys the deepest values of Norway — freedom of expression and democracy — to serve as a response to fear of terrorism. In doing so, Stoltenberg evokes ethical ideals to hold onto in a time of tragedy.

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Or take a look at the following paragraph from a blog posting by Timothy Burke, a teacher at Swarthmore College and parent of a preschool child who is trying to think through the issue of homework for elementary school kids:

In considering the role of ethos in rhetorical analyses, pay attention to the details right down to the choice of words or, in an image, the shapes and colors. The modest, tentative tone that Burke uses in his

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blog is an example of the kind of choice that can shape an audience’s perception of ethos. But these details need your interpretation. Language that’s hot and extreme can mark a writer as either passionate or loony. Work that’s sober and carefully organized can paint an institution as competent or overly cautious. Technical terms and abstract phrases can make a writer seem either knowledgeable or pompous.

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Examining Arguments Based on Facts and Reason: Logos In analyzing most arguments, you’ll have to decide whether an argument makes a plausible claim and offers good reasons for you to believe it. Not all arguments will package such claims in a single neat sentence, or thesis — nor should they. A writer may tell a story from which you have to infer the claim. Visual arguments may work the same way: viewers have to assemble the parts and draw inferences in order to get the point. Take a look, for instance, at this advertisement for GEICO insurance:

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This ad draws attention with a snappy photo of a large silver watch and a headline: “That watch won’t pay for itself.” The smaller text below mentions other luxury items consumers may covet: designer aviators, for example, that don’t “come cheap.” Then the logical shift: if you want luxury things you would do well to save money. And how to save money? “So switch to GEICO and save money for the things you love.” There’s an implied syllogism here:

You need to save money so you can afford the things you love.

GEICO will help you save money.

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GEICO will help you afford the things you love.

But a little critical thinking can lead you to question each of these implied premises. Is the reason to save money really to buy luxury items? Just exactly how will GEICO help you save money? How much is your current insurance and how does that compare to the cost of GEICO? Maybe GEICO does offer a very good deal on insurance, but you’ll need to do some more research to assure yourself of that fact. (For more on analyzing visual images, see Chapter 14.)

Some print arguments (like those on an editorial page) may be perfectly obvious: writers stake out a claim and then present reasons that you should consider, or they may first present reasons and lay out a case that leads you to accept a claim in the conclusion. Consider the following example. In a tough opinion piece in Time, political commentator John McWhorter argues that filmmaker Spike Lee is being racist when he rails against hipsters moving into Fort Greene, a formerly all-black neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. Lee fears that the whites are raising housing prices, pushing out old-time residents and diminishing the African American character of Fort Greene. McWhorter, an African American like Lee, sees matters differently:

Basically, black people are getting paid more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives for their houses, and a once sketchy neighborhood is now quiet and pleasant. And this is a bad thing . . . why?

Lee seems to think it’s somehow an injustice whenever black

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See another argument on race by John McWhorter, this time on what it means when we say someone “sounds black” or “sounds white.”

LINK TO McWhorter, “Thick of Tongue,” in Chapter 25

people pick up stakes. But I doubt many of the blacks now set to pass fat inheritances on to their kids feel that way. This is not the old story of poor blacks being pushed out of neighborhoods razed down for highway construction. Lee isn’t making sense.

— John McWhorter, “Spike Lee’s Racism Isn’t Cute”

When you encounter explicit charges like these, you analyze whether and how the claims are supported by good reasons and reliable evidence. A lengthy essay may, in fact, contain a series of claims, each developed to support an even larger point. Here’s McWhorter, for instance, expanding his argument by suggesting that Lee’s attitudes toward whites are irreconcilable.

“Respect the culture” when you move in, Lee growls. But again, he isn’t making sense. We can be quite sure that if whites “respected” the culture by trying to participate in it, Lee would be one of the first in line to call it “appropriation.” So, no whites better open up barbecue joints or spoken word cafes or try to be rappers. Yet if whites walk on by the culture in “respectful” silence, then the word on the street becomes

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that they want to keep blacks at a distance.

An anti-fur protestor in London makes a rather specific claim.

Indeed, every paragraph in an argument may develop a specific and related idea. In a rhetorical analysis, you need to identify all these separate propositions and examine the relationships among them: Are they solidly linked? Are there inconsistencies that the writer should acknowledge? Does the end of the piece support what the writer said (and promised) at the beginning?

You’ll also need to examine the quality of the information presented in an argument, assessing how accurately such information is reported, how conveniently it’s displayed (in charts or graphs, for example), and

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Historian Catherine Nolan-Ferrell asks us to confront the value of logos when she asks, “How do we navigate a world where many in society have lost trust in shared data?”

LINK TO Nolan-Ferrell, “Balancing Classroom Civility and Free Speech,” in Chapter 27

how well the sources cited represent a range of respected opinions on a topic. (For more information on the use of evidence, see Chapter 4.)

Knowing how to judge the quality of sources is more important now than ever before because the digital universe is full of junk. In some ways, the computer terminal has become the equivalent of a library reference room, but the sources available online vary widely in quality and have not been evaluated by a library professional. As a consequence, you must know the difference between reliable, firsthand, or fully documented sources and those that don’t meet such standards. (For using and documenting sources, see Chapters 19, 20, and 22.)

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Examining the Arrangement and Media of Arguments Aristotle carved the structure of logical argument to its bare bones when he observed that it had only two parts:

statement proof

You could do worse, in examining an argument, than to make sure that every claim a writer makes is backed by sufficient evidence. Some arguments are written on the fly in the heat of the moment. Most arguments that you read and write, however, will be more than mere statements followed by proofs. Some writers will lay their cards on the table immediately; others may lead you carefully through a chain of claims toward a conclusion. Writers may even interrupt their arguments to offer background information or cultural contexts for readers. Sometimes they’ll tell stories or provide anecdotes that make an argumentative point. They’ll qualify the arguments they make, too, and often pause to admit that other points of view are plausible.

In other words, there are no set formulas or acceptable patterns that fit all successful arguments. In writing a rhetorical analysis, you’ll have to assess the organization of a persuasive text on its own merits.

It’s fair, however, to complain about what may be absent from an

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argument. Most arguments of proposal (see Chapter 12), for example, include a section that defends the feasibility of a new idea, explaining how it might be funded or managed. In a rhetorical analysis, you might fault an editorial that supports a new stadium for a city without addressing feasibility issues. Similarly, analyzing a movie review that reads like an off-the-top-of-the-head opinion, you might legitimately ask what criteria of evaluation are in play (see Chapter 10).

Rhetorical analysis also calls for you to look carefully at an argument’s transitions, headings and subheadings, documentation of sources, and overall tone or voice. Don’t take such details for granted, since all of them contribute to the strength — or weakness — of an argument.

Nor should you ignore the way a writer or an institution uses media. Would an argument originally made in a print editorial, for instance, work better as a digital presentation (or vice versa)? Would a lengthy essay have more power if it included more illustrations — graphs, maps, photographs, and so on? Or do these images distract from a written argument’s substance?

Finally, be open to the possibility of new or nontraditional structures of arguments. The visual arguments that you analyze may defy conventional principles of logic or arrangement — for example, making juxtapositions rather than logical transitions between elements or using quick cuts, fades, or other devices to link ideas. Quite often, these nontraditional structures will also resist the neatness of a thesis, leaving readers to construct at least a part of the argument in their heads. As we saw with the “Portraits” Jeep spot at the beginning of this

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chapter, advertisers are growing fond of soft-sell multimedia productions that can seem like something other than what they really are — product pitches. We may be asked not just to buy a product but also to live its lifestyle or embrace its ethos. Is that a reasonable or workable strategy for an argument? Your analysis might entertain such possibilities.

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Looking at Style Even a coherent argument full of sound evidence may not connect with readers if it’s dull, off-key, or offensive. Readers naturally judge the credibility of arguments in part by how stylishly the case is made — even when they don’t know exactly what style is (for more on style, see Chapter 13). In fact, today rhetoricians and media critics alike point out the crucial importance of style in getting and holding attention in a time when readers are drowning in an overload of information.

Consider how these simple, blunt sentences from the opening of an argument for gun control shape your image of the author and probably determine whether you’re willing to continue to read the whole piece:

Six minutes and about twenty seconds. In a little over six minutes, seventeen of our friends were taken from us. Fifteen were injured, and everyone — absolutely everyone — in [our] community was forever altered. Everyone who was there understands. Everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands.

— Emma Gonzalez, speech delivered at March for Our Lives on March 24, 2018

The strong, straightforward tone, the drum-beat use of repetition, and the stark evocation of just how little time it took to take the lives of seventeen high school students and staff set the style for this speech, which led to six minutes of silence and then to prolonged, and loud, applause and cheers.

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Now consider the brutally sarcastic tone of Nathaniel Stein’s hilarious parody of the Harvard grading policy, a piece he wrote following up on a professor’s complaint of out-of-control grade inflation at the school. Stein borrows the formal language of a typical “grading standards” sheet to mock the decline in rigor that the professor has lamented:

The A+ grade is used only in very rare instances for the recognition of truly exceptional achievement.

For example: A term paper receiving the A+ is virtually indistinguishable from the work of a professional, both in its choice of paper stock and its font. The student’s command of the topic is expert, or at the very least intermediate, or beginner. Nearly every single word in the paper is spelled correctly; those that are not can be reasoned out phonetically within minutes. Content from Wikipedia is integrated with precision. The paper contains few, if any, death threats. . . .

An overall course grade of A+ is reserved for those students who have not only demonstrated outstanding achievement in coursework but have also asked very nicely.

Finally, the A+ grade is awarded to all collages, dioramas and other art projects.

— Nathaniel Stein, “Leaked! Harvard’s Grading Rubric”

Both styles probably work, but they signal that the writers are about to make very different kinds of cases. Here, style alone tells readers what

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to expect.

Manipulating style also enables writers to shape readers’ responses to their ideas. Devices as simple as repetition, parallelism, or even paragraph length can give sentences remarkable power. Consider this brief announcement by Jason Collins, who played for the Washington Wizards:

I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.

I didn’t set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I’m happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn’t the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, “I’m different.” If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I’m raising my hand.

— Jason Collins, Sports Illustrated, May 6, 2013

In this passage, Collins opens with three very short, very direct, and roughly parallel sentences. He also uses repetition of first-person pronouns to hammer home that he is claiming his own identity with this statement. Doing so invites readers and listeners to listen to his experience and to walk in his shoes, even for a brief time.

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Jason Collins

In a rhetorical analysis, you can explore such stylistic choices. Why does a formal style work for discussing one type of subject matter but not another? How does a writer use humor or irony to underscore an important point or to manage a difficult concession? Do stylistic choices, even something as simple as the use of contractions or personal pronouns, bring readers close to a writer, or do technical words and an impersonal voice signal that an argument is for experts only?

To describe the stylistic effects of visual arguments, you may use a different vocabulary and talk about colors, camera angles, editing, balance, proportion, fonts, perspective, and so on. But the basic principle is this: the look of an item — whether a poster, an editorial cartoon, or a film documentary — can support the message that it

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carries, undermine it, or muddle it. In some cases, the look will be the message. In a rhetorical analysis, you can’t ignore style.

Here’s an award-winning poster for Beauty and the Beast, praised by critics for its stylistic elegance. As a commentator for DigitalSpy put it, “So chic. So stylish. So yellow.”

A rhetorical analysis would note that the bright yellow dress and title evoke the sun as the image of Beauty dominates the middle of the image, while the beast’s profile is superimposed on a full moon. Here the simplicity, vivid color, and careful juxtaposition suggest that these two are made for each other. (For more on analyzing visual images, see Chapter 14.)

RESPOND● Find a recent example of a visual argument, either in print or on the

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Internet. Even though you may have a copy of the image, describe it

carefully in your paper on the assumption that your description is all

readers may have to go on. Then make a judgment about its

effectiveness, supporting your claim with clear evidence from the

“text.”

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Examining a Rhetorical Analysis On the following pages, well-known New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reports on his family’s annual vacation, when they “run away to the mountains.” He argues that we are plagued by “nature deficit disorder,” that we have lost our connection with the wilderness, with the land that supports us, and that we must do our best to preserve and protect the “natural splendor that no billionaire is allowed to fence off.” Responding to Kristof’s argument with a careful critical reading and detailed rhetorical analysis is Cameron Hauer, a student at Portland State University.

Fleeing to the Mountains

NICHOLAS KRISTOF

ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL, NORTHWEST OF TRUCKEE, Calif. —

This will make me sound grouchy and misanthropic, but I sometimes wonder if what makes America great isn’t so much its people as its trees and mountains.

In contrast to many advanced countries, we have a vast and spectacular publicly owned wilderness, mostly free and available to all. In an age of inequality, the affluent have gated neighborhoods, private schools, backup generators and greater influence on elected officials. But our most awe-inspiring wild places have remained largely

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a public good to be shared by all, a bastion of equality.

My family and I have been backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail through the Sierras north of Donner Pass, enjoying magnificent splendor that no billionaire is allowed to fence off. We all have equal access, at no charge: If you can hold your own against mosquitoes and bears, the spot is yours for the night.

Yet these public lands are at risk today. More on that in a moment, but first let me tell you about the Kristofs’ grand vacation. As we do each summer, we ran away from home to the mountains. We escaped the tether of email and cellphones, the tyranny of the inbox, and fled with everything we needed on our backs.

We’re yanked back to a simple life. We sleep under the stars rather than in a tent; if it rains we pull out a tarp to keep dry. Dawn wakes us up, we roll up our sleeping bags and plastic ground sheet, wolf down trail mix or granola bars and start down the path. We fill our water bottles at passing streams, stop for rest and meals wherever we fancy, chat as we walk, and when dusk comes we look for a flat spot, kick aside any rocks and branches and unroll our ground sheet and sleeping bags again.

Granted, we also moan about blisters. And marauding mosquitoes. And the heat — or, sometimes, the cold. We whine a lot, but that builds family solidarity.

This is also a spiritual experience: It’s a chance to share a reverence for the ethereal scenery of America’s wild places. The wilderness is

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nature’s cathedral, and it’s a thrill to worship here.

The march of civilization has been about distancing ourselves from the raw power of nature. At home, we move the thermostat up or down by a degree, and we absorb the idea that we are lords of the universe. On the trail, we are either sweating or freezing, and it always feels as if the path is mainly uphill. Nature mocks us, usefully reminding us who’s boss.

If your kids are suffering from what the writer Richard Louv calls nature-deficit disorder, I recommend that you all run away from home together. Flee to the mountains. It’s heaven with blisters.

There are often charges to enter much-trafficked spots like Yellowstone or Yosemite, but the wilderness is mostly free to hikers.

This is our collective patrimony, a tribute to the wisdom of Theodore

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Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and other visionaries who preserved our wild places for the future. Thank God for them. Otherwise, these lands might have been carved up and sold off as ranches for the rich.

Because of the foresight of past generations, the federal government owns one million square miles, an area three times the size of California, Oregon and Washington combined. Much of this is unspoiled, our inheritance and our shared playground.

Yet today, President Trump sees this heritage as an opportunity for development. More aggressively than past administrations, Trump’s is systematically handing over America’s public lands for private exploitation in ways that will scar the land forever.

The Trump administration lifted a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public land, it is drawing up plans to reduce wilderness protected as national monuments and it is rapidly opening up additional public lands to coal mining and oil and gas drilling.

A second challenge comes from our paralysis in the face of climate change, compounded by the Trump administration, and the risks this creates to our wilderness. A warmer climate has led to droughts and to the 20-year spread of the mountain pine beetle, and a result is the death of vast swaths of Western forests. Last year, 62 million trees died in California alone, the Forest Service says, and in Oregon and Washington I’ve watched forests turn brown and sickly. In parts of Wyoming and Colorado, the pine beetle has killed almost all the mature lodgepole pine trees, and it’s arguably even worse in British Columbia.

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The third risk is from gradual degradation and chronic underfunding. Even before Trump took office, wilderness trails and campgrounds were in embarrassing disrepair. How is it that we could afford to construct these trails 80 years ago in the Great Depression but cannot manage even to maintain them today?

When public lands are lost — or mined in ways that scar the landscape — something has been lost forever on our watch. A public good has been privatized, and our descendants have been robbed.

To promote an understanding of what is being lost, I encourage everyone to run away from home as well. Flee to the mountains, deserts and babbling brooks to get in touch with wild spaces, to find perspective and humility. The wilderness nourishes our souls, if we let it.

Appeal, Audience, and Narrative in Kristof’s Wilderness

CAMERON HAUER

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Cameron Hauer is a student at Portland State University, where he is majoring in Applied Linguistics, having returned to school after a decade spent cooking in fine dining establishments in the Pacific Northwest.

GUIDE to writing a rhetorical analysis

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Finding a Topic

A rhetorical analysis is usually assigned: you’re asked to show how an argument works and to assess its effectiveness. When you can choose your own subject for analysis, look for one or more of the following qualities:

a complex verbal or visual argument that challenges you — or disturbs or pleases you a text that raises current or enduring issues of substance a text that you believe should be taken more seriously

Look for arguments to analyze in the editorial and op-ed pages of any newspaper, political magazines such as the Nation or National Review, Web sites of organizations and interest groups, political blogs such as Huffington Post or Power Line, corporate Web sites that post their TV ad spots, videos and statements posted to YouTube, and so on.

Researching Your Topic

Once you’ve got a text to analyze, find out all you can about it. Use library or Web resources to explore:

who the author is and what his or her credentials are if the author is an institution, what it does, what its sources of funding are, who its members are, and so on who is publishing or sponsoring the piece and what the organization typically publishes what the leanings or biases of the author and publisher might be, where they are coming from in the argument, and what influences may have led them to make the argument what the context of the argument is — what preceded or provoked it and how others have responded to it

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Formulating a Claim

Begin with a hypothesis. A full thesis might not become evident until you’re well into your analysis, but your final thesis should reflect the complexity of the piece that you’re studying. In developing a thesis, consider questions such as the following:

What is the major claim of the argument? What evidence is presented in support of it? How can I describe what this argument achieves? What is the purpose, and is it accomplished? What audiences does the argument address and what audiences does it ignore, and why? Which rhetorical appeals does the argument make use of and which will likely influence readers most: ethos of the author? emotional appeals? logical progression? style, use of images or other illustrations? What aspects of the argument work better than others? How do the rhetorical elements of ethos, pathos, and logos interact?

Here’s the hardest part for most writers of rhetorical analyses: whether you agree or disagree with an argument should not keep you from careful, meticulous analysis: you need to stay out of the fray and pay attention only to how — and to how well — the argument works.

Examples of Possible Claims for a Rhetorical Analysis

Some people admire the directness and plain talking of Donald Trump; others are put off by his lack of information, his tendency to stretch or ignore the truth, and his noisy bluster. A close look at several of his tweets and public appearances will illuminate both sides of this debate.

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Today’s editorial in the Daily Collegian about campus crimes may scare first-year students, but its anecdotal reporting doesn’t get down to hard numbers — and for a good reason. Those statistics don’t back the position taken by the editors. The imageboard 4chan has been called an “Internet hate machine,” yet others claim it as a great boon to creativity. A close analysis of its home-page can help to settle this debate. The original design of New York’s Freedom Tower, with its torqued surfaces and evocative spire, made a stronger argument about American values than its replacement, a fortress-like skyscraper stripped of imagination and unable to make any statement except “I’m 1,776 feet tall.” The controversy over speech on campuses has reached a fever pitch, with some arguing that those who spout hate and bigotry and prejudice should be barred from speaking.

Preparing a Proposal

If your instructor asks you to prepare a proposal for your rhetorical analysis, here’s a format you might use:

Provide a copy of the work you’re analyzing, whether it’s a print text, a photograph, a digital image, or a URL, for instance. Offer a working hypothesis or tentative thesis. Indicate which rhetorical components seem especially compelling and worthy of detailed study and any connections between elements. For example, does the piece seem to emphasize facts and logic so much that it becomes disconnected from potential audiences? If so, hint at that possibility in your proposal. Indicate background information you intend to research about the author, institution, and contexts (political, economic, social, and religious) of the argument. Define the audience you’d like to reach. If you’re responding to an

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assignment, you may be writing primarily for a teacher and classmates. But they make up a complex audience in themselves. If you can do so within the spirit of the assignment, imagine that your analysis will be published in a local newspaper, Web site, or blog. Conclude by briefly discussing the key challenges you anticipate in preparing a rhetorical analysis.

Considering Genre and Media

Your instructor may specify that you use a particular genre and/or medium. If not, ask yourself these questions to help you make a good choice:

What genre is most appropriate for your rhetorical analysis? Does it call for an academic essay, a report, an infographic, a poster, brochure, or something else? What medium is most appropriate for your analysis? Would it be best delivered orally to a live audience? Presented as an audio essay or podcast? Presented in print only or in print with illustrations? Will you need visuals, such as moving or still images, maps, graphs, charts — and what function will they play in your analysis? Make sure they are not just “added on” but are necessary components of the analysis.

Thinking about Organization

Your rhetorical analysis is likely to include the following:

Facts about the text you’re analyzing: provide the author’s name; the title or name of the work; its place of publication or its

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location; the date it was published or viewed. Evidence that you have read the argument carefully and critically, that you have listened closely to and understand the points it is making, and that you have been open and fair in your assessment. Contexts for the argument: readers need to know where the text is coming from, to what it may be responding, in what controversies it might be embroiled, and so on. Don’t assume that they can infer the important contextual elements. A synopsis of the text that you’re analyzing: if you can’t attach the original argument, you must summarize it in enough detail so that a reader can imagine it. Even if you attach a copy of the piece, the analysis should include a summary. Some claim about the work’s rhetorical effectiveness: it might be a simple evaluative claim or something more complex. The claim can come early in the paper, or you might build up to it, providing the evidence that leads toward the conclusion you’ve reached. A detailed analysis of how the argument works: although you’ll probably analyze rhetorical components separately, don’t let your analysis become a dull roster of emotional, ethical, and logical appeals. Your rhetorical analysis should be an argument itself that supports a claim; a simple list of rhetorical appeals won’t make much of a point. Evidence for every point made in your analysis. An assessment of alternative views and counterarguments to your own analysis.

Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Response

If you have access to a writing center, discuss the text that you intend to analyze with a writing consultant before you write the analysis. Try to find people who agree with the argument and others who disagree, and take notes on their observations. Your instructor may assign you to

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a peer group for the purpose of reading and responding to one another’s drafts; if not, share your draft with someone on your own. You can use the following questions to evaluate a draft. If you’re evaluating someone else’s draft, be sure to illustrate your points with examples. Specific comments are always more helpful than general observations.

The Claim

Does the claim address the rhetorical effectiveness of the argument itself rather than the opinion or position that it takes? Is the claim significant enough to interest readers? Does the claim indicate important relationships between various rhetorical components? Would the claim be one that the creator of the piece would regard as serious criticism?

Evidence for the Claim

Is enough evidence given to support all your claims? What evidence do you still need? Is the evidence in support of the claim simply announced, or are its significance and appropriateness analyzed? Is a more detailed discussion needed? Do you use appropriate evidence, drawn from the argument itself or from other materials? Do you address objections readers might have to the claim, criteria, or evidence? What kinds of sources might you use to explain the context of the argument? Do you need to use sources to check factual claims made in the argument? Are all quotations introduced with appropriate signal phrases (for

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instance, “As Áida Álvarez points out”), and do they merge smoothly into your sentences?

Organization and Style

How are the parts of the argument organized? How effective is this organization? Would some other structure work better? Will readers understand the relationships among the original text, your claims, your supporting reasons, and the evidence you’ve gathered (from the original text and any other sources you’ve used)? If not, what could be done to make those connections clearer? Are more transitional words and phrases needed? Would headings or graphic devices help? Are the transitions or links from point to point, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph clear and effective? If not, how could they be improved? Is the style suited to the subject and appropriate to your audience? Is it too formal? Too casual? Too technical? Too bland or boring? Which sentences seem particularly effective? Which ones seem weakest, and how could they be improved? Should some short sentences be combined, or should any long ones be separated into two or more sentences? How effective are the paragraphs? Do any seem too skimpy or too long? Do they break the analysis at strategic points? Which words or phrases seem particularly effective, accurate, and powerful? Do any seem dull, vague, unclear, or inappropriate for the audience or your purpose? Are definitions provided for technical or other terms that readers might not know?

Spelling, Punctuation, Mechanics, Documentation, and Format

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Check the spelling of the author’s name, and make sure that the name of any institution involved with the work is correct. Note that the names of many corporations and institutions use distinctive spelling and punctuation. Check the title of the text you’re analyzing so you’re sure to get it right. Look for any errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like. Check the format of your assignment and make sure it matches instructions given on your original assignment.

RESPOND●

Find an argument on the editorial page or op-ed page in a recent

newspaper. Read it carefully and critically, taking time to make sure

you understand the claims it is making and the evidence that backs

up the claim. Then analyze it rhetorically, using principles discussed

in this chapter. Show how it succeeds, fails, or does something else

entirely. Perhaps you can show that the author is unusually

successful in connecting with readers but then has nothing to say.

Or perhaps you discover that the strong logical appeal is undercut

by a contradictory emotional argument. Be sure that the analysis

includes a summary of the original essay and basic publication

information about it (its author, place of publication, and

publisher).

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PART 2 WRITING arguments

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CHAPTER 7 Structuring Arguments

These two sets of statements illustrate the most basic ways in which Western culture structures logical arguments. The first piles up specific examples and draws a conclusion from them: that’s inductive reasoning and structure. The second sets out a general principle (the major premise of a syllogism) and applies it to a specific case (the minor premise) in order to reach a conclusion: that’s deductive reasoning and structure. In everyday reasoning, we often omit the middle statement, resulting in what Aristotle called an enthymeme: “Since dairy products make me sick, I better leave that ice cream alone.” (See Using Reason and Common Sense in Chapter 4 for more on enthymemes.)

But the arguments you will write in college call for more than just the careful critical thinking offered within inductive and deductive reasoning. You will also need to make claims, explain the contexts in which you are offering them, defend the assumptions on which they are based, offer convincing evidence, appeal to specific audiences, consider counterarguments fairly and carefully, and more. And you will have to do so using a coherent structure that moves your argument

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forward. This chapter introduces you to three helpful ways to structure arguments. Feel free to borrow from all of them!

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The Classical Oration The authors of this book once examined a series of engineering reports and found that — to their great surprise — these reports were generally structured in ways similar to those used by Greek and Roman rhetors two thousand years ago. Thus, this ancient structuring system is alive and well in twenty-first-century culture. The classical oration has six parts, most of which will be familiar to you, despite their Latin names:

Exordium: You try to win the attention and goodwill of an audience while introducing a topic or problem.

Narratio: You present the facts of the case, explaining what happened when, who is involved, and so on. The narratio puts an argument in context.

Partitio: You divide up the topic, explaining what the claim is, what the key issues are, and in what order they will be treated.

Confirmatio: You offer detailed support for the claim, using both logical reasoning and factual evidence.

Refutatio: You carefully consider and respond to opposing claims or evidence.

Peroratio: You summarize the case and move the audience to action.

This structure is powerful because it covers all the bases: readers or

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listeners want to know what your topic is, how you intend to cover it, and what evidence you have to offer. And you probably need a reminder to present a pleasing ethos when beginning a presentation and to conclude with enough pathos to win an audience over completely. Here, in outline form, is a five-part updated version of the classical pattern, which you may find useful on many occasions:

Introduction

gains readers’ interest and willingness to listen indicates your qualifications to write about your topic establishes some common ground with your audience demonstrates that you’re fair and even-handed states your claim

Background

presents information, including personal stories or anecdotes relevant to your argument

Lines of Argument

present good reasons, including logical and emotional appeals, in support of your claim

Alternative Arguments

carefully consider different points of view and opposing arguments note the advantages and disadvantages of these views explain why your view is preferable to others

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Conclusion

summarizes the argument elaborates on the implications of your claim makes clear what you want the audience to think or do reinforces your credibility and perhaps offers an emotional appeal

Not every piece of rhetoric, past or present, follows the structure of the oration or includes all its components. But you can identify some of its elements in successful arguments if you pay attention to their design. Here are the words of the 1776 Declaration of Independence:

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The authors might have structured this argument by beginning with the

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last two sentences of the excerpt and then listing the facts intended to prove the king’s abuse and tyranny. But by choosing first to explain the purpose and “self-evident” assumptions behind their argument and only then moving on to demonstrate how these “truths” have been denied by the British, the authors forge an immediate connection with readers and build up to the memorable conclusion. The structure is both familiar and inventive — as your own use of key elements of the oration should be in the arguments you compose.

Notice that John Hancock’s defiant signature on the Declaration of Independence is still readable in this much reduced image of the original document.

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Rogerian and Invitational Arguments In trying to find an alternative to confrontational and angry arguments like those that so often erupt in legislative bodies around the world, scholars and teachers of rhetoric have adapted the nonconfrontational principles employed by psychologist Carl Rogers in personal therapy sessions. In simple terms, Rogers argued that people involved in disputes should not respond to each other until they could fully, fairly, and even sympathetically state the other person’s position. Scholars of rhetoric Richard E. Young, Alton L. Becker, and Kenneth L. Pike developed a four-part structure that is now known as Rogerian argument:

1. Introduction: You describe an issue, a problem, or a conflict in terms rich enough to show that you fully understand and respect any alternative position or positions.

2. Contexts: You describe the contexts in which alternative positions may be valid.

3. Writer’s position: You state your position on the issue and present the circumstances in which that opinion would be valid.

4. Benefits to opponent: You explain to opponents how they would benefit from adopting your position.

The key to Rogerian argumentation is a willingness to think about opposing positions and to describe them fairly. In a Rogerian structure, you have to acknowledge that alternatives to your claims exist and that they might be reasonable under certain circumstances. In tone,

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Rogerian arguments steer clear of heated and stereotypical language, emphasizing instead how all parties in a dispute might gain from working together.

In the same vein, feminist scholars Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin have outlined a form of argument they label “invitational,” one that begins with careful attention to and respect for the person or the audience you are in conversation with. Foss and Griffin show that such listening — in effect, walking in the other person’s shoes — helps you see that person’s points of view more clearly and thoroughly and thus offers a basis for moving together toward new understandings. The kind of argument they describe is what rhetorician Krista Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening,” as we saw in Chapter 1 — listening that helps to establish productive connections between people and thus helps enable effective cross-cultural communications.

Invitational rhetoric has as its goal not winning over opponents but getting people and groups to work together and identify with each other; it strives for connection, collaboration, and the mutually informed creation of knowledge. As feminist scholar Sally Miller Gearhart puts it, invitational argument offers a way to disagree without hurting one another, to disagree with respect. This kind of argument is especially important in a society that increasingly depends on successful collaboration to get things done. In college, you may have opportunities to practice invitational rhetoric in peer-review sessions, when each member of a group listens carefully in order to work through problems and issues. You may also practice invitational rhetoric looking at any contested issue from other people’s points of

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view, taking them into account, and engaging them fairly and respectfully in your own argument. Students we know who are working in high-tech industries also tell us how much such arguments are valued, since they fuel innovation and “out of the box” thinking.

Invitational arguments, then, call up structures that more resemble good two-way conversations or free-ranging dialogues than straight- line marches from thesis to conclusion. Even conventional arguments benefit from invitational strategies by giving space early on to a full range of perspectives, making sure to present them thoroughly and clearly. Remember that in such arguments your goal is enhanced understanding so that you can open up a space for new perceptions and fresh ideas.

Consider how Frederick Douglass tried to broaden the outlook of his audiences when he delivered a Fourth of July oration in 1852. Most nineteenth-century Fourth of July speeches followed a pattern of praising the Revolutionary War heroes and emphasizing freedom, democracy, and justice. Douglass, a former slave, had that tradition in mind as he delivered his address, acknowledging the “great principles” that the “glorious anniversary” celebrates. But he also asked his (white) listeners to see the occasion from another point of view:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I,

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Frederick Douglass

therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? . . . I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by

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your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

— Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

Although his speech is in some ways confrontational, Douglass is also inviting his audience to see a version of reality that they could have discovered on their own had they dared to imagine the lives of African Americans living in the shadows of American liberty. Issuing that invitation, and highlighting its consequences, points a way forward in the conflict between slavery and freedom, black and white, oppression and justice, although response to Douglass’s invitation was a long time in coming.

More recently, in the aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election, pundits on the political left reconsidered strategies that may have distanced many working-class voters from any appeal Hillary Clinton might have made. Kevin Drum in Mother Jones offers what amounts to a Rogerian analysis of how liberal Democrats (like himself) might recapture middle-American voters who swung to Trump by accepting, not denigrating, their political values, such as being pro-life or owning a gun for self- defense:

In the same way that right-wing Republicans need to learn how to talk about women’s issues, Democrats need to learn

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how to talk about middle America. No more deplorables. No more clinging to guns and religion. Less swarming over every tin-eared comment on race.

—Kevin Drum, “Less Liberal Contempt, Please,” May 31, 2017

In finding validity in views held by some of middle America’s working-class voters, Drum urges his fellow liberals to take the high road of respect and learn to talk with those with whom they might share common interests.

The use of invitational argument like this in contemporary political life may seem rare, but in spite of much evidence to the contrary (think of brutal clashes on Twitter and cable news shows), the public claims to prefer nonpartisan and invitational rhetoric to one-on-one, winner-take- all battles. The lesson to take from Rogerian or invitational argument may be that it makes good sense to learn opposing positions well enough to state them accurately and honestly, to strive to understand the points of view of your opponents, to acknowledge those views fairly in your own work, and to look for solutions that benefit as many people as possible.

RESPOND● Dividing into groups, choose a controversial topic that is frequently

in the news, and decide how you might structure an argument on

the subject, using the general principles of the classical oration.

Then look at the same subject from a Rogerian or invitational

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perspective. How might your argument differ? Which approach

would work better for your topic? For the audiences you might want

to address?

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Toulmin Argument In The Uses of Argument (1958), British philosopher Stephen Toulmin presented structures to describe the way that ordinary people make reasonable arguments. Because Toulmin’s system acknowledges the complications of life — situations when we qualify our thoughts with words such as sometimes, often, presumably, unless, and almost — his method isn’t as airtight as formal logic that uses syllogisms (see introduction to Chapter 7 and Using Reason and Common Sense in Chapter 4). But for that reason, Toulmin logic has become a powerful and, for the most part, practical tool for understanding and shaping arguments in the real world.

Toulmin argument will help you come up with and test ideas and also figure out what goes where in many kinds of arguments. Let’s take a look at the basic elements of Toulmin’s structure:

Claim the argument you wish to prove

Qualifiers any limits you place on your claim

Reason(s)/Evidence support for your claim

Warrants underlying assumptions that support your claim

Backing evidence for warrant

If you wanted to state the relationship among them in a sentence, you might say:

My claim is true, to a qualified degree, because of the following reasons, which make sense if you consider the

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warrant, backed by these additional reasons.

These terms — claim, evidence, warrants, backing, and qualifiers — are the building blocks of the Toulmin argument structure. Let’s take them one at a time.

Making Claims Toulmin arguments begin with claims, debatable and controversial statements or assertions you hope to prove.

A claim answers the question So what’s your point? or Where do you stand on that? Some writers might like to ignore these questions and avoid stating a position. But when you make a claim worth writing about, then it’s worth standing up and owning it.

Is there a danger that you might oversimplify an issue by making too bold a claim? Of course. But making that sweeping claim is a logical first step toward eventually saying something more reasonable and subtle. Here are some fairly simple, undeveloped claims:

Congress should enact legislation that establishes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

It’s time to treat the opioid addiction in the United States as a medical crisis.

NASA should affirm its commitment to a human expedition to Mars.

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Veganism is the most responsible choice of diet.

Military insurance should not cover the cost of sex reassignment surgery for service men and women.

Good claims often spring from personal experiences. You may have relevant work or military or athletic experience — or you may know a lot about music, film, sustainable agriculture, social networking, inequities in government services — all fertile ground for authoritative, debatable, and personally relevant claims.

RESPOND●

Claims aren’t always easy to find. Sometimes they’re buried deep

within an argument, and sometimes they’re not present at all. An

important skill in reading and writing arguments is the ability to

identify claims, even when they aren’t obvious.

In class and working in a group, collect a sample of four to six brief

argumentative postings from political blogs or editorial postings

(from news sites). Read each item, and then try to identify every

claim that the writer makes. When you’ve compiled a list of claims,

look carefully at the words that the writer or writers use when

stating their positions. Is there a common vocabulary? Can you find

terms or phrases that signal an impending claim? Which of these

seem most effective? Which ones seem least effective? Why?

Offering Evidence and Good

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Academic arguments such as “Playing with Prejudice: The Prevalence and Consequences of Racial Stereotypes in Video Games” by Melinda C. R. Burgess et al. often closely follow the Toulmin structure, making sure that all their claims are well supported.

LINK TO Burgess et al., “Playing with Prejudice,” in Chapter 23

Reasons You can begin developing a claim by drawing up a list of reasons to support it or finding evidence that backs up the point.

One student writer wanted to gather good reasons in support of an assertion that his college campus needed more official spaces for parking bicycles. He did some research, gathering statistics about parking-space allocation, numbers of people using particular designated slots, and numbers of bicycles registered on campus. Before he went any further, however, he listed his primary reasons for wanting to increase bicycle parking:

Personal experience: At least twice a week for two terms, he was unable to find a designated parking space for his bike. Anecdotes: Several of his friends told similar stories. One even sold her bike as a result. Facts: He found out that the ratio of car to bike parking spaces

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was 100 to 1, whereas the ratio of cars to bikes registered on campus was 25 to 1. Authorities: The campus police chief told the college newspaper that she believed a problem existed for students who tried to park bicycles legally.

On the basis of his preliminary listing of possible reasons in support of the claim, this student decided that his subject was worth more research. He was on the way to amassing a set of good reasons and evidence that were sufficient to support his claim.

In shaping your own arguments, try putting claims and reasons together early in the writing process to create enthymemes. Think of these enthymemes as test cases or even as topic sentences:

Bicycle parking spaces should be expanded because the number of bikes on campus far exceeds the available spots.

It’s time to lower the driving age because I’ve been driving since I was fourteen and it hasn’t hurt me.

National legalization of marijuana is long overdue since it is already legal in many states, has proven to be less harmful than alcohol, and provides effective relief from pain associated with cancer.

Violent video games should be carefully evaluated and their use monitored by the industry, the government, and parents because such games cause addiction and even psychological harm to players.

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As you can see, attaching a reason to a claim often spells out the major terms of an argument.

But your work is just beginning when you’ve put a claim together with its supporting reasons and evidence — because readers are certain to begin questioning your statement. They might ask whether the reasons and evidence that you’re offering actually do support the claim: should the driving age really be changed just because you’ve managed to drive since you were fourteen? They might ask pointed questions about your evidence: exactly how do you know that the number of bikes on campus far exceeds the number of spaces available? Eventually, you’ve got to address potential questions about the quality of your assumptions and the reliability of your evidence. The connection between claim and reason(s) is a concern at the next level in Toulmin argument.

Anticipate challenges to your claims.

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Briahna Joy Gray argues that charges of cultural appropriation imply ownership of culture, as represented by music, costume, food, etc. What warrants lie behind this claim?

LINK TO Gray, “The Question of Cultural Appropriation,” in Chapter 24

Determining Warrants

Crucial to Toulmin argument is appreciating that there must be a logical and persuasive connection between a claim and the reasons and data supporting it. Toulmin calls this connection the warrant. It answers the question How exactly do I get from the data to the claim? Like the warrant in legal situations (a search warrant, for example), a sound warrant in an argument gives you authority to proceed with your case.

The warrant tells readers what your (often unstated) assumptions are — for example, that any major medical problem should be a concern of the government. If readers accept your warrant, you can then present specific evidence to develop your claim. But if readers dispute your warrant, you’ll have to defend it before you can move on to the claim

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itself.

Stating warrants can be tricky because they can be phrased in various ways. What you’re looking for is the general principle that enables you to justify the move from a reason to a specific claim — the bridge connecting them. The warrant is the assumption that makes the claim seem believable. It’s often a value or principle that you share with your readers. Here’s an easy example:

Don’t eat that mushroom: it’s poisonous.

The warrant supporting this enthymeme can be stated in several ways, always moving from the reason (it’s poisonous) to the claim (Don’t eat that mushroom):

Anything that is poisonous shouldn’t be eaten.

If something is poisonous, it’s dangerous to eat.

Here’s the relationship, diagrammed:

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Perfectly obvious, you say? Exactly — and that’s why the statement is so convincing. If the mushroom in question is a death cap or destroying angel (and you might still need expert testimony to prove that it is), the warrant does the rest of the work, making the claim that it supports seem logical and persuasive.

Let’s look at a similar example, beginning with the argument in its basic form:

We’d better stop for gas because the gauge has been reading empty for more than thirty miles.

In this case, you have evidence that is so clear (a gas gauge reading empty) that the reason for getting gas doesn’t even have to be stated: the tank is almost empty. The warrant connecting the evidence to the claim is also obvious:

If the fuel gauge of a car has been reading empty for more than thirty miles, then that car is about to run out of gas.

Since most readers would accept this warrant as reasonable, they would also likely accept the statement the warrant supports.

Naturally, factual information might undermine the whole argument: the fuel gauge might be broken, or the driver might know from experience that the car will go another fifty miles even though the fuel gauge reads empty. But in most cases, readers would accept the warrant.

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A simple icon — a skull and crossbones — can make a visual argument that implies a claim, a reason, and a warrant.

Now let’s consider how stating and then examining a warrant can help you determine the grounds on which you want to make a case. Here’s a political enthymeme of a familiar sort:

Flat taxes are fairer than progressive taxes because they treat all taxpayers in the same way.

Warrants that follow from this enthymeme have power because they appeal to a core American value — equal treatment under the law:

Treating people equitably is the American way.

All people should be treated in the same way.

You certainly could make an argument on these grounds. But stating the warrant should also raise a flag if you know anything about tax policy. If the principle is obvious and universal, then why do federal

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and some state income taxes require people at higher levels of income to pay at higher tax rates than people at lower income levels? Could the warrant not be as universally popular as it seems at first glance? To explore the argument further, try stating the contrary claim and warrants:

Progressive taxes are fairer than flat taxes because people with more income can afford to pay more, benefit more from government, and shelter more of their income from taxes.

People should be taxed according to their ability to pay.

People who benefit more from government and can shelter more of their income from taxes should be taxed at higher rates.

Now you see how different the assumptions behind opposing positions really are. If you decided to argue in favor of flat taxes, you’d be smart to recognize that some members of your audience might have fundamental reservations about your position. Or you might even decide to shift your entire argument to an alternative rationale for flat taxes:

Flat taxes are preferable to progressive taxes because they simplify the tax code and reduce the likelihood of fraud.

Here, you have two stated reasons that are supported by two new warrants:

Taxes that simplify the tax code are desirable.

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Taxes that reduce the likelihood of fraud are preferable.

Whenever possible, you’ll choose your warrant knowing your audience, the context of your argument, and your own feelings.

Be careful, though, not to suggest that you’ll appeal to any old warrant that works to your advantage. If readers suspect that your argument for progressive taxes really amounts to I want to stick it to people who work harder than I, your credibility may suffer a fatal blow.

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RESPOND●

At their simplest, warrants can be stated as “X is good” or “X is bad.”

Return to the editorials or blog posts that you analyzed in the

exercise on p. 144, this time looking for the warrant that is behind

each claim. As a way to start, ask yourself these questions:

If I find myself agreeing with the letter writer, what

assumptions about the subject matter do I share with him/her?

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If I disagree, what assumptions are at the heart of that

disagreement?

The list of warrants you generate will likely come from these

assumptions.

Offering Evidence: Backing The richest, most interesting part of a writer’s work — backing — remains to be done after the argument has been outlined. Clearly stated claims and warrants show you how much evidence you will need. Take a look at this brief argument, which is both debatable and controversial, especially in tough economic times:

NASA should affirm its commitment to a human expedition to Mars because Americans need a unifying national goal.

Here’s one version of the warrant that supports the enthymeme:

What unifies the nation ought to be a national priority.

To run with this claim and warrant, you’d first need to place both in context. Human space exploration has been debated with varying intensity following the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite, after the losses of the U.S. space shuttles Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003), and after the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Acquiring such background knowledge through reading, conversation, and inquiry of all kinds will be necessary for making your case. (See Chapter 3 for more on gaining authority.)

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Sticker honoring the retirement of the Space Shuttle program

There’s no point in defending any claim until you’ve satisfied readers that questionable warrants on which the claim is based are defensible. In Toulmin argument, evidence you offer to support a warrant is called backing.

Warrant What unifies the nation ought to be a national priority.

Backing Americans want to be part of something bigger than themselves. (Emotional appeal as evidence)

In a country as diverse as the United States, common purposes and values help make the nation stronger. (Ethical appeal as evidence)

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In the past, government investments such as the Hoover Dam and the Apollo moon program enhanced economic progress for many — though not all — Americans. (Logical appeal as evidence)

In addition to evidence to support your warrant (backing), you’ll need evidence to support your claim:

Argument in Brief (Enthymeme/Claim) NASA should launch a human expedition to Mars because Americans now need a unifying national goal.

Evidence The American people are politically divided along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and class. (Fact as evidence)

A common challenge or problem often unites people to accomplish great things. (Emotional appeal as evidence)

A successful Mars mission would require the cooperation of the entire nation — and generate tens of thousands of jobs. (Logical appeal as evidence)

A human expedition to Mars would be an admirable scientific project for the nation to pursue. (Appeal to values as evidence)

As these examples show, appeals to values and emotions can be just as appropriate as appeals to logic and facts, and all such claims will be stronger if a writer presents a convincing ethos. In most arguments,

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appeals work together rather than separately, reinforcing each other. (See Chapter 3 for more on ethos.)

Using Qualifiers Experienced writers know that qualifying expressions make writing more precise and honest. Toulmin logic encourages you to acknowledge limitations to your argument through the effective use of qualifiers. You can save time if you qualify a claim early in the writing process. But you might not figure out how to limit a claim effectively until after you’ve explored your subject or discussed it with others.

Qualifiers

few

it is possible

rarely

it seems

some

it may be

sometimes

more or less

in some cases

many

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typically

routinely

most

one might argue

often

perhaps

under these conditions

possibly

for the most part

if it were so

in general

Never assume that readers understand the limits you have in mind. Rather, spell them out as precisely as possible, as in the following examples:

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Unqualified Claim

People who don’t go to college earn less than those who do.

Qualified Claim

Statistics show that in most cases, people who don’t go to college earn less than those who do.

Understanding Conditions of Rebuttal In the Toulmin system, potential objections to an argument are called conditions of rebuttal. Understanding and reacting to these conditions are essential to support your own claims where they’re weak and also to recognize and understand the reasonable objections of people who see the world differently. For example, you may be a big fan of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and prefer that federal tax dollars be spent on these programs. So you offer the following claim:

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Claim The federal government should support the arts.

You need reasons to support this thesis, so you decide to present the issue as a matter of values:

Argument in Brief

The federal government should support the arts because it also supports the military.

Now you’ve got an enthymeme and can test the warrant, or the premises of your claim:

Warrant If the federal government can support the military, then it can also support other programs.

But the warrant seems frail: you can hear a voice over your shoulder saying, “In essence, you’re saying that Because we pay for a military, we should pay for everything!” So you decide to revise your claim:

Revised Argument

If the federal government can spend huge amounts of money on the military, then it can afford to spend moderate amounts on arts programs.

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Now you’ve got a new warrant, too:

Revised Warrant

A country that can fund expensive programs can also afford less expensive programs.

This is a premise that you can defend, since you believe strongly that the arts are just as essential as a strong military is to the well-being of the country. Although the warrant now seems solid, you still have to offer strong grounds to support your specific and controversial claim. So you cite statistics from reputable sources, this time comparing the federal budgets for the military and the arts. You break them down in ways that readers can visualize, demonstrating that much less than a penny of every tax dollar goes to support the arts.

But then you hear those voices again, saying that the “common defense” is a federal mandate; the government is constitutionally obligated to support a military, and support for the arts is hardly in the same league! Looks like you need to add a paragraph explaining all the benefits the arts provide for very few dollars spent, and maybe you should suggest that such funding falls under the constitutional mandate to “promote the general welfare.” Though not all readers will accept these grounds, they’ll appreciate that you haven’t ignored their point of view: you’ve gained credibility by anticipating a reasonable objection.

Dealing with conditions of rebuttal is an essential part of argument. But it’s important to understand rebuttal as more than mere opposition. Anticipating objections broadens your horizons, makes you more open to alternative viewpoints, and helps you understand what you need to

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do to support your claim.

Within Toulmin argument, conditions of rebuttal remind us that we’re part of global conversations: Internet newsgroups and blogs provide potent responses to positions offered by participants in discussions; instant messaging and social networking let you respond to and challenge others; links on Web sites form networks that are infinitely variable and open. In cyberspace, conditions of rebuttal are as close as your screen.

RESPOND● Using an essay or a project you are composing, do a Toulmin

analysis of the argument. When you’re done, see which elements of

the Toulmin scheme are represented. Are you short of evidence to

support the warrant? Have you considered the conditions of

rebuttal? Have you qualified your claim adequately? Next, write a

brief revision plan: How will you buttress the argument in the places

where it is weakest? What additional evidence will you offer for the

warrant? How can you qualify your claim to meet the conditions of

rebuttal? Then show your paper to a classmate and have him/her do

a Toulmin analysis: a new reader will probably see your argument in

different ways and suggest revisions that may not have occurred to

you.

Outline of a Toulmin Argument Consider the claim that was mentioned on p. 150:

The federal government should ban e-cigarettes.

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Claim

Qualifier The ban would be limited to public spaces.

Good Reasons

E-cigarettes have not been proven to be harmless.

E-cigarettes legitimize smoking and also are aimed at recruiting teens and children with flavors like bubblegum and cotton candy.

Warrants The Constitution promises to “promote the general welfare.”

Citizens are entitled to protection from harmful actions by others.

Backing The United States is based on a political system that is supposed to serve the basic needs of its people, including their health.

Evidence Analysis of advertising campaigns that reveal direct appeals to children

Lawsuits recently won against e-cigarette companies, citing the link between e-cigarettes and a return to regular smoking

Examples of bans on e-cigarettes already imposed in many public places

Authority Cite the FDA and medical groups on effect of e-cigarette smoking.

Conditions of Rebuttal

E-cigarette smokers have rights, too.

Smoking laws should be left to the states.

Such a ban could not be enforced.

Responses The ban applies to public places; smokers can smoke in private.

A Toulmin Analysis You might wonder how Toulmin’s method holds up when applied to

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an argument that is longer than a few sentences. Do such arguments really work the way that Toulmin predicts? In the following column from Bloomberg Opinion (June 19, 2017), Stephen L. Carter explains why he supports a unanimous Supreme Court decision protecting offensive speech. Carter, a professor of law at Yale, novelist, and essayist, begins by offering background information on a trademark case brought before the Supreme Court by a band called The Slants. Carter signals quite clearly (in what amounts to his core claim) that the Court was right to strike down restrictions on potentially offensive trademarks set in place during World War II. To justify his support for the new ruling, Carter helps readers understand the Constitutional rationale for defending forms of speech that some people might regard as offensive, derogatory, or racist. Carter even draws upon the remarks of two Supreme Court justices who reach the same conclusion about the unconstitutionality of the so-called “disparagement clause” through very different approaches. As you will see below, many elements of Toulmin argument are in play throughout Carter’s essay, even if they don’t follow a predictable sequence from claim to reason to evidence to conditions of rebuttal to response pattern.

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The Slants chose their band’s name to reappropriate the offensive slur. Anthony Pidgeon/Getty Images

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What Toulmin Teaches As Carter’s essay demonstrates, few arguments you read have perfectly sequenced claims or clear warrants, so you might not think of Toulmin’s terms in building your own arguments. Once you’re into your subject, it’s easy to forget about qualifying a claim or finessing a warrant. But remembering what Toulmin teaches will always help you strengthen your arguments:

Claims should be clear, reasonable, and carefully qualified. Claims should be supported with good reasons and evidence. Remember that a Toulmin structure provides the framework of an argument, which you fill out with all kinds of data, including facts, statistics, precedents, photographs, and even stories. Claims and reasons should be based on assumptions your audience will likely accept. Toulmin’s focus on warrants can be confusing because it asks us to state the values that underlie our arguments — something many would rather not do. Toulmin also prompts us to consider how our assumptions relate to particular audiences.

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Effective arguments respectfully anticipate objections readers might offer. Toulmin argument acknowledges that any claim can crumble under certain conditions, so it encourages complex views that don’t insist on absolute or unqualified positions.

It takes considerable experience to write arguments that meet all these conditions. Using Toulmin’s framework brings them into play automatically. If you learn it well enough, constructing good arguments can become a habit.

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Organization As you think about organizing your argument, remember that cultural factors are at work: patterns that you find persuasive are probably ones that are deeply embedded in your culture. In the United States, many people expect a writer to “get to the point” as directly as possible and to articulate that point efficiently and unambiguously. The organizational patterns favored by many in business hold similarities to the classical oration — a highly explicit pattern that leaves little or nothing unexplained — introduction and thesis, background, overview of the parts that follow, evidence, other viewpoints, and conclusion. If a piece of writing follows this pattern, American readers ordinarily find it “well organized.”

So it’s no surprise that student writers in the United States are expected to make their structures direct and their claims explicit, leaving little unspoken. Their claims usually appear early in an argument, often in the first paragraph.

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But not all cultures take such an approach. Some expect any claim or thesis to be introduced subtly, indirectly, and perhaps at the end of a work, assuming that audiences will “read between the lines” to understand what’s being said. Consequently, the preferred structure of arguments (and face-to-face negotiations, as well) may be elaborate, repetitive, and full of digressions. Those accustomed to such writing may find more direct Western styles naive, childish, or even rude.

When arguing across cultures, look for cues to determine how to structure your presentations effectively. Here are several points to consider:

Do members of your audience tend to be very direct, saying explicitly what they mean? Or are they more restrained? Consider adjusting your work to the expectations of the audience. Do members of your audience tend to respect authority and the opinions of groups? They may find blunt approaches disrespectful or contrary to their expectations. Consider when to state your thesis: At the beginning? At the end? Somewhere else? Not at all? Consider whether digressions are a good idea, a requirement, or an element to avoid.

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CHAPTER 8 Arguments of Fact

Some people believe that extensive use of smartphones and

social media is especially harmful to children and young adults,

and recent research provides disturbing evidence that they may

be right.

In the past, female screen stars like Marilyn Monroe could be

buxom and curvy, less concerned about their weight than

actresses today. Or so the legend goes. But measuring the

costumes worn by Monroe and other actresses reveals a

different story.

When an instructor announces a tough new attendance policy

for her course, a student objects that there is no evidence that

students who regularly attend classes perform any better than

those who do not. The instructor begs to differ.

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Understanding Arguments of Fact Factual arguments come in many varieties, but they all try to

establish whether something is or is not so, answering

questions such as Is a historical legend true? Has a crime

occurred? or Are the claims of a scientific study replicable? At

first glance, you might object that these aren’t arguments at all

but just a matter of looking things up and then writing reports.

And you’d be correct to an extent: people don’t usually argue

factual matters that are settled or undisputed (The earth

revolves around the sun), that might be decided with simple

research (The Mendenhall Glacier has receded 1.75 miles since

1958), or that are the equivalent of a rule (One mile measures

5,280 feet). Reporting facts, you might think, should be free of

the friction of argument.

But the authority of “facts” has been routinely challenged. With

a full generation of contemporary philosophers insisting that

reality is just a creation of language, perhaps it’s not surprising

that politicians and pundits now find themselves arguing over

“fake news,” “known facts,” and “alternative facts.”

Yet facts do still become arguments whenever they’re

controversial on their own or challenge people’s conventional

beliefs and lifestyles. Disagreements about childhood obesity,

endangered species, or energy production ought to have a kind

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of clean, scientific logic to them. But that’s rarely the case

because the facts surrounding them must be interpreted. Those

interpretations then determine what we feed children, where

we can build a dam, or how we heat our homes. In other words,

serious factual arguments almost always have consequences.

Can we rely on wind and solar power to solve our energy needs?

Will the Social Security trust fund really go broke? Is it healthy

to eat fatty foods? People need well-reasoned factual arguments

on subjects of this kind to make informed decisions. Such

arguments educate the public.

For the same reason, we need arguments to challenge beliefs

that are common in a society but held on the basis of

inadequate or faulty information. We sometimes need help, too,

noticing change that is occurring all around us. So corrective

arguments appear daily in the media, often based on studies

written by scientists or researchers that the public would not

encounter on their own. Many people, for example, still believe

that talking on a cell phone while driving is just like listening to

the radio. But their intuition is not based on hard data: scientific

studies show that using a cell phone in a car is comparable to

driving under the influence of alcohol. That’s a fact. As a result,

fifteen states (and counting) have banned the use of handheld

phones while driving—and almost all now ban texting while

driving.

Factual arguments also routinely address broad questions about

how we understand the past. For example, are the accounts that

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we have of the American founding—or the Civil War,

Reconstruction, or the heroics of the “Greatest Generation” in

World War II—accurate? Or do the “facts” that we teach today

sometimes reflect the perspectives and prejudices of earlier

times or ideologies? The telling of history is almost always

controversial and rarely settled: the British and Americans will

always tell different versions of what happened in North

America in 1776.

The Internet puts mountains of information at our fingertips,

but we need to be sure to confirm whether or not that

information is fact, using what Howard Rheingold calls “crap

detection,” the ability to distinguish between accurate

information and inaccurate information, misinformation, or

disinformation. (For more on “crap detection,” see Chapter 19,

“Evaluating Sources.”)

As you can see, arguments of fact do much of the heavy lifting

in our world. They report on what has been recently discovered

or explore the implications of that new information. They also

add interest and complexity to our lives, taking what might

seem simple and adding new dimensions to it. In many

situations, they’re the precursors to other forms of analysis,

especially causal and proposal arguments. Before we can

explore why things happen as they do or solve problems, we

need to do our best to determine the facts.

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RESPOND● For each topic in the following list, decide whether the claim is

worth arguing to a college audience, and explain why or why not.

Earthquakes at Yellowstone National Park are increasing in

number and intensity.

Many people die annually of heart disease.

The planet would benefit enormously if more people learned to

eat insects.

Japan might have come to terms more readily in 1945 if the

Allies in World War II hadn’t demanded unconditional

surrender.

Boys would do better in school if there were more men

teaching in elementary and secondary classrooms.

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The benefits of increasing oil and natural gas production via

fracking more than outweigh the environmental downsides of

the process.

There aren’t enough high-paying jobs for college graduates

these days.

Hydrogen may never be a viable alternative to fossil fuels

because it takes too much energy to change hydrogen into a

usable form.

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Characterizing Factual Arguments Factual arguments are often motivated by simple human

curiosity or suspicion: Are people who earn college degrees

happier than those who don’t? If being fat is so unhealthy, why

aren’t mortality rates rising? Does it matter economically that so

many young people today think of themselves as foodies?

Researchers may notice a pattern that leads them to look more

closely at some phenomenon or behavior, exploring questions

such as What if? or How come? Or maybe a writer first notes

something new or different or unexpected and wants to draw

attention to that fact: Contrary to expectations, suicide rates are

much higher in rural areas than in urban ones.

Such observations can lead quickly to hypotheses—that is,

toward tentative and plausible statements of fact whose merits

need to be examined more closely. Perhaps people at different

educational levels define happiness differently? Maybe being a

little overweight isn’t as bad for people as we’ve been told?

Maybe self-identifying as a “foodie” is really a marker of class

and social aspirations? To support such hypotheses, writers

then have to uncover evidence that reaches well beyond the

casual observations that triggered an initial interest—like a

news reporter motivated to see whether there’s a verifiable

story behind a source’s tip.

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For instance, the authors of Freakonomics, Stephen J. Dubner

and Steven D. Levitt, were intrigued by the National Highway

Traffic Safety Administration’s claim that car seats for children

were 54 percent effective in preventing deaths in auto crashes

for children below the age of four. In a New York Times op-ed

column entitled “The Seat-Belt Solution,” they posed an

important question about that factual claim:

But 54 percent effective compared with what? The

answer, it turns out, is this: Compared with a child’s

riding completely unrestrained.

Their initial question about that claim led them to a more

focused inquiry, then to a database on auto crashes, and then to

a surprising conclusion: for kids above age twenty-four months,

those in car seats were statistically safer than those without any

protection but weren’t safer than those confined by ordinary

seat belts (which are much simpler, cheaper, and more readily

available devices). Looking at the statistics every which way, the

authors wonder if children older than two years would be just

as well off physically—and their parents less stressed and better

off financially—if the government mandated seat belts rather

than car seats for them.

What kinds of evidence typically appear in sound factual

arguments? The simple answer might be “all sorts,” but a case

can be made that factual arguments try to rely more on “hard

evidence” than do “constructed” arguments based on logic and

reason (see Chapter 4). Even so, some pieces of evidence are

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harder than others!

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Developing a Factual Argument Entire Web sites are dedicated to finding and posting errors

from news and political sources. Some, like Media Matters for

America and Accuracy in Media, take overtly partisan stands.

Here’s a one-day sampling of headlines from Media Matters:

After NASA Announces It Found Water on Mars, Rush

Limbaugh Says It’s Part of a Climate Change Conspiracy

Trump administration met with a GOP donor and a Fox

contributor about a fake story meant to distract from

Russia probe

Fox hosts can’t keep their facts straight while praising

Trump’s immigration cuts

And here’s a listing from Accuracy in Media from the same day:

Major Newspapers Just Pretend to Have Conservative

Columnists Left Claims Hitler-Style “Indoctrination” in

Trump’s Boy Scouts Speech Washington Post Reluctantly

Admits Stock Market Gains Linked to Trump

It would be hard to miss the blatant political agendas at work on

these sites.

Other fact-checking organizations have better reputations when

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it comes to assessing the truths behind political claims and

media presentations. Although both are also routinely charged

with bias, Pulitzer Prize–winning PolitiFact.com and

FactCheck.org at least make an effort to seem fair-minded

across a broader political spectrum. FactCheck.org, for

example, provides a detailed analysis of the claims it

investigates in relatively neutral and denotative language, and

lists the sources its researchers used—just as if its writers were

doing a research paper. At its best, FactCheck.org demonstrates

what one valuable kind of factual argument can accomplish.

Any factual argument that you might compose—from how you

state your claim to how you present evidence and the language

you use—should be similarly shaped by the occasion for the

argument and a desire to serve the audiences that you hope to

reach. We can offer some general advice to help you get started.

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PolitiFact uses a meter to rate political claims from “True” to “Pants on Fire.”

RESPOND● The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of

Pennsylvania hosts FactCheck.org, a Web site dedicated to

separating facts from opinion or falsehood in the area of politics. It

claims to be politically neutral. Find a case that interests you, either

a recent controversial item listed on its homepage or another from

its archives. Carefully study the item. Pay attention to the devices

that FactCheck.org uses to suggest or ensure objectivity and the

way that it handles facts and statistics. Then offer your own brief

factual argument about the site’s objectivity.

Identifying an Issue 323

In their report about food insecurity on college campuses, researchers James Dubick, Brandon Mathews, and Clare Cady offer an argument of fact based on more than 3,700 surveys of students on 34 college campuses.

LINK TO Dubick et al., “Hunger on Campus,” in Chapter 24

To offer a factual argument of your own, you need to identify an

issue or problem that will interest you and potential readers.

Look for situations or phenomena—local or national—that seem

novel or out of the ordinary in the expected order of things. For

instance, you might notice that many people you know are

deciding not to attend college. How widespread is this change,

and who are the people making this choice?

Or follow up claims that strike you as at odds with the facts as

you know them or believe them. Maybe you doubt explanations

being offered for your favorite sport team’s current slump or for

the declining number of male students majoring in the

humanities at your school. Or you might give a local spin to

factual questions that other people have already formulated on

a national level. Are more of your friends considering technical

apprenticeships (rather than expensive academic programs),

delaying any plans they might have for marriage or families, or

buying entirely online instead of at brick and mortar stores?

You will likely write a better paper if you take on a factual

question that genuinely interests you.

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In fact, whole books are written when authors decide to pursue

factual questions that intrigue them. But you want to be careful

not to argue matters that pose no challenge for you or your

audiences. You’re not offering anything new if you just try to

persuade readers that smoking is harmful to their well-being.

So how about something fresh in the area of health?

Quick preliminary research and reading might allow you to

move from an intuition to a hypothesis, that is, a tentative

statement of your claim: Having a dog is good for your health.

As noted earlier, factual arguments often provoke other types of

analysis. In developing this claim, you’d need to explain what

“good for your health” means, potentially an argument of

definition. You’d also likely find yourself researching causes of

the phenomenon if you can demonstrate that it is factual. As it

turns out, your canine hypothesis would have merit if you

defined “good for health” as “encouraging exercise.” Here’s the

lede to a 2011 New York Times story reporting recent research:

If you’re looking for the latest in home exercise

equipment, you may want to consider something with

four legs and a wagging tail.

Several studies now show that dogs can be powerful

motivators to get people moving. Not only are dog

owners more likely to take regular walks, but new

research shows that dog walkers are more active overall

than people who don’t have dogs.

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—Tara Parker-Pope, “Forget the Treadmill. Get a Dog,”

March 14, 2011

As always, there’s another side to the story: what if people likely

to get dogs are the very sort already inclined to be more

physically active? You could explore that possibility as well (and

researchers have) and then either modify your initial

hypothesis or offer a new one. That’s what hypotheses are for.

They are works in progress.

A Harvard source for your paper on dogs and health?

RESPOND●

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Read C. Richard King’s excerpt from Redskins: Insult and Brand in Chapter 23. What kind of research does King use to support his argument?

LINK TO King, “Redskins: Insult and Brand,” in Chapter 23

Working with a group of colleagues, generate a list of a dozen

“mysteries” regularly explored on TV shows, in blogs, or in tabloid

newspapers. Here are three to get you started—the alien crash

landing at Roswell, the existence of Atlantis, and the uses of Area 51

in Nevada. Then decide which—if any—of these puzzlers might be

resolved or explained in a reasonable factual argument and which

ones remain eternally mysterious and improbable. Why are people

attracted to such topics? Would any of these items provide material

for a noteworthy factual argument?

Researching Your Hypothesis

How and where you research your subject will depend,

naturally, on your subject. You’ll certainly want to review

Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence,” Chapter 19, “Evaluating

Sources,” and Chapter 20, “Using Sources,” before constructing

an argument of fact. Libraries and the Web will provide you

with deep resources on almost every subject. Your task will

typically be to separate the best sources from all the rest. The

word best here has many connotations: some reputable sources

may be too technical for your audiences; some accessible

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sources may be pitched too low or be too far removed from the

actual facts.

You’ll be making judgment calls like this routinely. But do use

primary sources whenever you can. For example, when

gathering a comment from a source on the Web, trace it

whenever possible to its original site, and read the comment in

its full context. When statistics are quoted, follow them back to

the source that offered them first to be sure that they’re recent

and reputable. Instructors and librarians can help you

appreciate the differences. Understand that even sources with

pronounced biases can furnish useful information, provided

that you know how to use them, take their limitations into

account, and then share what you know about the sources with

your readers.

Sometimes, you’ll be able to do primary research on your own,

especially when your subject is local and you have the resources

to do it. Consider conducting a competent survey of campus

opinions and attitudes, for example, or study budget documents

(often public) to determine trends in faculty salaries, tuition,

student fees, and so on. Primary research of this sort can be

challenging because even the simplest surveys or polls have to

be intelligently designed and executed in a way that samples a

representative population (see Chapter 4). But the work could

pay off in an argument that brings new information to readers.

Refining Your Claim 328

As you learn more about your subject, you might revise your

hypothesis to reflect what you’ve discovered. In most cases,

these revised hypotheses will grow increasingly complex and

specific. Following are three versions of essentially the same

claim, with each version offering more information to help

readers judge its merit:

Americans really did land on the moon, despite what some people think! Since 1969, when the Eagle supposedly landed on the moon, some people have been unjustifiably skeptical about the success of the United States’ Apollo program. Despite plentiful hard evidence to the contrary—from Saturn V launches witnessed by thousands to actual moon rocks tested by independent labs worldwide—some people persist in believing falsely that NASA’s moon landings were filmed on deserts in the American Southwest as part of a massive propaganda fraud.

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The additional details about the subject might also suggest new

ways to develop and support it. For example, conspiracy

theorists claim that the absence of visible stars in photographs

of the moon landing is evidence that it was staged, but

photographers know that the camera exposure needed to

capture the foreground—astronauts in their bright space suits—

would have made the stars in the background too dim to see.

That’s a key bit of evidence for this argument.

As you advance in your research, your thesis will likely pick up

even more qualifying words and expressions, which help you to

make reasonable claims. Qualifiers—words and phrases such as

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some, most, few, for most people, for a few users, under

specific conditions, usually, occasionally, seldom, and so on—

will be among your most valuable tools in a factual argument.

(See p. 153 in Chapter 7 for more on qualifiers.)

Sometimes it will be important to contextualize a factual claim

for others who may find it hard to accept. Of course, you could

just present the hard numbers, but research suggests that many

people double down on their positions when offered contrary

facts. What to do? Michael Shermer, writing in Scientific

American, suggests these common sense strategies:

[W]hat can we do to convince people of the error of their

beliefs? From my experience, 1. keep emotions out of the

exchange, 2. discuss, don’t attack (no ad hominem and no

ad Hitlerum), 3. listen carefully and try to articulate the

other position accurately, 4. show respect, 5.

acknowledge that you understand why someone might

hold that opinion, and 6. try to show how changing facts

does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These

strategies may not always work to change people’s

minds, but now that the nation has just been put through

a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce

unnecessary divisiveness.

—Michael Shermer, “How to Convince Someone When

Facts Fail”

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Deciding Which Evidence to Use In this chapter, we’ve blurred the distinction between factual

arguments for scientific and technical audiences and those for

the general public (in magazines, blogs, social media sites,

television documentaries, and so on). In the former kind of

arguments, readers will expect specific types of evidence

arranged in a formulaic way. Such reports may include a

hypothesis, a review of existing research on the subject, a

description of methods, a presentation of results, and finally a

formal discussion of the findings. If you are thinking “lab

report,” you are already familiar with an academic form of a

factual argument with precise standards for evidence.

Less scientific factual arguments—claims about our society,

institutions, behaviors, habits, and so on—are seldom so

systematic, and they may draw on evidence from a great many

different media. For instance, you might need to review old

newspapers, scan videos, study statistics on government Web

sites, read transcripts of congressional hearings, record the

words of eyewitnesses to an event, glean information by

following experts on Twitter, and so on. Very often, you will

assemble your arguments from material found in credible,

though not always concurring, authorities and resources—

drawing upon the factual findings of scientists and scholars, but

perhaps using their original insights in novel ways.

For example, you might be intrigued by a much cited article

from the Atlantic (August 5, 2017) in which author Jean M.

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Twenge reviews evidence that suggests that adolescents who

spend more and more time on their cellphones are increasingly

unhappy—to the detriment of their emotional health. Here’s an important moment in her lengthy argument:

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these

new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data

suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future

survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse

and designed to be nationally representative, has asked

12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since

1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991.

The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how

much of their leisure time they spend on various

activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-

person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent

years, screen activities such as using social media,

texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be

clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on

screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those

who spend more time than average on nonscreen

activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are

linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are

linked to more happiness.

—Jean M. Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a

Generation?”

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Reading such dire news (and the article reports even more

frightening increases in suicide), may raise new questions for

you: Are there contrary studies? Is it conceivable that time spent

online has benefits? Twenge herself notes, for example, that

teen pregnancies have dropped dramatically in recent years.

Perhaps, too, adolescents so inwardly directed by screen use

might develop into more sensitive and less violent adults? Such

considerations might lead you to look for research that

complicates the earlier work by bringing fresh facts or

perspectives to the table.

Often, though, you may have only a limited number of words or

pages in which to make an academic argument. What do you do

then? You present your best evidence as powerfully as possible:

you can make a persuasive factual case with just a few examples

—three or four often suffice to make a point. Indeed, going on

too long or presenting even good data in uninteresting ways can

undermine a claim.

Presenting Your Evidence In Hard Times (1854), British author Charles Dickens poked fun

at a pedagogue he named Thomas Gradgrind, who preferred

hard facts before all things human or humane. When poor Sissy

Jupe (called “girl number twenty” in his awful classroom) is

unable at his command to define horse, Gradgrind turns to his

star pupil, Bitzer:

“Bitzer,” said Thomas Gradgrind. “Your definition of a

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horse.”

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-

four grinders, four eyeteeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds

coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too.

Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age

known by marks in mouth.” Thus (and much more)

Bitzer.

“Now girl number twenty,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “You

know what a horse is.”

—Charles Dickens, Hard Times

But does Bitzer? Rattling off facts about a subject isn’t quite the

same thing as knowing it, especially when your goal is, as it is in

an argument of fact, to educate and persuade audiences. So you

must take care how you present your evidence.

Factual arguments, like any others, take many forms. They can

be as simple and pithy as a letter to the editor (or Bitzer’s

definition of a horse) or as comprehensive and formal as a

senior thesis or even a dissertation, meant for just two or three

readers evaluating the competence of your work. But to earn

the attention of readers in more public forums, you may need to

work harder, affirming your expertise by offering engaging and

authoritative sources, presenting your argument with grace and

clarity, including tables, graphs, photographs and other visual

evidence when appropriate, and documenting all your claims.

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For an example of how to use design effectively in a factual argument, see “How Do Your Eating Habits Differ from Your Grandparents’?” in Chapter 24. Compare the chart to the table that accompanies it. How does design impact the success of the factual argument?

LINK TO United States Department of Agriculture, “How Do Your Eating Habits Differ from Your Grandparents’?” in Chapter 24

Such moves will establish the ethos of your work, making it

seem serious, credible, well-conceived, and worth reading.

Considering Design and Visuals

When you prepare a factual argument, consider how you can

present your evidence most effectively. Precisely because

factual arguments often rely on evidence that can be measured,

computed, or illustrated, they benefit from thoughtful, even

artful presentation of data. If you have lots of examples, you

might arrange them in a list (bulleted or otherwise) and keep

the language in each item roughly parallel. If you have an

argument that can be translated into a table, chart, or graph

(see Chapter 14), try it. Below, for example, are three of the six

tables that accompanied Jean M. Twenge’s essay on

smartphones, all dramatically illustrating a decline in various

adolescent behaviors following the introduction of the iPhone

in 2007. And if there’s a more dramatic medium for your factual

argument—a Prezi slide show, a multimedia mashup, a

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documentary video posted via a social network—experiment

with it, checking to be sure it would satisfy the assignment.

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Jean M. Twenge uses graphs to support her claims about the impact of smartphones on teenagers.

Images and photos—from technical illustrations to imaginative

re-creations—have the power to document what readers might

otherwise have to imagine, whether actual conditions of

drought, poverty, or a disaster like Hurricane Harvey that

dropped 27 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana in

2017, or the dimensions of the Roman forum as it existed in the

time of Julius Caesar. Readers today expect the arguments they

read to include visual elements, and there’s little reason not to

offer this assistance if you have the technical skills to create

them.

Consider also the rapid development of the genre known as

infographics—basically data presented in bold visual form.

These items can be humorous and creative, but many, such as

“Learning Out of Poverty” on the following page, make

powerful factual arguments even when they leave it to viewers

to draw their own conclusions. Just search “infographics” on

the Web to find many examples.

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“Learning Out of Poverty.” Infographics like this one turn facts and data into arguments.

GUIDE to writing an argument of fact

Finding a Topic

You’re entering an argument of fact when you:

make a claim about fact or existence that’s controversial or surprising: Climate change is threatening species in all regions by extending the range of non-native plants and animals. correct an error of fact: The overall abortion rate is not increasing in the United States, though rates are increasing in some states. challenge societal myths: Many Mexicans fought alongside Anglos in battles that won Texas its independence from Mexico. wish to discover the state of knowledge about a subject or examine a range of perspectives and points of view: The rationales of parents who homeschool their children reveal some surprising differences.

Researching Your Topic

Use both a library and the Web to locate the information you need. A research librarian is often a valuable resource, as are experts or eyewitnesses. Begin research by consulting the following types of sources:

scholarly books on your subject newspapers, magazines, reviews, and journals (online and print) online databases government documents and reports Web sites, blogs, social networking sites, and listservs or

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newsgroups experts in the field, some of whom might be right on your campus

Do field research if appropriate—a survey, a poll, or systematic observation. Or invite people with a stake in the subject to present their interpretations of the facts. Evaluate all sources carefully, making sure that each is authoritative and credible.

Formulating a Hypothesis

Don’t rush into a thesis. Instead, begin with a hypothesis that expresses your beliefs at the beginning of the project but that may change as you learn more. It’s okay to start with a question to which you don’t have an answer or with a broad, general interest in a subject:

Question: Have higher admissions standards at BSU reduced the numbers of entering first-year students from small, rural high schools? Hypothesis: Higher admissions standards at BSU are reducing the number of students admitted from rural high schools, which tend to be smaller and less well-funded than those in suburban and urban areas. Question: Have music sites like Pandora and Spotify reduced the amount of illegal downloading of music? Hypothesis: Services like Pandora and Spotify may have done more than lawsuits by record companies to discourage illegal downloads of music. Question: How dangerous is nuclear energy, really? Hypothesis: The danger posed by nuclear power plants is far less than that attributable to other viable energy sources. Question: Why can’t politicians and citizens agree about the threat posed by the huge federal deficit? Hypothesis: People with different points of view see different

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threats in the budget numbers and so react differently.

Examples of Arguable Factual Claims

A campus survey that shows that far more students have read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban than Hamlet indicates that our current core curriculum lacks depth. Evidence suggests that the European conquest of the Americas may have had more to do with infectious diseases than any superiority in technology or weaponry. In the long run, dieting may be more harmful than moderate overeating.

Preparing a Proposal

If your instructor asks you to prepare a proposal for your project, here’s a format that may help:

State your thesis or hypothesis completely. If you are having trouble doing so, try outlining it in Toulmin terms:

Claim:

Reason(s):

Warrant(s):

Alternatively, you might describe the complications of a factual issue you hope to explore in your project, with the thesis perhaps coming later.

Explain why the issue you’re examining is important, and provide the context for raising the issue. Are you introducing new information, making available information better known, correcting what has been reported incorrectly, or

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complicating what has been understood more simply? Identify and describe those readers you most hope to reach with your argument. Why is this group of readers most appropriate for your project? What are their interests in the subject? How might you involve them in the paper? Discuss the kinds of evidence you expect to use in the project and the research the paper will require. Briefly discuss the key challenges you anticipate in preparing your argument.

Considering Genre and Media

Your instructor may specify that you use a particular genre and/or medium. If not, ask yourself these questions to help you make a good choice:

What genre is most appropriate for your argument of fact? Does it call for an academic essay, a report, an infographic, a brochure, or something else? What medium is most appropriate for your argument? Would it be best delivered orally to a live audience? Presented as an audio essay or podcast? Presented in print only or in print with illustrations? Will you need visuals, such as moving or still images, maps, graphs, charts—and what function will they play in your argument? Make sure they are not just “added on” but are necessary components of the argument.

Thinking about Organization

The simplest structure for a factual argument is to make a claim and then prove it. But even a basic approach needs an introductory section that provides a context for the claim and a concluding section that assesses the implications of the argument. A factual argument that

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corrects an error or provides an alternative view of some familiar concept or historical event will also need a section early on explaining what the error or the common belief is. Be sure your opening section answers the who, what, where, when, how, and (maybe) why questions that readers will bring to the case.

Factual arguments offered in some academic fields follow formulas and templates. A format favored in the hard sciences and also in the social and behavioral sciences is known by its acronym, IMRAD, which stands for Introduction, Methods, Research, and Discussion. Another typical format calls for an abstract, a review of literature, a discussion of method, an analysis, and a references list. When you have flexibility in the structure of your argument, it makes sense to lead with a striking example to interest readers in your subject and then to conclude with your strongest evidence. Pay particular attention to transitions between key points.

If you are defending a specific claim, anticipate the ways people with different points of view might respond to your argument. Consider how to address such differences respectfully in the body of your argument. But don’t let a factual argument with a persuasive thesis end with concessions or refutations, especially in pieces for the general public. Such a strategy leaves readers thinking about problems with your claim at precisely the point when they should be impressed by its strengths. On the other hand, if your factual argument becomes exploratory, you may find yourself simply presenting a range of positions.

Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Response

Your instructor may assign you to a group for the purpose of reading and responding to each other’s drafts. If not, ask for responses from

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serious readers or consultants at a writing center. Use the following questions to evaluate a colleague’s draft. Since specific comments help more than general observations, be sure to illustrate your comments with examples. Some of the questions below assume a conventional, thesis-driven project, but more exploratory or invitational arguments of fact also need to be clearly phrased, organized, and supported with evidence.

The Claim

Does the claim clearly raise a serious and arguable factual issue? Is the claim as clear and specific as possible? Is the claim qualified? If so, how?

Evidence for the Claim

Is the evidence provided enough to persuade readers to believe your claim? If not, what additional evidence would help? Does any of the evidence seem inappropriate or ineffective? Why? Is the evidence in support of the claim simply announced, or do you explain its significance and appropriateness? Is more discussion needed? Are readers’ potential objections to the claim or evidence addressed adequately? Are alternative positions understood thoroughly and presented fairly? What kinds of sources are cited? How credible and persuasive will they be to readers? What other kinds of sources might work better? Are all quotations introduced with appropriate signal phrases (such as “As Tyson argues, . . .”) and blended smoothly into the writer’s sentences? Are all visuals titled and labeled appropriately? Have you introduced them and commented on their significance?

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Organization and Style

How are the parts of the argument organized? Is this organization effective? Will readers understand the relationships among the claims, supporting reasons, warrants, and evidence? If not, how might those connections be clearer? Is the function of every visual clear? Are more transitions needed? Would headings or graphic devices help? Are the transitions or links from point to point, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph clear and effective? If not, how could they be improved? Are all visuals carefully integrated into the text? Is each visual introduced and commented on to point out its significance? Is each visual labeled as a figure or a table and given a caption as well as a citation? Is the style suited to the subject? Is it too formal, casual, or technical? Can it be improved? Which sentences seem effective? Which ones seem weaker, and how could they be improved? Should short sentences be combined, and any longer ones be broken up? How effective are the paragraphs? Too short or too long? How can they be improved? Which words or phrases seem effective? Do any seem vague or inappropriate for the audience or the writer’s purpose? Are technical or unfamiliar terms defined?

Spelling, Punctuation, Mechanics, Documentation, and Format

Are there any errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like? Is an appropriate and consistent style of documentation used for parenthetical citations and the list of works cited or references? (See Chapter 22.)

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Does the paper or project follow an appropriate format? Is it appropriately designed and attractively presented? How could it be improved?

PROJECTS●

1. Turn a database of information you find in the library or online into a traditional argument or, alternatively, into a multimodal project such as an infographic that offers various ways to present a claim. FedStats, a government Web site, provides endless data, but so can the sports or financial sections of a newspaper. Once you find a rich field of study, examine the data and draw your ideas from it, perhaps amplifying these ideas with material from other related sources of information. If you decide to create an infographic, you’ll find good examples online at VizWorld or Cool Infographics. Software tools you can use to create infographics include Piktochart and Google Public Data Explorer. Have fun.

2. Write an argument about a factual matter you are confident— based on personal experience or your state of knowledge—that most people get wrong, time and again. Use your expertise to correct this false impression.

3. Tough economic and political times sometimes reinforce and sometimes undermine cultural myths. With your classmates, generate a list of common beliefs about education, employment, family life, marriage, social progress, technology, and so on that seem to be under unusual scrutiny today. Does it still pay to invest in higher education? Do two-parent households matter as much as they used to? Can children today expect to do better than their parents? Is a home still a good investment? Pick

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one area to explore in depth, narrow the topic as much as you can, and then gather facts that inform it by doing research, perhaps working collaboratively to expand your findings. Turn your investigation into a factual argument.

4. Since critic and writer Nicholas Carr first asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” many have answered with a resounding “yes,” arguing that extensive time online is reducing attention spans and leaving readers less critical than ever. Others have disagreed, saying that new technologies are doing just the opposite—expanding our brain power. Do some research on this controversy, on the Web or in the library, and consult with a wide range of people interested in the subject, perhaps gathering them together for a panel discussion. Then offer a factual argument based on what you uncover, reflecting the range of perspectives and opinions you have encountered.

Two Sample Factual Arguments

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Don’t Believe Facebook: The Demise of the Written Word Is Very Far Off

MICHAEL HILTZIK

June 17, 2016

Facebook executive Nicola Mendelsohn shook up the online-o-

sphere earlier this week with one of those offhand declarations

that sound superficially profound for a moment or two but are

vacuous at their core. In five years, she told a Fortune

conference in London, her platform will probably be “all

video,” and the written word will be essentially dead.

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“I just think if we look already, we’re seeing a year-on-year

decline on text,” she said. “If I was having a bet, I would say:

video, video, video.” That’s because “the best way to tell stories

in this world, where so much information is coming at us,

actually is video. It conveys so much more information in a

much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest

much more information.”

This is, of course, exactly wrong. We don’t mean her prediction

about Facebook; in that respect she’s talking her own book,

since Facebook has made a big commercial bet on video. It’s

her assertion that video conveys more information—and faster

—than text that’s upside-down.

We’ll outsource the initial pushback to Kevin Drum of Mother

Jones, who observes, “Video has many benefits, but

information density generally isn’t one of them. . . . I can read

the transcript of a one-hour speech in about five or 10 minutes

and easily pick out precisely what’s interesting and what’s not.

With video, I have to slog through the full hour.” That’s why his

policy is never to click a link that goes to video.

Drum’s most salient point applies to the definition of the

“information” people are seeking when they’re accessing video

or text. “I read/view stuff on the Web in order to gather actual

information that I can comment on,” he writes. Plainly, video is

hopelessly overmatched by text in conveying hard information

—facts, figures, data. A given video may arguably convey more

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“information” in bulk, but most of that is self-reinforcing

context—color, motion, sound. The underlying factual

information is relatively meager, in the same sense that the

energy capacity of an electric-car battery can’t match that of an

average gasoline fuel tank (the range of a fully charged Tesla

Model S is about 250 miles, while that of a typical gasoline-

fueled sedan can exceed 400).

Then there’s the challenge of extracting usable information

from video vs. text. Video is a linear medium: You have to allow

it to unspool frame by frame to glean what it’s saying. Text can

be absorbed in blocks; the eye searches for keywords or names

or other pointers such as quotation marks. Text is generally

searchable online. Some programs can convert some videos to

searchable form, but more often, the search is done via a

transcript keyed to points in the video. Here, for example, is the

full transcript of “Meet the Press” for May 29. Below is the video

of the entire show. If your task was to find the moment when

Chuck Todd first mentioned Trump University, which would

you use to find it? (We’re not even counting the five commercial

breaks.) [A video appears here in Hiltzik’s original text.]

Give up? It’s at about the 24:43 mark.

The demise of text is often predicted, but the horizon seems to

perpetually recede. Tech writer Tim Carmody puts his finger on

the reasons why “text is surprisingly resilient” in an essay at

Kottket.org: “It’s cheap, it’s flexible, it’s discreet. Human brains

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process it absurdly well considering there’s nothing really built-

in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can

spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or

necessity. And it’s endlessly computable—you can search it,

code it. . . . In short, all of the same technological advances that

enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR

entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see

more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up.”

He concludes that “nothing has proved as invincible as writing

and literacy. Because text is just so malleable. Because it fits

into any container we put it in. Because our world is

supersaturated in it, indoors and out. Because we have so much

invested in it. . . . Unless our civilization fundamentally

collapses, we will never give up writing and reading.”

In predicting a world overtaken by video, Mendelsohn seems to

be making a category error; she’s conflating visual with video.

Facebook and other online platforms understand that their

users are accessing their sites for their visual offerings, but

that’s not the same as saying they’re doing nothing but watching

clips.

That notion is contradicted by the findings of Oxford

University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in its

just-released Digital News Report for 2016.

The study found that most consumers of online news (59%) still

gravitate to news articles—that is, text; only 24% said they

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accessed news video in the week before they were polled. “One

surprise in this year’s data,” the report’s authors found, “is that

online news video appears to be growing more slowly than

might be expected.” The 24% figure “represents surprisingly

weak growth given the explosive growth and prominence on the

supply side.” In other words, there’s more video than ever

before, but it’s not attracting a commensurately large audience.

Why not? For the same reasons Drum mentioned:

They take too long to load and unspool, and extracting the

sought-after information is slower and more inconvenient than

reading the written word. The number-two complaint—“Pre-roll

ads put me off”—is another artifact of the linear nature of video,

compounded by the cleverness of video providers in forcing you

to watch through an entire ad, or three, before the clip even

starts.

The secret underlying Mendelsohn’s claim is that there is

something at which video is better than text: marketing.

The goal of advertising is not to impart information, but to keep

it from the audience—to distract viewers from thinking too hard

or asking questions. Video is ideal for that because that color,

movement, noise, and light is all distraction. Video is

entertainment, often of the empty-calorie variety. People love

circuses, but they don’t normally go there to study zoology.

Indeed, it seems that most of the articles (yes, articles) written

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about the coming dominance of video look at the phenomenon

from the marketer’s standpoint: “A recent campaign from

Volkswagen,” the Guardian reported last year, “saw a trio of its

videos viewed a combined 155 million times.” Here’s a safe bet:

those videos weren’t produced to explain why the car company

had been faking emissions data, but to entice viewers to buy

their cars. Mendelsohn, by the way, came to Facebook from the

advertising industry.

Certainly text and the written word will change to meet the

demands of the new technologies through which we do our

reading. That’s always been the case. Novels tended to be

structured as a series of cliffhangers when they were read in

monthly installments in a popular magazine; and in a different

narrative form when they began to be printed in books sized to

fit conveniently in a saddlebag, or valise, or before the

fireplace. The length of news articles began to shrink when the

reading audience began to migrate from newspapers that

arrived on the stoop in the morning and were kept around to be

perused at leisure, and toward smartphones and pads to be read

between elevator stops.

That’s a testament to the infinite malleability of text. Text can

conform to the relentless shrinkage of people’s attention spans;

video can’t. Who will have time in the future to watch even a

five-minute video, when they can learn so much more by

scanning five paragraphs of text? “Bet for better video, bet for

better speech, bet for better things we can’t imagine,” Carmody

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writes, “but if you bet against text, you will lose.”

Michael Hiltzik’s argument originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, where he is a columnist who ordinarily writes about financial issues. You’ll see that orientation in his reflections on why the written word will likely thrive in the digital era. The piece includes no endnotes, but we’ve underlined where the online text provides links to source materials.

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CHAPTER 9 Arguments of Definition

Everyone seems convinced that products like Amazon’s Alexa

and Apple’s Homekit are redefining the way people live in and

control their homes. But what exactly do these products do?

What defines them?

A panel of judges must decide whether computer-enhanced

images must be identified as such in a contest for landscape

photography. At what point is an electronically manipulated

image no longer a photograph—or does it even matter?

A conservative student group accuses the student government

on campus of sponsoring a lecture series featuring a

disproportionate number of “social justice warrior types.” A

spokesperson for the student government defends its program

by questioning whether the term actually means anything.

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Understanding Arguments of Definition Definitions matter. Just ask scientists, mathematicians,

engineers, judges—or people who want to use restrooms

consistent with their gender identification. Looking back, in

1996 the Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, the

Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage in

federal law this way:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of

any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various

administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States,

the word “marriage” means only a legal union between

one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the

word “spouse” refers only to a person of the opposite sex

who is a husband or a wife. 1 U.S.C. 7.

This decision and its definitions of marriage and spouse have

been challenged over and over again in the ensuing decades,

leading eventually to another Supreme Court decision, in the

summer of 2013, that declared DOMA unconstitutional. The

majority opinion, written by Justice Kennedy, found that the

earlier law was discriminatory and that it labeled same-sex

unions as “less worthy than the marriage of others.” In so

ruling, the court affirmed that the federal government cannot

differentiate between a “marriage” of heterosexuals and one of

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homosexuals. Debates over laws that involve definitions of

marriage and, more recently, gender are still ongoing, and you

might want to check the status of such controversies in your

own state.

Cases like these demonstrate that arguments of definition aren’t

abstract academic exercises: they often have important

consequences for ordinary people—that’s why farmers,

landowners, Congress, and the Environmental Protection

Agency have battled for decades over how that agency defines

“wetlands,” which Congress long ago gave it power to regulate.

And why it was so controversial when in Citizens United v.

Federal Election Commission (2010) the Supreme Court decided

that individuals in association—such as unions or corporations

—are equivalent to individual citizens when it comes to the

exercise of free speech rights and thus have no limit on their

spending in election campaigns. Opponents of the decision

argue that it enhances the power of monied interests in

American politics; others see it as affirming free speech in the

face of increasing government censorship.

Arguments about definition even sometimes decide what

someone or something is or can be. Such arguments can both

include or exclude: A wolf in Montana either is an endangered

species or it isn’t. An unsolicited kiss is or is not sexual

harassment. A person merits official political refugee status in

the United States or doesn’t. Another way of approaching

definitional arguments, however, is to think of what falls

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between is and is not in a definitional claim. In fact, many

definitional disputes occur in that murky realm.

Consider the controversy over how to define human

intelligence. Some argue that human intelligence is a capacity

that is measured by tests of verbal and mathematical reasoning.

In other words, it’s defined by IQ and SAT scores. Others define

intelligence as the ability to perform specific practical tasks.

Still others interpret intelligence in emotional terms as a

competence in relating to other people. Any of these positions

could be defended reasonably, but perhaps the wisest approach

would be to construct a definition of intelligence that is rich

enough to incorporate all these perspectives—and maybe more.

The fact is that crucial political, social, and scientific terms—

such as intelligence, justice, free speech, or gender—are

reargued, reshaped, and updated for the times.

Why not just consult a dictionary when the meanings of terms

are disputed? It doesn’t work that way, no matter how up to date

or authoritative a dictionary might be. In fact, dictionaries

(almost by definition!) inevitably reflect the way individual

groups of people use words at a specified time and place. And

like any form of writing, these reference books mirror the

interests and prejudices of their makers—as shown, perhaps

most famously, in the entries of lexicographer Samuel Johnson

(1709–1784), who gave the English language its first great

dictionary. No friend of the Scots, Johnson defined oats as “a

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grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in

Scotland supports the people.” (To be fair, he also defined

lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”)

Thus, it’s possible to disagree with dictionary definitions or to

regard them merely as starting points for arguments.

The Dictionary for Landlubbers defines words according to their point of view!

RESPOND● Briefly discuss how you might define the italicized terms in the

following controversial claims of definition. Compare your

definitions of the terms with those of your classmates.

Graphic novels can be serious literature.

Burning a nation’s flag is a hate crime.

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Neither Matt Drudge nor Rachel Maddow is a journalist.

College sports programs have become big businesses.

Plagiarism can be an act of civil disobedience.

The menus at Taco Bell and Panda Express illustrate cultural appropriation.

Satanism is a religion properly protected by the First Amendment.

The District of Columbia should not have all the privileges of an American state.

Polyamorists should have the option of marriage.

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Kinds of Definition Because there are various kinds of definitions, there are also

different ways to make a definition argument. Fortunately,

identifying a particular type of definition is less important than

appreciating when an issue of meaning is at stake. Let’s explore

some common definitional issues.

Formal Definitions Formal definitions are what you find in dictionaries. Such

definitions place a term in its proper genus and species—first

determining its class and then identifying the features or

criteria that distinguish it from other members of that class.

That sounds complicated, but an example will help you see the

principle. To define electric car, for example, you might first

place it in a general class—passenger vehicles. Then you define

its species. Here’s how the U.S. Department of Energy does that,

explaining specific differences between cars powered by

electricity (EVs):

Just as there are a variety of technologies available in

conventional vehicles, plug-in electric vehicles (also

known as electric cars or EVs) have different capabilities

that can accommodate different drivers’ needs. A major

feature of EVs is that drivers can plug them in to charge

from an off-board electric power source. This

distinguishes them from hybrid electric vehicles, which

supplement an internal combustion engine with battery

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power but cannot be plugged in.

Got that? It gets even more complicated (or precise) as the

government goes on to distinguish among plug-in hybrid

electric vehicles (PHEVs), all-electric vehicles (AEVs), battery

electric vehicles (BEVs), and even fuel cell electric vehicles

(FCEVs).

But all these definitional distinctions can actually make matters

clearer. For instance, suppose that you are considering a new

car and prefer an electric one this time. Quickly, the

definitional question becomes—what kind? A Toyota Prius, or

maybe a Tesla Model 3? How do they differ? Both are clearly

passenger cars—one might even add four-door sedans, so the

genus raises no question. But the Prius is an electrically assisted

version of a regular gasoline car while the Tesla is fully electric

—just battery and motor, no engine. That’s the species

difference, which obviously has consequences for consumers

concerned, let’s say, either about range or about CO emissions.

(Or maybe it just comes down to good looks?) 2

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Consider how Ben Schwartz defines funny in his response to claims of a “humor crisis” in America.

LINK TO Schwartz, “Shutting Up,” in Chapter 27

Tesla Model 3

Operational Definitions

Operational definitions identify an object or idea by what it

does or by what conditions create it. For example, someone’s

offensive sexual imposition on another person may not meet

the technical definition of harassment unless it is considered

unwanted, unsolicited, and repeated. These three conditions

then define what makes an act that might be acceptable in some

situations turn into harassment. But they might also then

become part of a highly contentious debate: were the conditions

actually present in a given case? For example, could an

offensive act be harassment if the accused believed sexual

interest was mutual and therefore solicited?

As you might imagine, arguments arise from operational

definitions whenever people disagree about what the conditions

define or whether these conditions have been fulfilled. Here are

some examples of those types of questions:

Questions Related to Conditions

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Can institutional racism occur in the absence of specific and individual acts of racism? Can people paid for their community service still be called volunteers? Does academic dishonesty occur if a student accepts wording suggested by a writing center tutor?

Questions Related to Fulfillment of Conditions

Has an institution supported traditions or policies that have led to widespread racial inequities? Was the compensation given to volunteers really “pay” or simply “reimbursement” for expenses? Did the student actually copy down what the tutor said with the intention of using it?

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Prince Charming considers whether an action would fulfill the conditions for an operational definition.

RESPOND● This chapter opens with three rhetorical situations that center on

definitional issues: What is Alexa? What is a photograph? What

defines a social justice warrior (SJW)? Select one of these situations,

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and then address it, using the strategies either of formal definitions

or of operational ones. For example, might a formal definition help

to explain what products like Alexa or Homekit are? (You may have

to do some quick research.) Would an operational definition work to

explain or defend what SJWs allegedly do or don’t do?

Definitions by Example Resembling operational definitions are definitions by example,

which define a class by listing its individual members. Such

definitions can be helpful when it is easier to illustrate or show

what related people or things have in common than to explain

each one in precise detail. For example, one might define the

broad category of virtual reality products by listing the major

examples of these items or define Libertarian Democrat by

naming politicians or thinkers associated with that title.

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An app like Discovr Music defines musical styles by example when it connects specific artists or groups to others who make similar sounds.

Arguments of this sort may focus on who or what may be

included in a list that defines a category—classic movies, worst

natural disasters, groundbreaking painters, acts of terror. Such

arguments often involve comparisons and contrasts with the

items that most readers would agree belong in this list. One

could ask why Washington, D.C., is denied the status of a state:

how does it differ from the fifty recognized American states? Or

one might wonder why the status of planet is denied to

asteroids, when both planets and asteroids are bodies that orbit

the sun. A comparison between planets and asteroids might

suggest that size is one essential feature of the eight recognized

planets that asteroids don’t meet. (In 2006, in a famous exercise

in definitional argument, astronomers decided to deny poor

Pluto its planetary classification.)

Negative Definitions Definitional arguments sometimes involve explaining what a

person, thing, or concept is by defining what it is not or

explaining with what it should be contrasted. Such strategies of

definition play a substantial role in politics today, as individuals

or political groups craft public images that show them in the

best light—as not radicals, not fascists, not Alt-Right, not Antifa,

not coastal elitists, not one-percenters, and so on. But this

strategy of argument has other uses as well, especially when a

writer wants to counter stereotypes or change expectations. For

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a thoughtful—and particularly apropos—example, see Rob

Jenkins’s “Defining the Relationship” at the end of this chapter.

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Legal scholar John Palfrey’s discussion of free speech on college campuses depends on the definition and limits of free expression.

LINK TO Palfrey, “Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces,” in Chapter 27

Developing a Definitional Argument

Definitional arguments don’t just appear out of the blue; they

often evolve from daily life. You might get into an argument

over the definition of ordinary wear and tear when you return a

rental car with some soiled upholstery. Or you might be asked

to write a job description for a new position to be created in

your workplace: you have to define the job position in a way

that doesn’t step on anyone else’s turf. Or maybe employees at

your school object to being defined as temporary workers when

they’ve held their same jobs for years. Or someone derides one

of your best friends as fake woke and you’re unsure how to read

the term. In a dozen ways every day, you encounter situations

that are questions of definition. They’re so inevitable that you

barely notice them for what they are.

Formulating Claims In addressing a question of definition, you’ll likely formulate a

tentative claim—a declarative statement that represents your

first response to such situations. Note that such initial claims

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usually don’t follow a single definitional formula.

Claims of Definition

A person paid to do public service is not a volunteer.

Institutional racism can exist—maybe even thrive—in the

absence of overt civil rights violations.

Climate change is not the same thing as global warming.

Political bias has been routinely practiced by some media

outlets.

Theatergoers shouldn’t confuse musicals with operas.

None of the statements listed here could stand on its own

because it likely reflects a first impression and gut reaction. But

that’s fine because making a claim of definition is typically a

starting point, a cocky moment that doesn’t last much beyond

the first serious rebuttal or challenge. Statements like these

aren’t arguments until they’re attached to reasons, data,

warrants, and evidence (see Chapter 7).

Finding good reasons to support a claim of definition usually

requires formulating a general definition by which to explore

the subject. To be persuasive, the definition must be broad and

not tailored to the specific controversy:

A volunteer is . . .

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Institutional racism is . . .

Climate change is . . . but global warming is . . .

Political bias is . . .

A musical is . . . but an opera is . . .

Now consider how the following claims might be expanded with

a general definition to become full-fledged definitional

arguments:

Arguments of Definition

Someone paid to do public service is not a volunteer

because volunteers are people who . . .

Institutional racism can exist even in the absence of overt

violations of civil rights because, by definition,

institutional racism is . . .

Climate change differs from global warming because . . .

Political bias in media outlets is evident whenever . . .

Musicals focus on words first while operas . . .

Notice, too, that some of the issues can involve comparisons

between things—such as operas and musicals.

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Crafting Definitions Imagine that you decide to tackle the concept of paid volunteer

in the following way:

Participants in the federal AmeriCorps program are not

really volunteers because they receive “education

awards” for their public service. Volunteers are people

who work for a cause without receiving compensation.

In Toulmin terms, as explained in Chapter 7, the argument

looks like this:

Claim Participants in AmeriCorps aren’t volunteers . . .

Reason . . . because they are paid for their service.

Warrant People who are compensated for their services are, ordinarily, employees.

As you can see, the definition of volunteers will be crucial to the

shape of the argument. In fact, you might think you’ve settled

the matter with this tight little formulation. But now it’s time to

listen to the readers over your shoulder (again, see Chapter 7),

who are pushing you further. Do the terms of your definition

account for all pertinent cases of volunteerism—in particular,

any related to the types of public service AmeriCorps members

might be involved in? What do you do with unpaid interns: how

do they affect your definition of volunteers? Consider, too, the

word cause in your original claim of the definition:

Volunteers are people who work for a cause without

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receiving compensation.

Cause has political connotations that you may or may not

intend. You’d better clarify what you mean by cause when you

discuss its definition in your paper. Might a phrase such as the

public good be a more comprehensive or appropriate substitute

for a cause? And then there’s the matter of compensation in the

second half of your definition:

Volunteers are people who work for a cause without

receiving compensation.

Aren’t people who volunteer to serve on boards, committees,

and commissions sometimes paid, especially for their

expenses? What about members of the so-called all-volunteer

military? They’re financially compensated during their years of

service, and they enjoy benefits after they complete their tours

of duty.

As you can see, you can’t just offer up a definition as part of an

argument and expect that readers will accept it. Every part of a

definition has to be interrogated, critiqued, and defended. So

investigate your subject in the library, on the Internet, and in

conversation with others, especially genuine experts if you can.

You might then be able to present your definition in a single

paragraph, or you may have to spend several pages coming to

terms with the complexity of the core issue.

After conducting research of this kind, you’ll be in a better

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position to write an extended definition that explains to your

readers what you believe makes a volunteer a volunteer, how to

identify institutional racism, or how to distinguish between a

musical and an opera.

Matching Claims to Definitions Once you’ve formulated a definition that readers will accept—a

demanding task in itself—you might need to look at your

particular subject to see if it fits your general definition. It

should provide evidence of one of the following:

It is a clear example of the class defined. It clearly falls outside the defined class. It falls between two closely related classes or fulfills some conditions of the defined class but not others. It defies existing classes and categories and requires an entirely new definition.

How do you make this key move in an argument? Here’s an

example from an article by Anthony Tommasini entitled

“Opera? Musical? Please Respect the Difference.” Early in the

piece, Tommasini argues that a key element separates the two

musical forms:

Both genres seek to combine words and music in

dynamic, felicitous and, to invoke that all-purpose term,

artistic ways. But in opera, music is the driving force; in

musical theater, words come first.

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This explains why for centuries opera-goers have revered

works written in languages they do not speak.

Tommasini’s claim of definition (or of difference) makes sense

because it clarifies aspects of the two genres.

If evidence you’ve gathered while developing an argument of

definition suggests that similar limitations may be necessary,

don’t hesitate to modify your claim. It’s amazing how often

seemingly cut-and-dried matters of definition become blurry—

and open to compromise and accommodation—as you learn

more about them. That has proved to be the case as various

campuses across the country have tried to define hate speech or

internship—tricky matters indeed. And even the Supreme Court

has never said exactly what pornography is. Just when matters

seem to be settled, new legal twists develop. Should virtual child

pornography created with software be illegal, as is the real

thing? Or is a virtual image—even a lewd one—an artistic

expression that is protected (as other works of art are) by the

First Amendment?

Considering Design and Visuals In thinking about how to present your argument of definition,

you may find a simple visual helpful, such as the Venn diagram

below from Wikimedia Commons that defines sustainability as

the place where our society and its economy intersect with the

environment. Such a visual might even suggest a structure for

an oral presentation.

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Remember too that visuals like photographs, charts, and graphs

can also help you make your case. Such items could

demonstrate that the conditions for a definition have been met

—for example, a widely circulated photograph of children in

Flint, Michigan, carrying bottled water (see p. 210) might define

crisis or civic collapse. Or you might create a graphic yourself to

illustrate a concept you are defining, perhaps through

comparison and contrast.

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Finally, don’t forget that basic design elements—such as

boldface and italics, headings, or links in online text—can

contribute to (or detract from) the credibility and

persuasiveness of your argument of definition. (See Chapter 14

for more on “Visual Rhetoric.”)

GUIDE to writing an argument of definition

● Finding a Topic

You’re entering an argument of definition when you:

formulate a controversial or provocative definition: Cultural appropriation is the disrespectful borrowing of the ideas, history, cultural achievements, dress, music, traditions, foods, or any other cultural artifacts of an exploited or marginalized group by a more powerful one.

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challenge a definition: For many Americans today, cultural appropriation is an idea that runs counter to the melting-pot ideal of American assimilation. try to determine whether something fits an existing definition: Dining at Taco Bell or Panda Express is (or is not) an act of cultural appropriation. seek to broaden an existing definition or create a new definition to accommodate wider or differing perspectives: In a world where cultural information is shared so fluidly via social media, it may be time to explore alternative representations of cultural appropriation.

Look for issues of definition in your everyday affairs—for instance, in the way that jobs are classified at work, that key terms are used in your academic major, that politicians visually represent social issues that concern you, and so on. Be especially alert to definitional arguments that arise when you or others deploy adjectives such as true, real, actual, or genuine: a true patriot, real reform, authentic Kombucha tea.

● Researching Your Topic

You can research issues of definition by using the following sources:

college dictionaries and encyclopedias unabridged dictionaries specialized reference works and handbooks, such as legal and medical dictionaries your textbooks (check their glossaries) Web articles and blogs that focus on particular topics, especially political ones community or advocacy groups focused on legal or social issues social media postings by experts you respect

Browse in your library reference room and use the electronic indexes

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and databases to determine how often disputed or contentious terms or phrases occur in influential online newspapers, journals, and Web sites.

When dealing with definitions, ask librarians about the most appropriate and reliable sources. For instance, to find the definition of a legal term, Black’s Law Dictionary or a database such as FindLaw may help. Check USA.gov for how the government defines terms.

● Formulating a Claim

After exploring your subject, try to formulate a thesis that lets readers know where you stand or what issues are at stake. Begin with the following types of questions:

questions related to genus: Is assisting in suicide a crime? questions related to species: Is marijuana a harmful addictive drug or a useful medical treatment? questions related to conditions: Must the imposition of sexual attention be both unwanted and unsolicited to be considered sexual harassment? questions related to fulfillment of conditions: Has our college kept in place traditions or policies that might embody forms of racial privilege? questions related to membership in a named class: Can a story put together out of thirty-one retweets be called a novel, or even a short story?

If you start with a thesis, it should be a complete statement that makes a claim of definition and states the reasons supporting it. You may later decide to separate the claim from its supporting reasons. But a working thesis should be a fully articulated thought that spells out all the details and qualifications: Who? What? Where? When? How many? How

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regularly? How completely?

However, since arguments of definition are often exploratory and tentative, an initial thesis (if you have one) may simply describe problems in formulating a particular definition: What we mean by X is likely to remain unsettled until we can agree more fully about Y and Z;

The key to understanding what constitutes X may lie in appreciating how

different groups approach Y and Z.

● Examples of Definitional Claims

Assisting a gravely ill person in committing suicide should not be considered murder when the motive for the act is to ease a person’s suffering and not to benefit from the death. Although somewhat addictive, marijuana should not be classified as a dangerous drug because it damages individuals and society less than heroin or cocaine and because it helps people with life- threatening diseases live more comfortably. Giving college admission preference to all racial minorities can be an example of class discrimination because such policies may favor middle- and upper-class students who are already advantaged. Attempts to define the concept of free speech need to take into account the way the term is understood in cultures worldwide, not just in the countries of Western Europe and North America.

● Preparing a Proposal

If your instructor asks you to prepare a proposal for your project, here’s a format that may help:

State your thesis or hypothesis completely. If you’re having trouble doing so, try outlining it in Toulmin terms:

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Claim:

Reason(s):

Warrant(s):

Alternatively, you might describe the complications of a definitional issue you hope to explore in your project, with the thesis perhaps coming later.

Explain why this argument of definition deserves attention. What’s at stake? Why is it important for your readers to consider? Identify whom you hope to reach through your argument and why these readers would be interested in it. How might you involve them in the paper? Briefly discuss the key challenges that you anticipate in preparing your argument. Determine what sources you expect to consult: Social media? Databases? Dictionaries? Encyclopedias? Periodicals? Determine what visuals to include in your definitional argument.

● Considering Genre and Media

Your instructor may specify that you use a particular genre. If not, ask yourself these questions to help you make a good choice:

What format is most appropriate for your argument of definition? Does it call for an academic essay, report, infographic, poster, or something else? What medium is most appropriate for your argument? Would it be best delivered orally to a live audience? Presented as an audio essay or podcast? Presented in print only or in print with illustrations?

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Will you need visuals, such as moving or still images, maps, graphs, charts—and what function will they play in your argument? Make sure they are not just “added on” but are necessary components of the argument.

● Thinking about Organization

An argument of definition is likely to include some of the following parts:

a claim involving a question of definition a general definition of some key concept a careful look at your subject in terms of that general definition evidence for every part of the argument, including visual evidence if appropriate a careful consideration of alternative views and counterarguments a conclusion drawing out the implications of the argument

It’s impossible, however, to predict what emphasis each of those parts might receive or what the ultimate shape of an argument of definition will be. Try to account for the ways people with different points of view will likely respond to your argument. Then, consider how to address such differences civilly in the body of your argument.

● Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Response

Your instructor may assign you to a group for the purpose of reading and responding to each other’s drafts. If not, ask for responses from serious readers or consultants at a writing center. Use the following questions to evaluate a colleague’s draft. Be sure to illustrate your comments with examples; specific comments help more than general observations.

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The Claim

Is the claim clearly an issue of definition? Is the claim significant enough to interest readers? Are clear and specific criteria established for the concept being defined? Do the criteria define the term adequately? Using this definition, could most readers identify what’s being defined and distinguish it from other related concepts?

Evidence for the Claim

Is enough evidence furnished to explain or support the definition? If not, what kind of additional evidence is needed? Is the evidence in support of the claim simply announced, or are its significance and appropriateness analyzed? Is a more detailed discussion needed? Are all the conditions of the definition met in the concept being examined? Are any objections readers might have to the claim, criteria, evidence, or way the definition is formulated adequately addressed? Have you represented other points of view completely and fairly? What kinds of sources are cited? How credible and persuasive will they be to readers? What other kinds of sources might work better? Are all quotations introduced with appropriate signal phrases (such as “As Tyson argues, . . .”) and blended smoothly into the writer’s sentences? Are all visual sources labeled, introduced, and commented upon?

Organization and Style

How are the parts of the argument organized or presented? Is this organization effective? Will readers understand the relationships among the claims,

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supporting reasons, warrants, and evidence? If not, how might those connections be clearer? Does every visual serve a clear purpose? Are more transitions (verbal or visual) needed? Would headings help? Are the transitions or links from point to point, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph clear and effective? If not, how could they be improved? Are all visuals (or other elements such as audio or video clips) carefully integrated into the text? Is each visual introduced and commented on to point out its significance? If your argument of definition is an academic essay, is each visual labeled as a figure or a table and given a caption as well as a citation? Is the style suited to the subject? Is it too formal, casual, or technical? Can it be improved? Which sentences seem effective? Which ones seem weaker, and how could they be improved? Should short sentences be combined, and any longer ones be broken up? How effective are the paragraphs? Too short or too long? How can they be improved? Which words or phrases seem effective? Do any seem vague or inappropriate for the audience or the writer’s purpose? Are technical or unfamiliar terms defined?

Spelling, Punctuation, Mechanics, Documentation, and Format

Are there any errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like? Is the documentation appropriate and consistent? (See Chapter 22.) Does the paper or project follow an appropriate format? Is it appropriately designed and attractively presented?

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PROJECTS●

1. Write an argument of definition about a term such as fake news or intersectionality that has suddenly become culturally significant or recently changed in some important way. Either defend the way the term has come to be defined or raise questions about its appropriateness, offensiveness, accuracy, and so on. Consider words or expressions such as Antifa, big data, deep state, disruptive technology, Islamophobia, machine learning, marginalization, white nationalist, etc.

2. Write an essay in which you compare or contrast the meaning of two related terms, explaining the differences between them by using one or more methods of definition: formal definition, operational definition, definition by example. Be clever in your choice of the initial terms: look for a pairing in which the differences might not be immediately apparent to people unfamiliar with how the terms are used in specific communities. Consider terms such as liberal/progressive, classy/cool, lead soprano/prima donna, student athlete/jock, highbrow/intellectual, manual laborer/blue collar worker, babysitter/nanny, and so on.

3. In an essay at the end of this chapter, Natasha Rodriguez explores the adjective underprivileged, trying to understand why this label bothers her so much. She concludes that needing financial aid should not be conflated with being disadvantaged. After reading this selection carefully, respond to Rodriguez’s argument in an argument of definition of your own—either an academic essay or a multimodal presentation, combining various media such as audio, video, posters, etc. Alternatively, explore a concept similar to “underprivileged”

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with the same intensity that Rodriguez brings to her project. Look for a term to define and analyze either from your major or from an area of interest to you.

4. Because arguments of definition can have such important consequences, it helps to develop one by first getting input from lots of “stakeholders,” that is, from people or groups likely to be affected by any change in the way a term is defined. Working with a small group, identify a term in your school or wider community that might need a fresh formulation or a close review. It could be a familiar campus word or phrase such as nontraditional student, diversity, scholastic dishonesty, or social justice; or it may be a term that has newly entered the local environment, perhaps reflecting an issue of law enforcement, safety, transportation, health, or even entertainment. Once you have settled on a significant term, identify a full range of stakeholders. Then, through some systematic field research (interviews, questionnaires) or by examining existing documents and materials (such as library sources, Web sites, pamphlets, publications), try to understand how the term currently functions in your community. Your definitional argument will, in effect, be what you can learn about the meanings that word or phrase has today for a wide variety of people.

Two Sample Definitional Arguments

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Defining the Relationship

ROB JENKINS

August 9, 2016

Dear Students: I think it’s time we had the talk. You know, the

one couples who’ve been together for a while sometimes have

to review boundaries and expectations? Your generation calls

this “DTR”—short for “defining the relationship.”

We definitely need to define our relationship because, first of

all, it is a long-term relationship—maybe not between you and

me, specifically, but between people like you (students) and

people like me (professors). And, second, it appears to need

some defining, or redefining. I used to think the boundaries and

expectations were clear on both sides, but that no longer seems

to be the case.

The truth is, I wonder if college students today truly understand

the nature of their relationship to professors. Perhaps their

experiences with other authority figures—high-school teachers,

parents, and bosses—have led them to make assumptions that

aren’t quite accurate. Or perhaps students are just not too

thrilled with authority figures in general. That’s always been the

case, to some extent. But it seems to me, after 31 years of

college teaching, that the lines have grown blurrier, the

misconceptions more profound.

So I’d like to take a few moments to define the professor-student

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relationship. And if no one has ever put it to you quite this way

before—well, that just highlights the need for a DTR.

And by the way, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to

offend you or tick you off. I actually like you quite a bit, or I

wouldn’t even bother having this discussion.

I don’t work for you. Students (or their parents), when they’re

unhappy with something I’ve said or done, occasionally try

throwing this line in my face: “You work for me.” They mean

that by paying tuition and taxes, they pay my salary and I

should, therefore, be responsive in the way they desire.

Let’s dismiss that old canard right off the bat. Yes, as a

professor at a state institution, I am a public employee. But

that’s precisely the point: I’m employed by the college and by

the public, not by any particular member of the public. My duty

—to the institution and to the people of this state—is to ensure

that students in my courses meet the standards set by the

college’s faculty and are well-prepared for further study and for

life.

You’re not a customer, and I’m not a clerk. Unfortunately, too

many students have been told for too long that they are

“customers” of the institution—which means, of course, that

they’re always right. Right?

Wrong. This is not Wal-Mart. You are not a customer, and I

don’t even own a blue smock. Our relationship is much more

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like that of doctor and patient. My only obligation: to tell you

what you need to hear (not what you want to hear) and to do

what I think is best (not what you think is best).

I’m not a cable network or streaming site. What you get out of

this relationship is that you'll be better equipped to succeed in

this and other college courses, and life in general. What I get is

a great deal of professional and personal satisfaction.

Natives of today’s social-media-fueled digital universe have

come to expect that everything they want will be available

whenever they want it, on demand. That includes, or ought to

include, their professors. I mean, we have email, don’t we? And

cellphones?

Consider this official notice that I have opted out of the on-

demand world. My office hours are listed on my syllabus. If for

some reason I can’t be in my office during those hours, I’ll let

you know beforehand if possible or post a note on my door. But

I’m usually there.

As for email, yes, I have it and I check it often, but not

constantly. I do have a life outside this classroom—a wife, kids,

hobbies, other professional obligations. That’s why I don’t give

out my private cell number. If you need me after hours, email

me and I’ll probably see it and respond within 24 to 48 hours.

I’m not a high-school teacher. A common refrain among first-

year college students is, “But my high-school teacher said. . . .”

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Those teachers did their best to prepare you for college and tell

you what to expect. Unfortunately, some of their information

was outdated or just plain wrong. For example, not every essay

has exactly five paragraphs, and it’s OK, in certain situations, to

begin a sentence with “because.” One of the main differences

between them and me is that I’m not telling you how you’re

going to do things “once you get to college.” This is college, and

this is how we do things.

Plus, because of something called “academic freedom,” which

most college professors enjoy but most high-school teachers

don’t, I’m not nearly as easy to intimidate when you think you

deserved an A. I’m sure you (or your parents) would never

dream of trying anything like that, but I thought I’d go ahead

and mention it, just in case.

I’m not your boss. Please don’t misunderstand: I don’t take a

“my way or the highway” approach to teaching. In my view,

that’s not what education, and certainly not higher education, is

all about. I’m here to help you learn. Whether you choose to

accept that help—ultimately, whether you choose to learn

anything—is up to you.

My role is not to tell you what to do, like your shift manager at

the fast-food restaurant. Rather, I will provide information,

explain how to do certain things, and give you regular

assignments and assessments designed to help you internalize

that knowledge and master those skills. Internalizing and

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mastering are your responsibility. I can’t “fire” you, any more

than you can get me fired. But I can and will evaluate the quality

and timeliness of your work, and that evaluation will be

reflected in your final grade.

I’m not your parent. Some of my colleagues (especially among

the administration) believe the institution should act “in loco

parentis,” which means “in the place of a parent.” In other

words, when you’re away from your parents, we become your

parents.

I’ve never really subscribed to that theory, at least not in the

classroom. I suppose there are certain areas of the college, like

student services, that have some parental-like obligation to

students. But as a professor, I don’t. And what that means, more

than anything else, is that I’m not going to treat you like a child.

I’m not your BFF. When I first started teaching, I was only a few

years older than many of my students. It was tempting, at times,

to want to be friends with some of them. I occasionally

struggled to maintain an appropriate professional distance.

Not anymore. I’ve been doing this for a while now—over 30

years—and I’m no longer young. (Sadly, I’m no longer mistaken

for a student, either.) I try to be friendly and approachable, but

if by “friendly” you think I mean “someone to hang out with,” I

don’t. I regret that we cannot actually be friends.

That applies to virtual friendship, too. Even if you happen to

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track me down on Facebook, I will not accept your friend

request. You’re welcome to follow me on Twitter, if you like, but

I won’t follow you back. And I don’t do Instagram or Snapchat

or, um, whatever else there is.

I’m not your adversary. Just because we’re not best buds,

please don’t think I’m your enemy. Nothing could be further

from the truth. In fact, if by “friend” you mean someone who

cares about your well-being and success, then I guess I am a

friend after all.

Yet there is always a degree of tension in the student-professor

relationship. You may at times feel that I am behaving in an

adversarial manner—questioning the quality and relevance of

your work, making judgments that you perceive as negative.

Understand that is only because I do want you to succeed. It’s

not personal, on my end, and you must learn not to take it

personally.

I’d like to be your partner. More than anything, I’d like for us to

form a mutually beneficial alliance in this endeavor we call

education.

I pledge to do my part. I will:

Stay abreast of the latest ideas in my field. Teach you what I believe you need to know, with all the enthusiasm I possess. Invite your comments and questions and respond

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constructively. Make myself available to you outside of class (within reason). Evaluate your work carefully and return it promptly with feedback. Be as fair, respectful, and understanding as I can humanly be. If you need help beyond the scope of this course, I will do my best to provide it or see that you get it.

In return, I expect you to:

Show up for class each day or let me know (preferably in advance) if you have some good reason to be absent. Do your reading and other assignments outside of class and be prepared for each class meeting. Focus during class on the work we’re doing and not on extraneous matters (like whoever or whatever is on your phone at the moment). Participate in class discussions. Be respectful of your fellow students and their points of view. In short, I expect you to devote as much effort to learning as I devote to teaching.

What you get out of this relationship is that you’ll be better

equipped to succeed in this and other college courses, work-

related assignments, and life in general. What I get is a great

deal of professional and personal satisfaction. Because I do

really like you guys and want the best for you.

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All in all, that’s not a bad deal. It’s a shame more relationships

aren’t like ours.

Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Georgia State University– Perimeter College and a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education, where this argument was published.

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CHAPTER 10 Evaluations

“We don’t want to go there for coffee. Their beans aren’t fair

trade, the drinks are high in calories, and the stuff is way

overpriced.”

The campus storytelling project has just won a competition

sponsored by NPR, and everyone involved is thrilled. Then they

realize that this year all but one of the leaders of this project will

graduate and that they have very few new recruits. So they put

their heads together to figure out what qualities they need in

new recruits that will help maintain the excellence of their

project.

Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane is playing at the

Student Union for only one more night, but the new Marvel

Avengers epic is featured across the street in 3-D. Guess which

movie your roomie wants to see? You intend to set her straight.

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Understanding Evaluations Evaluations are everyday arguments. By the time you leave

home in the morning, you’ve likely made a dozen informal

evaluations: You’ve selected neat but informal clothes because

you have a job interview with a manufacturing company

looking for machinists. You’ve chosen low-fat yogurt and fruit

over the pancakes you really love. You’ve queued up the perfect

playlist on your iPhone for your hike to campus. In each case,

you’ve applied criteria to a particular problem and then made a

decision. That’s evaluating on the fly.

Some professional evaluations require more elaborate

standards, evidence, and paperwork (imagine an aircraft

manufacturer certifying a new jet for passenger service), but

they don’t differ structurally from the simpler choices that

people make all the time. People love to voice their opinions,

and they always have. In fact, a mode of ancient rhetoric—

called the ceremonial or epideictic (see Chapter 1)—was devoted

entirely to speeches of praise and blame.

Today, rituals of praise and (mostly) blame are a significant part

of American life. Adults who would choke at the notion of

debating causal or definitional claims will happily spend hours

appraising the Oakland Raiders, Boston Red Sox, or Pittsburgh

Penguins. Other evaluative spectacles in our culture include

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awards shows, late-night comedy shows, most-valuable-player

presentations, lists of best-dressed or worst-dressed celebrities,

literary prizes, consumer product magazines, and—the ultimate

formal public gesture of evaluation—elections. Indeed, making

evaluations is a form of entertainment in America and

generates big audiences (think of The Voice) and revenues.

Arguments about sports are usually evaluations of some kind.

RESPOND● The last ten years have seen a proliferation of “reality” talent shows

around the world—Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can

Dance, American (or Canadian or Australian or many other) Idol,

America’s Got Talent, The Voice, and so on. Write a short opinion

piece assessing the merits of a particular “talent” show. What

should a proper event of this kind accomplish? Does the event

you’re reviewing do so?

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Criteria of Evaluation Arguments of evaluation can produce simple rankings and

winners or can lead to profound decisions about our lives, but

they always involve standards. The particular standards we

establish for judging anything—whether a political candidate,

consumer product, work of art, or career strategy—are called

criteria of evaluation. Sometimes criteria are self-evident: a

truck that gets nine miles per gallon is a gas hog, and a piece of

fish that smells even a little off shouldn’t be eaten. But criteria

get complicated when a subject is abstract: What constitutes a

fair wage? What are the qualities of a classic song? What makes

an event worthy of news coverage? Struggling to identify such

amorphous criteria of evaluation can lead to important insights

into your values, motives, and preferences.

Why make such a big deal about criteria when many acts of

evaluation seem effortless? Because we should be suspicious of

opinions we offer too casually. Spontaneous quips and snap

judgments can’t carry the same weight as well-informed and

well-argued opinions. Serious evaluations require reflection,

and when we look deeply into our judgments, we sometimes

discover important questions that typically go unasked, many

prefaced by why:

You challenge the grade you received in a course, but you don’t question the practice of grading. You argue passionately that a Democratic Congress is better for America than a Republican one, but you fail to consider

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why voters get only two choices. You argue that news coverage is biased, but it doesn’t occur to you to ask what makes an event worthy of news coverage.

Push an argument of evaluation hard enough and even simple

judgments become challenging and intriguing.

In fact, for many writers, grappling with criteria is the toughest

step in producing an evaluation. When you offer an opinion

about a topic you know well, readers ought to learn something

from your argument. So you need to formulate and then justify

the criteria for your opinions, whatever the subject.

Do you think, for instance, that you could explain what (if

anything) makes a veggie burger good? Though many people

have eaten veggie burgers, they probably haven’t spent much

time thinking about them. Moreover it wouldn’t be enough

merely to assert that a proper one should be juicy or tasty—such

observations are trite, uninteresting, and obvious. The

following criteria offered on the Cook’s Illustrated Web site

show what happens when experts give the matter their at-

tention:

We wanted to create veggie burgers that even meat

eaters would love. We didn’t want them to taste like

hamburgers, but we did want them to act like

hamburgers, having a modicum of chew, a harmonious

blend of savory ingredients, and the ability to go from

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grill to bun without falling apart. [emphasis added]

—Cook’s Illustrated

After a lot of experimenting, Cook’s Illustrated came up with a

recipe that met these criteria.

What criteria of evaluation are embedded in this visual argument?

Criteria of evaluation aren’t static, either. They may evolve over

time depending upon audience. Much market research, for

example, is designed to find out what particular consumers

want now or may want in the future—what their criteria are for

choosing a product or service. In good economic times, people

may demand homes with soaring entryways, lots of space, and

premium appliances. In tougher times, they may care more

about quality insulation and energy-efficient stoves and

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dishwashers. Shifts in values, attitudes, and criteria happen all

the time.

Criteria can also reveal biases we hardly notice. In a Current

Affairs column (July 28, 2017), Nathan J. Robinson, citing a 2007

study featured on the Our World In Data Web site, argues that

we are blind to an especially insidious omission in mainstream

American news coverage—the unspoken and often racially

motivated criteria networks use to decide what merits public

attention at all. Robinson contends that only “the purest kind of

subconscious prejudice” is at work in determining whose death

is worth reporting. Looking closely at 700,000 major network

news stories, the researchers found that

the loss of 1 European life was equivalent to the loss of 45

African lives, in terms of the amount of coverage

generated. Deaths in Europe and the Americas were

given tens of times more weight than Asian, African, and

Pacific lives.

Robinson is clearly asking news providers and consumers alike

to reconsider how they evaluate newsworthiness.

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A graph from the Our World In Data Web site shows significant disparities in news coverage given to loss of life in different parts of the world.

RESPOND● Choose one item from the following list that you understand well

enough to evaluate (or choose a category of your own). Develop

several criteria of evaluation that you could defend to distinguish

excellence from mediocrity in the area. Then choose an item that

you don’t know much about and explain the research you might do

to discover reasonable criteria of evaluation for it.

smartwatches

NFL quarterbacks

social media sites

TV journalists

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video games

virtual reality products

Navajo rugs

U.S. vice presidents

organic vegetables

electric cars

spoken word poetry

specialty coffee

country music bands

superhero films

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Characterizing Evaluation One way of understanding evaluative arguments is to consider

the types of evidence they use. A distinction explored in

Chapter 4 between hard evidence and constructed arguments

based on reason is helpful here: we defined hard evidence as

facts, statistics, testimony, and other kinds of arguments that

can be measured, recorded, or even found—the so-called

smoking gun in a criminal investigation. We defined

constructed arguments based on reason as those that are

shaped by language and various kinds of logic.

We can talk about arguments of evaluation the same way,

looking at some as quantitative and others as qualitative.

Quantitative arguments of evaluation employ criteria that can

be measured, counted, or demonstrated in some mechanical

fashion (something is taller, faster, smoother, quieter, or more

powerful than something else). In contrast, qualitative

arguments rely on criteria that must be explained through

language and media, alluding to such matters as values,

traditions, and emotions (something is more ethical, more

beneficial, more handsome, or more noble than something

else). A claim of evaluation might be supported by arguments of

both sorts.

Quantitative Evaluations At first glance, quantitative evaluations seem to hold all the

cards, especially in a society as enamored of science and

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technology as our own is. Making judgments should be easy if

all it involves is measuring and counting—and in some cases,

that’s the way things work out. Who’s the tallest or oldest or

loudest person in your class? If your classmates allow

themselves to be measured, you could find out easily enough,

using the right equipment and internationally sanctioned

standards of measurement—the meter, the calendar, or the

decibel.

But what if you were to ask, Who’s the smartest person in class?

You could answer this more complex question quantitatively,

using IQ tests or college entrance examinations that report

results numerically. In fact, almost all college-bound students

in the United States submit to this kind of evaluation, taking

either the SAT or the ACT to demonstrate their verbal and

mathematical prowess. Such measures are widely accepted by

educators and institutions, but they are also vigorously

challenged. What do they actually measure? They predict likely

academic success only in college, which is one kind of

intelligence. As you might guess, quantitative measures of

evaluation have limits. Devised to measure only certain criteria

and ignore others, they have an inevitably limited perspective.

And yet quantitative evaluations may still be full of insight. For

example, even if you are not concerned with finding a mate at

this point, you might be interested to know what people are

looking for in a potential partner. Good looks? Of course—

according to a Business Wire story, 51 percent of the people on

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online dating services value attractiveness in a potential mate.

Others look for modesty (39 percent), ambition (50 percent),

and a sense of humor (67 percent). But what trumps all these

qualities is something you might not have thought much about

at this point: your credit rating. Fully 69 percent of those

surveyed thought a good credit score was important or very

important in considering whom they might date. An odd

criterion? Not at all. Dr. Helen Fischer, chief scientific advisor

for Match.com, explains why:

When it comes to dating, a good credit score ups your

mate value, helping you win a responsible, long-term

partner, more so than some other qualities that online

daters might highlight on their profile. Money talks, but

your credit score can speak more about who you are as a

person, and singles agree that those with good credit

tend to be conscientious and reliable.

—“Online Daters Say a Good Credit Score Is More

Attractive Than a Fancy Car,” Business Wire, August 21,

2017

Something to remember when your next credit card bill comes

due?

Qualitative Evaluations Many issues of evaluation that are closest to people’s hearts

aren’t subject to quantification. What makes a movie great or

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significant? If you suggested a quantitative measure like length,

your friends would probably hoot, “Get serious!” But what about

box-office receipts, adjusted for inflation? Would films that

made the most money—an easily quantifiable measure—be the

“best pictures”? That select group would include movies such as

Star Wars, The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, Titanic,

Avatar, and E.T. An interesting group of films—but the best?

To define the criteria for “significant movie,” you’d more likely

look for the standards and evidence that serious critics explore

in their arguments, abstract or complicated issues such as their

societal impact, cinematic technique, dramatic structures,

intelligent casting, and so on. Most of these markers of quality

could be defined or identified with some precision but not

actually measured or counted. You’d also have to make your

case rhetorically, convincing the audience to accept the

benchmarks of quality you are offering and yet appreciating

that they might not.

Indeed, a movie reviewer (or anyone else) making strong

qualitative judgments might spend as much time defending

criteria of evaluation as providing evidence that these standards

are present in a particular film. And putting those standards

into action can be what makes a review attention getting or,

even better, worth reading. Here’s a paragraph from Mehera

Bonner, an entertainment editor for Marie Claire who is not shy

about applying a feminist perspective to Christopher Nolan’s

World War II epic Dunkirk (2017), depicting the evacuation of

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more than 300,000 allied soldiers trapped by German forces on

the coast of France at the outset of the conflict:

[M]y main issue with Dunkirk is that it’s so clearly

designed for men to man-out over. And look, it’s not like I

need every movie to have “strong female leads.” Wonder

Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and

I understand that this war was dominated by brave male

soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the

general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it

just screams “men-only”—and specifically seems to cater

to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love

nothing more than to explain to me why I’m wrong about

not liking it. . . . [T]o me, Dunkirk felt like an excuse for

men to celebrate maleness.

—Mehera Bonner, “I Think Dunkirk Was Mediocre at

Best, and It’s Not Because I’m Some Naïve Woman Who

Doesn’t Get It”

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Web sites such as Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes offer recommendations for films based on users’ past selections and the ratings of other users and critics. Sometimes those judgments are at odds. Then whom do you trust?

RESPOND● For examples of powerful evaluation arguments, search the Web for

eulogies or obituaries of famous, recently deceased individuals. Try

to locate at least one such item, and then analyze the types of

claims it makes about the accomplishments of the deceased. What

types of criteria of evaluation hold the obituary or eulogy together?

Why should we respect or admire the person?

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Developing an Evaluative Argument Developing an argument of evaluation can seem like a simple

process, especially if you already know what your claim is likely

to be. To continue the movie theme for one more example:

Citizen Kane is likely the finest film ever made by an

American director.

Having established a claim, you would then explore the

implications of your belief, drawing out the reasons, warrants,

and evidence that might support it:

Claim Citizen Kane is the finest film ever made by an American director . . .

Reason . . . because it revolutionizes the way we see the world.

Warrant Great films change viewers in fundamental ways.

Evidence Shot after shot, Citizen Kane presents the life of its protagonist through cinematic images that viewers can never forget.

The warrant here is, in effect, an implied statement of criteria—

in this case, the quality that defines “great film” for the writer. It

may be important for the writer to share that assumption with

readers and perhaps to identify other great films that similarly

make viewers appreciate new perspectives.

As you can see, in developing an evaluative argument, you’ll

want to pay special attention to criteria, claims, and evidence.

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What criteria does Deanna Hartley use in evaluating what makes some candidates more successful than others in how they use social media during a job search?

LINK TO Hartley, “Creative Ways to Get Noticed by Employers on Social Media,” in Chapter 26

Formulating Criteria

Although even casual evaluations (This band sucks!) might be

traced to reasonable criteria, most people don’t defend their

positions until they are challenged (Oh yeah?). Writers who

address readers with whom they share core values rarely

discuss their criteria in great detail. Similarly, critics with

established reputations in their fields aren’t expected to restate

all their principles every time they write reviews. They assume

audiences will—over time—come to appreciate their standards.

Indeed, the expertise they command becomes a part of their

persuasive ethos (see Chapter 3). Still, criteria can make or

break a piece.

So spend time developing your criteria of evaluation. What

exactly makes a shortstop an all-star? What marks a

standardized test as an unreliable measure of intelligence?

What distinguishes an inspired rapper from a run-of-the-mill

one? In cases like these, list the possibilities and then pare them

down to the essential qualities. If you propose vague, dull, or

unsupportable principles, expect to be challenged.

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You’re most likely to be vague about your beliefs when you

haven’t thought, read, or experienced enough about your

subject. Push yourself at least as far as you imagine readers will.

Anticipate readers looking over your shoulder, asking difficult

questions. Say, for example, that you intend to argue that

anyone who wants to stay on the cutting edge of personal

technology will obviously want Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro

because it does so many amazing things. But what does that

mean exactly? What makes the device “amazing”? Is it that it

offers the flexibility of a touch screen, boasts an astonishing

high-resolution screen, and gives artists the ability to draw with

a stylus? These are particular features of the device. But can you

identify a more fundamental quality to explain the product’s

appeal, such as a Surface user’s experience, enjoyment, or

productivity? You’ll often want to raise your evaluation to a

higher level of generality like this so that your appraisal of a

product, book, performance, or political figure works as a

coherent argument, and not just as a list of random

observations.

Be certain, too, that your criteria of evaluation apply to more

than just your topic of the moment. Your standards should

make sense on their own merits and apply across the board. If

you tailor your criteria to get the outcome you want, you are

doing what is called “special pleading.” You might be pleased

when you prove that the home team is awesome, but it won’t

take skeptics long to figure out how you’ve cooked the books.

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Food blogger Jess Kapadia makes a strong evaluative claim when she asserts that, for example, the best Indian food she ever ate was not in India but in Singapore.

LINK TO Kapadia, “I Still Don’t Understand the Cultural Appropriation of Food,” in Chapter 24

RESPOND● Local news and entertainment magazines often publish “best of”

issues or articles that catalog their readers’ and editors’ favorites in

such categories as “best place to go on a first date,” “best ice cream

sundae,” and “best dentist.” Sometimes the categories are specific:

“best places to say ‘I was retro before retro was cool’” or “best

movie theater seats.” Imagine that you’re the editor of your own

local magazine and that you want to put out a “best of” issue

tailored to your hometown. Develop five categories for evaluation.

For each category, list the evaluative criteria that you would use to

make your judgment. Next, consider that because your criteria are

warrants, they’re especially tied to audience. (The criteria for “best

dentist,” for example, might be tailored to people whose major

concern is avoiding pain, to those whose children will be regular

patients, or to those who want the cheapest possible dental care.)

For several of the evaluative categories, imagine that you have to

justify your judgments to a completely different audience. Write a

new set of criteria for that audience.

Making Claims

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In evaluations, claims can be stated directly or, more rarely,

strongly implied. For most writers, strong and specific

statements followed by reasonable qualifications work best.

Consider the differences between the following three claims

and how much greater the burden of proof is for the first claim:

J. R. R. Tolkien is the best writer of fantasy ever.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a better fantasy

series than J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, even for

children.

For most readers, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the

King offers, arguably, a more profound examination of

evil than J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly

Hallows.

Here’s a second set of examples demonstrating the same

principle, that knowledgeable qualifications generally make a

claim of evaluation easier to deal with and smarter:

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recent suggestion for a

new graduation requirement for high school seniors in

his city sure is dumb!

A proposal by Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago that

students in his city’s schools not receive high school

diplomas unless they’ve been admitted to college, joined

the military, or are already employed, might do more

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harm than good.

While praiseworthy in its goal to make high school

seniors think about their futures, Mayor Emanuel’s

proposed graduation requirement might force many

working-class students into making the wrong choices—

going to trade school, joining the military, enrolling in

second-rate online schools—just to claim a high school

diploma they’ve already earned.

The point of qualifying theses like these isn’t to make evaluative

claims bland but to make them responsible and reasonable.

Consider how Reagan Tankersley uses the criticisms of a

musical genre he enjoys to frame an assertion he makes in its

defense:

Structurally, dubstep is a simple musical form, with

formulaic progressions and beats, something that gives a

musically tuned ear little to grasp or analyze. For this

reason, a majority of traditionally trained musicians find

the genre to be a waste of time. These people have a

legitimate position. . . . However, I hold that it is the

simplicity of dubstep that makes it special: the primal

nature of the song is what digs so deeply into fans. It

accesses the most primitive area in our brains that

connects to the uniquely human love of music.

—Reagan Tankersley, “Dubstep: Why People Dance”

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Tankersley doesn’t pretend that dubstep is a subtle or

sophisticated musical form, nor does he expect his argument to

win over traditionally minded critics. Yet he still makes a claim

worth considering.

Dubstep band Dope D.O.D. performing live in Moscow in 2015

One tip: Nothing adds more depth to an opinion than letting

others challenge it. When you can, use the resources of the

Internet or local discussion boards to get responses to your

opinions or topic proposals. It can be eye-opening to realize

how strongly people react to ideas or points of view that you

regard as perfectly normal. Share your claim and then, when

you’re ready, your first draft with friends, classmates, or tutors

at the writing center, asking them to identify places where your

ideas need additional support, either in the discussion of

criteria or in the presentation of evidence.

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Presenting Evidence Generally, the more evidence in an evaluation the better,

provided that the evidence is relevant. For example, in

evaluating the performance of two laptops, the speed of their

processors would be essential; the quality of their keyboards or

the availability of service might be less crucial yet still worth

mentioning. But you have to decide how much detail your

readers want in your argument. For technical subjects, you

might make your basic case briefly and then attach additional

supporting documents at the end—tables, graphs, charts—for

those who want more data.

Just as important as relevance in selecting evidence is

presentation. Not all pieces of evidence are equally convincing,

nor should they be treated as such. Select evidence that is most

likely to influence your readers, and then arrange the argument

to build toward your strongest points. In most cases, that best

material will be evidence that’s specific, detailed, memorable,

and derived from credible sources. The following example

comes from a celebratory defense of art and artists by musician,

songwriter, and producer T Bone Burnett, delivered at the 2016

AmericanaFest music festival in Nashville. The energy of his

language and the memorable examples likely solidify the case

that music is foundational to the American mythology:

This is the story of the United States: a kid walks out of

his home with a song and nothing else, and conquers the

world. We have replicated that phenomenon over and

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over: Elvis Presley, … Rosetta Tharpe, Johnny Cash,

Howlin Wolf, Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane,

Billie Holiday.

—T Bone Burnett, Nashville, TN, September 22, 2016

T Bone Burnett gave the keynote speech at the AmericanaFest (Americana Music Festival & Conference) in Nashville.

In evaluation arguments, don’t be afraid to concede a point

when evidence goes contrary to the overall claim you wish to

make. If you’re really skillful, you can even turn a problem into

an argumentative asset, as Bob Costas does in acknowledging

the flaws of baseball great Mickey Mantle in the process of

praising him:

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None of us, Mickey included, would want to be held to

account for every moment of our lives. But how many of

us could say that our best moments were as magnificent as his?

—Bob Costas, “Eulogy for Mickey Mantle”

Considering Design and Visuals Visual components play a significant role in many kinds of

evaluation arguments, especially during political campaigns—as

the image on the following page suggests. But they can also be

important in more technical arguments as well (see the graph

from Our World in Data earlier in this chapter). As soon as

numbers are involved in supporting your claim, think about

ways to arrange quantitative information in tables, charts,

graphs, or infographics to make the information more

accessible to readers. Visual elements are especially helpful

when comparing items. The facts can seem to speak for

themselves if they are presented with care and deliberation.

But don’t ignore other basic design features of a text—such as

headings for the different criteria you’re using or, in online

evaluations, links to material related to your subject.

RESPOND●

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Vote Hillary by Deborah Kass

Take a close look at what artist Deborah Kass described in July 2016

as her “official fundraising screen print” for the presidential

campaign of Hillary Clinton. In what ways did it make an argument

of evaluation designed to make Americans consider voting for the

Democratic candidate rather than for Republican Donald Trump?

Would any elements in it make some voters perhaps less likely to

support Clinton? Explain your assessment of the image.

GUIDE to writing an evaluation

Finding a Topic

You’re entering an argument of evaluation when you:

make a judgment about quality: Citizen Kane is probably the finest film ever made by an American director. challenge such a judgment: Citizen Kane is vastly overrated by

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most film critics. construct a ranking or comparison: Citizen Kane is a more intellectually challenging movie than Casablanca. explore criteria that might be used in making critical judgments: Criteria for judging films are evolving as the production and audiences of films become ever more international.

Issues of evaluation crop up everywhere—in the judgments you make about public figures or policies; in the choices you make about instructors and courses; in the recommendations you offer about books, films, or television programs; in the preferences you exercise in choosing products, activities, or charities. Evaluations typically use terms or images that indicate value or rank—good/bad, effective/ineffective, best/worst, competent/incompetent,

successful/unsuccessful. When you can choose a topic for an evaluation, consider writing about something on which others regularly ask your opinion or advice.

Researching Your Topic

You can research issues of evaluation by using the following sources:

journals, reviews, and magazines (for current political and social issues) books (for assessing judgments about history, policy, etc.) biographies (for assessing people) research reports and scientific studies books, magazines, and Web sites for consumers periodicals and Web sites that cover entertainment and sports blogs and social media sites that explore current topics

Surveys and polls can be useful in uncovering public attitudes: What kinds of movies are young people seeing today? Who are the most

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admired people in the country? What activities or businesses are thriving

or waning? You’ll discover that Web sites, newsgroups, and blogs thrive on evaluation. (Ever receive an invitation to “like” something on social media?) Browse these public forums for ideas, and, when possible, explore your own topic ideas there. But remember that all sources need to be critically assessed themselves; examine each source carefully, making sure that it is legitimate and credible.

Formulating a Claim

After exploring your subject, try to draw up a full and specific claim that lets readers know where you stand and on what criteria you’ll base your judgments. Come up with a thesis that’s challenging enough to attract readers’ attention. In developing a thesis, you might begin with questions like these:

What exactly is my opinion? Where do I stand? Can I make my judgment more clear-cut? Do I need to narrow or qualify my claim? By what standards will I make my judgment? Will readers or viewers accept my criteria, or will I have to defend them, too? What criteria might others offer? What evidence or major reasons can I offer in support of my evaluation?

For a conventional evaluation, such as a book or restaurant review, your thesis should be a complete statement. In one sentence, make a claim of evaluation and state the reasons that support it. Be sure your claim is specific. Anticipate the questions readers might have: Who? What? Where? Under what conditions? With what exceptions? In all

cases? Don’t expect readers to guess where you stand.

For a more exploratory argument, you might begin (and even end) with

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questions about the process of evaluation itself. What are the qualities we seek—or ought to—in our political leaders? What does it say about our

cultural values when we find so many viewers entertained by so-called

reality shows on television? What might be the criteria for collegiate

athletic programs consistent with the values of higher education?

Projects that explore topics like these might not begin with straightforward theses or have the intention to persuade readers.

Examples of Evaluative Claims

Though they may never receive Oscars for their work, Tom Cruise and Angela Bassett deserve credit as actors who have succeeded in a wider range of film roles than most of their contemporaries. The much-vaunted population shift back to urban areas in the United States has really been mostly among rich, educated, and childless people who can afford the high costs of living there. The most remarkable aspect of Elon Musk as an entrepreneur is the way he blatantly uses public money to build his companies— from Tesla to SpaceX. Jimmy Carter has been highly praised for his work as a former president of the United States, but history may show that even his much-derided term in office laid the groundwork for the foreign policy and economic successes now attributed to later administrations. Young adults today are shying away from diving into the housing market because they no longer believe that homeownership is a key element in economic success.

Preparing a Proposal

If your instructor asks you to prepare a proposal for your project, here’s a format that may help:

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State your thesis completely. If you’re having trouble doing so, try outlining it in Toulmin terms:

Claim:

Reason(s):

Warrant(s):

Alternatively, you might describe your intention to explore a particular question of evaluation in your project, with the thesis perhaps coming later.

Explain why this issue deserves attention. What’s at stake? Identify whom you hope to reach through your argument and why these readers would be interested in it. Briefly discuss the key challenges you anticipate in preparing your argument. Determine what research strategies you’ll use. What sources do you expect to consult?

Considering Genre and Media

Your instructor may specify that you use a particular genre and/or medium. If not, ask yourself these questions to help you make a good choice:

What genre is most appropriate for your argument of evaluation? Does it call for an academic essay, a report, an infographic, a video, or something else? What medium is most appropriate for your argument? Would it be best delivered orally to a live audience? Presented as an audio essay or podcast? Presented in print only or in print with illustrations? Will you need visuals, such as moving or still images, maps,

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graphs, charts—and what function will they play in your argument? Make sure they are not just “added on” but are necessary components of the argument.

Thinking about Organization

Your evaluation will likely include elements such as the following:

an evaluative claim that makes a judgment about a person, idea, or object the criterion or criteria by which you’ll measure your subject an explanation or justification of the criteria (if necessary) evidence that the particular subject meets or falls short of the stated criteria consideration of alternative views and counterarguments

All these elements may be present in arguments of evaluation, but they won’t follow a specific order. In addition, you’ll often need an opening paragraph to explain what you’re evaluating and why. Tell readers why they should care about your subject and take your opinion seriously.

Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Response

Your instructor may assign you to a group for the purpose of reading and responding to each other’s drafts. If not, ask for responses from serious readers or consultants at a writing center. Use the following questions to evaluate a colleague’s draft. Be sure to illustrate your comments with examples; specific comments help more than general observations.

The Claim

Is the claim an argument of evaluation? Does it make a critical judgment about something? Does the claim establish clearly what’s being evaluated?

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Is the claim too sweeping or too narrow? Does it need to be qualified or expanded? Will the criteria used in the evaluation be clear to readers? Do the criteria need to be defined more precisely? Are the criteria appropriate ones to use for this evaluation? Are they controversial? Should they be defended?

Evidence for the Claim

Is enough evidence provided to show that what’s being evaluated meets the established criteria? If not, what additional evidence is needed? Is the evidence in support of the claim simply announced, or are its significance and appropriateness analyzed? Is more detailed discussion needed? Are any objections readers might have to the claim, criteria, or evidence adequately addressed? What kinds of sources are cited? How credible and persuasive will they be to readers? What other kinds of sources might work better? Are all quotations introduced with appropriate signal phrases (such as “As Tyson argues, . . .”) and blended smoothly into the writer’s sentences? Are all visual sources labeled, introduced, and commented upon?

Organization and Style

How are the parts of the argument organized? Is this organization effective? Will readers understand the relationships among the claims, supporting reasons, warrants, and evidence? If not, how might those connections be clearer? Does every visual serve a clear purpose? Are more transitions needed? Would headings or graphic devices help?

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Are the transitions or links from point to point, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph clear and effective? If not, how could they be improved? Are all visuals carefully integrated into the text? Is each visual introduced and commented on to point out its significance? Is each visual labeled as a figure or a table and given a caption as well as a citation? Is the style suited to the subject? Is it too formal, casual, or technical? Can it be improved? Which sentences seem effective? Which ones seem weaker, and how could they be improved? Should short sentences be combined, and any longer ones be broken up? How effective are the paragraphs? Too short or too long? How can they be improved? Which words or phrases seem effective? Do any seem vague or inappropriate for the audience or the writer’s purpose? Are technical or unfamiliar terms defined?

Spelling, Punctuation, Mechanics, Documentation, and Format

Are there any errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like? Is the documentation appropriate and consistent? (See Chapter 22.) Does the paper or project follow an appropriate format? Is it well designed and attractively presented?

PROJECTS●

1. What kinds of reviews or evaluations do you read or consult most often—those of TV shows, sports teams, video games, fashions, fishing gear, political figures? Try composing an

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argument of evaluation in your favorite genre: make and defend a claim about the quality of some object, item, work, or person within your area of interest or special knowledge. Let the project demonstrate an expertise you have gained. If it helps, model your evaluation upon the work of a reviewer or expert you particularly respect and choose the medium that you think works best.

2. Prepare a project in which you challenge what you regard as a wrong-headed evaluation, providing sound reasons and solid evidence for challenging this existing and perhaps commonly held view. Maybe you believe that a classic novel you had to read in high school is overrated or that people who criticize a particular social media platform really don’t understand it. Explain why the subject of your evaluation needs to be reconsidered and provide reasons, evidence, and, if necessary, different criteria of evaluation for doing so. For an example of this type of (re)evaluation, see Becca Stanek’s “I took vitamins every day for a decade. Then I found out they’re useless.”

3. Write an evaluation in which you compare or assess the contributions or achievements of two or three notable people working within the same field or occupation. They may be educators, entrepreneurs, public officials, artists, legislators, editorial cartoonists, fashion designers, programmers, athletes, faculty at your school, or employees where you work. While your first instinct might be to rank these individuals and pick a “winner,” you could also aim to help readers appreciate the different paths by which your subjects have achieved distinction.

4. Within this chapter, the authors claim that criteria of evaluation can change depending on times and circumstances: “In good economic times, people may demand homes with soaring

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entryways, lots of space, and premium appliances. In tougher times, they may care more about quality insulation and energy- efficient stoves and dishwashers.” Working in a group, discuss several scenarios of change and then explore how those circumstances could alter the way we evaluate particular objects, activities, or productions. For example, what impact might global warming have upon the way we determine desirable places to live or vacation? How might growing resistance worldwide to immigration or open borders affect political alliances or cultural diversity? If people across the globe continue to put on weight, how might standards of personal beauty or fashion alter? If media and news outlets continue to fall in public esteem, how might we change the way we make political decisions? Following the discussion, write a paper or prepare a project in which you explore how one scenario for change might revise customary values and standards of evaluation.

Two Sample Evaluations

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I took vitamins every day for a decade. Then I found out they’re useless.

BECCA STANEK

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March 22, 2017

Save for a few lapses in my irresponsible college days, I’ve

popped a multivitamin every single day since middle school.

First it was the chalky multivitamins that left a lump in my

throat for minutes after I’d gulped one down. Then it was the

slightly grainy, massive pills that my mom bought in bulk at

Costco. (They were technically for post-menopausal women,

but my mother assured me they would be just fine for my 17-

year-old self.) Then last year, tired of big, bad-tasting pills, I

bought gummy vitamins. Who doesn’t like noshing on some

candy that holds the promise of great health?

Well, last week I threw my vitamins away. I’ll miss that sugary,

fruity taste—but, according to my doctor, that’s about all I’ll be

missing.

At my appointment last Wednesday, my doctor bluntly

informed me that my multivitamins weren’t doing a darn thing

for me. Though the idea of getting just a little bit more of all the

most important vitamins may seem like a foolproof idea, she

informed me that more isn’t necessarily better. Few people

have vitamin deficiencies. Moreover, for those who do have a

deficiency in, say, Vitamin D or Vitamin B12, those little grape-

shaped gummies—or any multivitamin, for that matter—don’t

pack anywhere near enough of any one vitamin to correct that

deficiency, she explained.

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That could be passed off as just one doctor’s opinion . . . except

there are a plethora of studies out there that back up her

argument. A much buzzed-about study published in Annals of

Internal Medicine in 2013, for instance, came to this clear-cut

conclusion after reviewing three trials of multivitamin

supplements and 24 trials of “single or paired vitamins that

randomly assigned more than 40,000 participants”:

Evidence is sufficient to advise against routine

supplementation, and we should translate null and

negative findings into action. The message is simple: Most

supplements do not prevent chronic disease or death, their

use is not justified, and they should be avoided. This

message is especially true for the general population with

no clear evidence of micronutrient deficiencies, who

represent most supplement users in the United States and

in other countries. [Annals of Internal Medicine]

Specifically, the study found vitamins to be ineffective when it

comes to reducing the risk of heart disease, cancer, declines in

cognitive ability, and premature death. And, Quartz noted,

some vitamins can even be “harmful in high enough

quantities”:

Our bodies can easily get rid of excess vitamins that

dissolve in water, like vitamin C, all the B vitamins, and

folate, but they hold onto the ones that are fat soluble.

Buildup of vitamin A, K, E, or D—all of which are necessary

in low levels—can cause problems with your heart and

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kidneys, and can even be fatal in some cases. [Quartz]

Though the FDA says on its vitamins information page that

there “are many good reasons to consider taking supplements,”

it indicates vitamins only “may be useful when they fill a

specific identified nutrient gap that cannot or is not otherwise

being met by the individuals’ intake of food.” The CDC

estimated in 2014 that “nine out of 10 people in the U.S. are

indeed getting enough of some important vitamins and

nutrients.”

So why are so many Americans still taking multivitamins?

Steven Salzberg, a medicine professor at Johns Hopkins, told

NPR multivitamins are “a great example of how our intuition

leads us astray.” “It seems reasonable that if a little bit of

something is good for you, then more should be better for you.

It’s not true,” Salzberg said. “Supplementation with extra

vitamins or micronutrients doesn’t really benefit you if you

don’t have a deficiency.”

Americans’ abysmally bad diets also give vitamin companies

some marketing ammunition. When the average American is

eating just one or two servings of fruits and veggies a day

(experts recommend as many as 10 servings of fruits and

veggies a day for maximum benefits), a little boost of vitamins

might seem like a good idea. But popping a pill isn’t going to

make up for all those lost servings. “Food contains thousands of

phyto-chemicals, fiber, and more that work together to promote

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good health that cannot be duplicated with a pill,” said

nutritionist Karen Ansel.

And if it’s those tasty gummy vitamins we’re falling back on,

there’s an even better chance we’re not offsetting our sugar-and

fat-laden diets. The women’s gummy multivitamins I was taking

pack three grams of sugar per gummy. A serving size is two

gummies. Even before breakfast, I was consuming six grams of

sugar—almost a quarter of the American Heart Association’s

recommended maximum sugar intake for women.

So why, if there are so many signs pointing to no on

multivitamins, had I never really heard any of them until that

fateful visit to the doctor? Pediatrician Paul Offit explained in a

2013 New York Times opinion article that it might have

something to do with a bill introduced in the 1970s:

In December 1972, concerned that people were consuming

larger and larger quantities of vitamins, the FDA

announced a plan to regulate vitamin supplements

containing more than 150 percent of the recommended

daily allowance. Vitamin makers would now have to prove

that these “megavitamins” were safe before selling them.

Not surprisingly, the vitamin industry saw this as a threat,

and set out to destroy the bill. In the end, it did far more

than that.

Industry executives recruited William Proxmire, a

Democratic senator from Wisconsin, to introduce a bill

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preventing the FDA from regulating megavitamins. [Paul

Offit, via the New York Times]

That bill became law in 1976. Some 30 years later, almost a third

of Americans were still taking a daily multivitamin. But count

this gal out.

Becca Stanek, a writer for TheWeek.com, explains exactly why she gave up a habit common to many Americans—taking multivitamins. Citing ample research, she argues that most people don’t need them and people with genuine vitamin deficiencies need something more potent than an over-the-counter pill. We’ve underlined the hyperlinked words and phrases to give you an idea of how a professional writer backs up important claims in an evaluative argument. You can find the piece online at http://theweek.com/articles/687917/took-multivitamins- every-day-decade-found-theyre-useless.

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CHAPTER 11 Causal Arguments

Although they have thrived for over fifty million years, several

decades ago colonies of bees started dying . . . and dying. Are

pesticides the cause? Or perhaps it’s the move agriculture has

made from planting cover crops like alfalfa and clover that

create natural fertilizers to using synthetic fertilizers. Or has the

decline been triggered by viruses transmitted by the varroa

mite, which infested the United States beginning in the mid-

1980s? Scientists believe a combination of these factors

accounts for a continuing decline in bees.

Somewhat unexpectedly, marijuana prices have declined

sharply in locales that have recently legalized pot. As a result,

state governments have not enjoyed the tax bonanzas they

anticipated, but at least they’ve enjoyed a reduction in law

enforcement costs.

Despite attempts to raise oil prices by cutting production, OPEC

(Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) has discovered

that fracking techniques pioneered in the United States — which

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will likely spread around the world — have broken the power

the cartel once held over petroleum markets.

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Understanding Causal Arguments Americans seem to be getting fatter, so fat in fact that we hear

often about the “obesity crisis” in the United States. But what is

behind this rise in weight? Rachel Berl, writing for U.S. News

and World Report, points to the combination of unhealthy foods

and a sedentary lifestyle. Berl quotes Harvard nutrition

professor Walter Willett, who notes that individuals with lower

income and lower education are more likely to buy inexpensive

foods high in refined sugar and starch:

“There is no single, simple answer to explain the obesity

patterns” in America, says Willett. . . . “More deeply,

[obesity] also reflects lower public investment in

education, public transportation, and recreational

facilities,” he says. The bottom line: cheap, unhealthy

foods mixed with a sedentary lifestyle have made obesity

the new normal in America.

— Rachel Pomerance Berl

Many others agree that as processed fast food and other things

such as colas have gotten more and more affordable,

consumption of them has gone up, along with weight. But

others offer different theories for the rise in obesity.

Whatever the reasons for our increased weight, the

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consequences can be measured by everything from the width of

airliner seats to the rise of diabetes in the general population.

Scientists, social critics, and health gurus offer many

explanations, and some are challenged or refuted. But figuring

out exactly what’s going on is a national concern — and an

important example of cause-and-effect argument.

Causal arguments — from the causes of an opioid addiction

crisis in many American communities to the consequences of

ocean pollution around the globe — are at the heart of many

major policy decisions, both national and international. But

arguments about causes and effects also inform choices that

people make every day. Suppose that you need to petition for a

grade change because you were unable to turn in a final project

on time. You’d probably enumerate the reasons for your failure

— the illness of your hamster, followed by an attack of the

hives, followed by a crash of your computer — hoping that an

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associate dean reading the petition might see these

explanations as tragic enough to change your grade. In

identifying the causes of the situation, you’re implicitly arguing

that the effect (your failure to submit the project on time)

should be considered in a new light. Unfortunately, the

administrator might accuse you of faulty causality (see Faulty

Causality in Chapter 5) and propose that your failure to

complete the project is due more to procrastination than to the

reasons you offer — a causal analysis of her own.

Causal arguments exist in many forms and frequently appear as

part of other arguments (such as evaluations or proposals). It

may help focus your work on causal arguments to separate

them into three major categories:

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Arguments That State a Cause and Then Examine Its Effects What would happen if Congress ever came together and passed

immigration reform that gave millions of people in the United

States a legal pathway to citizenship? Before such legislation

could be enacted, the possible consequences of this “cause”

would have to be examined in detail and argued intensely. In

fact, groups on all sides of this hot-button issue have been doing

so for decades now, and they generally posit different

outcomes. In this debate, you’d be successful if you could

convincingly describe the consequences of such a change and

make people see them as beneficial. Alternatively, you could

challenge the causal explanations made by groups you don’t

agree with. But, either way, speculation about causes and

effects can be dicey simply because life is complicated.

Consider the following passage from an essay in the Chronicle

of Higher Education by political scientist and self-identifying

liberal Mark Lilla, in which he describes the effects that he

believes follow from focusing too single-mindedly on “identity

politics,” especially in higher education:

Identity politics on the left was at first about large classes

of people — African-Americans, women, gays — seeking

to redress major historical wrongs by mobilizing and

then working through our political institutions to secure

their rights. But by the 1980s it had given way to a

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pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow

and exclusionary self-definition that is now cultivated in

our colleges and universities. The main result has been to

turn young people back onto themselves, rather than

turning them outward toward the wider world they share

with others. It has left them unprepared to think about

the common good in non-identity terms and what must

be done practically to secure it — especially the hard and

unglamorous task of persuading people very different

from themselves to join a common effort. Every advance

of liberal identity consciousness has marked a retreat of

effective liberal political consciousness.

— Mark Lilla, “How Colleges Are Strangling Liberalism”

Predictably, Professor Lilla’s causal analysis received much

attention and criticism, but he raised issues and described

consequences that merit serious discussion.

Arguments That State an Effect and Then Trace the Effect Back to Its Causes This type of argument might begin with a specific effect (an

unprecedented drop in sales of traditional four-door sedans)

and then trace it to its most likely causes (the popularity of

crossover SUVs, availability of all-wheel drive SUVs, cheaper

gas). Or you might examine the reasons auto manufacturers

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offer for the sales decline of their once most popular models —

Honda Accords and Toyota Camrys — and decide whether their

causal explanations pass muster.

Like other types of causal arguments, those tracing effects to a

cause can offer provocative insights. You can see that in a 2017

Atlantic article by Jean M. Twenge, already excerpted in

Chapter 8. In the piece, Twenge, a professor at San Diego State

University, examines research that documents disturbing

behaviors she’d been noticing in post-millennial children and

adolescents. She begins the piece describing those effects

(generally) before going on to propose a not entirely surprising

cause:

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25

years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student

in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to

define a generation appear gradually, and along a

continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already

rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance,

are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism

had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on,

tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to

line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and

valleys. Then I began studying [the current] generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors

and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs

became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of

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the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial

generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of

generational data — some reaching back to the 1930s — I

had never seen anything like it.

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends

persisted, across several years and a series of national

surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.

The biggest difference between the Millennials and their

predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens

today differ from the Millennials not just in their views

but in how they spend their time. The experiences they

have every day are radically different from those of the

generation that came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in

behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which

officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect

on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering

economy. But it was exactly the moment when the

proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone

surpassed 50 percent.

— Jean M. Twenge, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a

Generation?”

Twenge goes on to connect the iPhone (and its clones) to a host

of specific effects, some positive, but most negative: fewer auto

accidents; less drinking; higher rates of depression and suicide;

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declines in dating and sexual activity; avoidance of adult

responsibilities. Needless to say, her analysis caused a stir,

likely because many readers found the evidence she cited

compelling.

Arguments That Move through a Series of Links: A Causes B, Which Leads to C and Perhaps to D As you might guess, entire arguments can be structured around

a series of linked causal connections. But you can see that

structure within individual paragraphs too when writers want to

draw out the consequences of their cause/effect studies. Here

are two such paragraphs near the end of Twenge’s essay

(described above) on how smartphones have damaged a whole

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generation of children; note how she uses the causal links to

emphasize the consequences over time of that addiction:

The correlations between depression and smartphone

use are strong enough to suggest that more parents

should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As

the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it’s a

policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve

Jobs limited his kids’ use of the devices he brought into

the world.

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience

adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is

likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people

who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become

depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time

for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with

their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities

to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more

adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but

not the right facial expression.

What is happening now, Twenge argues, has predictable

implications for the future.

RESPOND● The causes of the following events and phenomena are well known

and frequently discussed. But do you understand these causes well

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enough to spell them out to someone else? Working in a group, see

how well (and in how much detail) you can explain these events or

phenomena. Which explanations are relatively clear, and which

seem more open to debate?

earthquakes/tsunamis

swelling caused by a bee sting

sharp rises in reported cases of autism or asthma

fake news

climate change

popularity of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why

increasing post-graduation debt for college students

outcome of the 2016 presidential election

controversies in schools and online over free speech

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Characterizing Causal Arguments Causal arguments tend to share several characteristics.

They Are Often Part of Other Arguments Many stand-alone causal arguments address questions that are

fundamental to our well-being: What accounts for the rise of

violent extremist political groups — left and right — in the

United States? What will happen as space travel moves into the

private sector, thanks to companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin,

and Virgin Galactic? How will the American middle class adjust

to its diminishing status? What will happen to Europe or Japan

if birthrates there continue to decline?

But causal analyses often work to support other types of

arguments — especially proposals. For example, a proposal to

limit the time that people spend on social media (see Two

Sample Proposals in Chapter 12) might begin with evidence

establishing that too much time on Facebook and Instagram can

have dire psychological consequences. This initial causal

analysis then provides a rationale for the proposal argument

that follows.

They Are Almost Always Complex

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C. Richard King examines the complex network of cause and effect surrounding the racial slur and professional football team name “redskin,” wondering if the slur is the result of racism or its cause — or both.

LINK TO King, “Redskins: Insult and Brand,” in Chapter 23

The complexity of most causal relationships makes it difficult to

establish causes and effects. For example, in 2011 researchers at

Northwestern University reported a startling correlation: youths

who participated in church activities were far more likely to

grow into obese adults than their counterparts who were not

engaged in religious activities. How does one even begin to

explain such a peculiar and unexpected finding? Too many

church socials? Unhealthy food at potluck meals? More regular

social engagement? Perhaps.

Or consider the complexity of analyzing cause and effect when

it relates to consuming specific foods. In Chapter 4 we

mentioned a Wall Street Journal article by economist Emily

Oster examining the research behind many of the dietary

prohibitions pregnant women routinely face. When she took

the time to read the actual research behind the advice, Oster

made interesting discoveries. Some of the causal connections

stood up to scrutiny, but other claims were more ambiguous.

The claim that light drinking could cause behavior problems in

children was complicated by the fact that 45 percent of the

women in the study who had one drink a day also used cocaine.

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As Oster wryly observed, “Perhaps the problem is that cocaine,

not the occasional glass of Chardonnay, makes your child more

likely to have behavior problems.”

With all its careful details and qualifications, what Oster’s

article illustrates — and it’s worth reading in its entirety — is

that causal claims, even those you have heard routinely, are

rarely simple or beyond scrutiny.

They Are Often Definition Based One reason that causal arguments are complex is that they often

depend on careful definitions. Recent figures from the U.S.

Department of Education, for example, show that the number

of high school dropouts is rising and that this rise has caused an

increase in youth unemployment. But exactly how does the

study define dropout? A closer look may suggest that some

students (perhaps a lot) who drop out later “drop back in” and

complete high school or that some who drop out become

successful entrepreneurs or business owners. Further, how

does the study define employment? Until you can provide

definitions for all key terms in a causal claim, you should

proceed cautiously with your argument.

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Causal arguments can also be confusing.

They Usually Yield Probable Rather Than Absolute Conclusions Because causal relationships are almost always complex or

subtle, they seldom can yield more than a high degree of

probability. Consequently, they are almost always subject to

criticism or open to charges of false causality. (We all know

smokers who defy the odds to live long, cancer-free lives.)

Scientists in particular are wary when making causal claims.

Even after an event, proving precisely what caused it can be

hard. During the student riots of the late 1960s, for example, a

commission was charged with determining the causes of riots

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on a particular campus. After two years of work and almost a

thousand pages of evidence and reports, the commission was

unable to pinpoint anything but a broad network of

contributing causes and related conditions. And how many

years is it likely to take to unravel all the factors responsible for

the extended recession and economic decline in the United

States that began in 2008? After all, serious scholars are still

arguing about the forces responsible for the Great Depression

of 1929.

To demonstrate that X caused Y, you must find the strongest

possible evidence and subject it to the toughest scrutiny. But a

causal argument doesn’t fail just because you can’t find a single

compelling cause. In fact, causal arguments are often most

effective when they help readers appreciate how tangled our

lives and landscapes really are.

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In her essay “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” Roxane Gay looks closely at the cultural and linguistic causes and effects of “rape culture” — the way male violence toward women has become expected and even accepted.

LINK TO Gay, “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” in Chapter 25

Developing Causal Arguments Exploring Possible Claims

To begin creating a strong causal claim, try listing some of the

effects — events or phenomena — that you’d like to know the

causes of:

Why do college and university tuition costs so greatly outstrip the rate of inflation? Why are almost all the mothers in animated movies either dead to begin with or quickly killed off? Why have American schools largely abandoned technical training programs that, in the past, led to successful blue- collar careers? Why do so few younger Americans vote, even in major elections?

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Or try moving in the opposite direction, listing some

phenomena or causes you’re interested in and then

hypothesizing what kinds of effects they may produce:

What effect is fracking having on the development of alternative energy sources? What consequences will follow from the politicization of traditional news organizations? What will be the consequences if more liberal (or conservative) judges are appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court? What will happen as China and India become dominant industrialized nations?

Read a little about the causal issues that interest you most, and

then try them out on friends and colleagues. They might suggest

ways to refocus or clarify what you want to do or offer leads to

finding information about your subject. After some initial

research, map out the causal relationship you want to explore

in simple form:

X might cause (or might be caused by) Y for the following

reasons:

1. 2. 3. (add more as needed)

Such a statement should be tentative because writing a causal

argument should be an exercise in which you uncover facts, not

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assume them to be true. Often, your early assumptions (Tuition was raised to renovate the stadium) might be undermined by

the facts you later discover (Tuition doesn’t fund the

construction or maintenance of campus buildings).

You might even decide to write a wildly exaggerated or parodic

causal argument for humorous purposes. Humorist Dave Barry

does this when he explains the causes of El Niño and other

weather phenomena: “So we see that the true cause of bad

weather, contrary to what they have been claiming all these

years, is TV weather forecasters, who have also single-handedly

destroyed the ozone layer via overuse of hair spray.” Most of the

causal reasoning you do, however, will take a serious approach

to subjects that you, your family, and your friends care about.

RESPOND● Working with a group, write a big Why? on a sheet of paper or

computer screen, and then generate a list of why questions. Don’t

be too critical of the initial list:

Why

— do people laugh?

— do swans mate for life?

— do college students binge drink?

— do teenagers no longer care about getting driver’s licenses?

— do babies cry?

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— do politicians, celebrities, or journalists take risks on social media?

Generate as lengthy a list as you can in fifteen minutes. Then decide

which of the questions might make plausible starting points for

intriguing causal arguments.

Defining the Causal Relationships In developing a causal claim, examine the various types of

causes and effects in play in a given argument and define their

relationship. Begin by listing all the plausible causes or effects

you need to consider. Then decide which are the most

important for you to analyze or the easiest to defend or critique.

The following chart on “Causes” may help you to appreciate

some important terms and relationships.

Type of Cause

What It Is or Does What It Looks Like

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Sufficient cause

Enough for something to occur on its own

Lack of oxygen is sufficient to cause death Cheating on an exam is sufficient to fail a course

Necessary cause

Required for something to occur (but in combination with other factors)

Fuel is necessary for fire Capital is necessary for economic growth

Precipitating cause

Brings on a change

Protest march ignites a strike by workers Plane flies into strong thunderstorms

Proximate cause

Immediately present or visible cause of action

Strike causes company to declare bankruptcy Powerful wind shear causes plane to crash

Remote cause

Indirect or underlying explanation for action

Company was losing money on bad designs and inept manufacturing Wind shear warning failed to sound in cockpit

Reciprocal causes

One factor leads to a second, which reinforces the first, creating a cycle

Lack of good schools in a neighborhood leads to poverty, which further weakens education, which leads to even fewer opportunities . . .

Even the most everyday causal analysis can draw on such

distinctions among reasons and causes. What factors might

persuade a student in choosing a post-secondary school?

Proximate reasons might be the location of the school or its

excellent track record of graduate employment. But what are

the necessary reasons — the ones without which your choice of

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that college could not occur? Adequate financial support? Good

test scores and academic record? The expectations of a parent?

Once you’ve identified a causal claim, you can draw out the

reasons, warrants, and evidence that can support it most

effectively:

Claim Certain career patterns cause women to be paid less than men.

Reason Women’s career patterns differ from men’s.

Warrant Successful careers are made during the period between ages twenty-five and thirty-five.

Evidence Women often drop out of or reduce work during the decade between ages twenty-five and thirty-five to raise families.

Claim Lack of community and alumni support caused the football coach to lose his job.

Reason Ticket sales and alumni support have declined for three seasons in a row despite a respectable team record.

Warrant Winning over fans is as important as winning games for college coaches in smaller athletic programs.

Evidence Over the last ten years, coaches at several programs have been sacked because of declining support and revenues.

RESPOND● Here’s a schematic causal analysis of one event, exploring the

difference among precipitating, necessary, and sufficient causes.

Critique and revise the analysis as you see fit. Then create another

of your own, beginning with a different event, phenomenon,

incident, fad, or effect.

Event: Traffic fatality at an intersection

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Precipitating cause: A pickup truck that runs a red light, totals a Miata, and injures its driver

Necessary cause: Two drivers who are navigating Friday rush- hour traffic (if no driving, then no accident)

Sufficient cause: A truck driver who is distracted by a cell- phone conversation

Supporting Your Point In drafting your causal argument, you’ll want to do the

following:

Show that the causes and effects you’ve suggested are highly probable and backed by evidence, or show what’s wrong with the faulty causal reasoning you may be critiquing. Assess any links between causal relationships (what leads to or follows from what). Show that your explanations of any causal chains are accurate, or identify where links in a causal chain break down. Show that plausible cause-and-effect explanations haven’t been ignored or that the possibility of multiple causes or effects has been considered.

In other words, you will need to examine your subject carefully

and find appropriate ways to support your claims. There are

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different ways to accomplish that goal.

For example, in studying effects that are physical and

measurable (as they would be with diseases or climate

conditions), you can usually offer and test hypotheses, or

theories about possible causes. That means exploring such

topics thoroughly to draw upon authorities and research

articles for your explanations and evidence. (See Chapter 17,

“Academic Arguments,” and Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence.”)

Don’t be surprised if you find yourself debating which among

conflicting authorities make the most plausible causal or

explanatory arguments. Your achievement as a writer may be

simply that you present these differences in an essay, leaving it

to readers to make judgments of their own.

But not all the evidence in compelling causal arguments needs

to be strictly scientific or scholarly. Many causal arguments rely

on ethnographic observations — the systematic study of

ordinary people in their daily routines. How would you explain,

for example, why some people step aside when they encounter

someone head-on and others do not? In an argument that

attempts to account for such behavior, investigators Frank

Willis, Joseph Gier, and David Smith observed “1,038

displacements involving 3,141 persons” at a Kansas City

shopping mall. In results that surprised the investigators,

“gallantry” seemed to play a significant role in causing people to

step aside for one another — more so than other causes that the

investigators had anticipated (such as deferring to someone

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who’s physically stronger or higher in status). Doubtless you’ve

read of other such studies, perhaps in psychology or sociology

courses. You may even decide to do a little fieldwork on your

own — which raises the possibility of using personal

experiences in support of a causal argument.

Indeed, people’s experiences generally lead them to draw

causal conclusions about things they know well. Personal

experience can also help build your credibility as a writer, gain

the empathy of listeners, and thus support a causal claim.

Although one person’s experiences cannot ordinarily be

universalized, they can still argue eloquently for causal

relationships. Listen to Sara Barbour, writing in 2011 as a

student at Columbia University and drawing upon her own

carefully described experiences to bemoan what may happen

when e-readers finally displace printed books:

In eliminating a book’s physical existence, something

crucial is lost forever. Trapped in a Kindle, the story

remains but the book can no longer be scribbled in,

hoarded, burned, given, or received. We may be able to

read it, but we can’t share it with others in the same way,

and its ability to connect us to people, places, and ideas is

that much less powerful.

I know the Kindle will eventually carry the day — an

electronic reader means no more embarrassing coffee

stains, no more library holds and renewals, no more

frantic flipping through pages for a lost quote, or going to

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three bookstores in one afternoon to track down an

evasive title. Who am I to advocate the doom of millions

of trees when the swipe of a finger can deliver all 838

pages of Middlemarch into my waiting hands?

But once we all power up our Kindles something will be

gone, a kind of language. Books communicate with us as

readers — but as important, we communicate with each

other through books themselves. When that connection

is lost, the experience of reading — and our lives — will be

forever altered.

— Sara Barbour, “Kindle vs. Books: The Dead Trees

Society,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2011

All these strategies — testing hypotheses, presenting

experimental evidence, and offering personal experience — can

help you support a causal argument or undermine a causal

claim you regard as faulty.

RESPOND● One of the fallacies of argument discussed in Chapter 5 is the post

hoc, ergo propter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”) fallacy.

Causal arguments are particularly prone to this kind of fallacious

reasoning, in which a writer asserts a causal relationship between

two entirely unconnected events. When Angelina Jolie gave birth to

twins in 2008, for instance, the stock market rallied by nearly six

hundred points, but it would be difficult to argue that either event is

related to the other.

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Because causal arguments can easily fall prey to this fallacy, you

might find it instructive to create and defend an absurd connection

of this kind. Begin by asserting a causal link between two events or

phenomena that likely have no relationship: Isn’t it more likely that

rising sea levels, usually attributed to global warming, are due to the

water displaced by ever larger ocean-going cargo vessels and by

more numerous cruise ships filled with much heavier passengers?

Then spend a page or two spinning out an imaginative argument to

defend the claim. It’s OK to have fun with this assignment exercise,

but see how convincing you can be at generating plausibly

implausible arguments.

A graph can provide visual evidence for a causal claim—in this case, the link between opioid prescriptions and opioid deaths.

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Considering Design and Visuals You may find that the best way to illustrate a causal relationship

is to present it visually. Even a simple bar graph or chart can

demonstrate a relationship between two variables that might be

related to a specific cause, like the one above suggesting a

connection between the rise in opioid prescriptions and the rise

in opioid deaths. The report accompanying the graph,

published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

sets out guidelines for prescribing opioids to relieve chronic

pain without increasing the likelihood of addiction and

overdose.

Or you may decide that the most dramatic way to present

important causal information about a single issue or problem is

via an infographic, cartoon, or public service announcement.

Our arresting example is part of a campaign by People for the

Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). An organization that

advocates for animal rights, PETA promotes campaigns that

typically try to sway people to adopt vegetarian diets by

depicting the practices of the agriculture industry as cruel. But

in this item, they make a very different causal argument,

connect eating meat to . . . well, you’ll see if you check the fine

print.

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“Meat interrupts your sex life.” This PETA ad campaign makes a causal argument that’s hard to ignore.

GUIDE to writing a causal argument

Finding a Topic

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You’re entering a causal argument when you:

state a cause and then examine its effects: An enduring economic downturn in many blue-collar areas of the country changed the political landscape in 2016. describe an effect and trace it back to its causes: There has been a recent decline in migration to the U.S., likely due to questions about what immigration policies will look like in the immediate future. trace a string of causes to figure out why something happened: The housing and financial markets collapsed in 2008 after government mandates to encourage homeownership led banks to invent questionable financial schemes in order to offer subprime mortgages to borrowers who bought homes they could not afford with loans they could not pay back. explore plausible consequences (intended or not) of a particular action, policy, or change: The ban on incandescent lightbulbs may draw more attention to climate change than any previous government action.

Spend time brainstorming possibilities for causal arguments. Many public issues lend themselves to causal analysis and argument: browse the home-page of a newspaper or news source on any given day to discover plausible topics. Consider topics that grow from your own experiences.

It’s fair game, too, to question the accuracy or adequacy of existing arguments about causality. You can write a strong paper by raising doubts about the facts or assumptions that others have made and perhaps offering a better causal explanation on your own.

Researching Your Topic

Causal arguments will lead you to many different resources:

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current news media — especially magazines, newspapers (online or in print), and news networks online databases and search engines scholarly journals books written on your subject (here you can do a keyword search, either in your library or online) social media

In addition, why not carry out some field research? Conduct interviews with appropriate authorities on your subject, create a questionnaire aimed at establishing a range of opinions on your subject, or arrange a discussion forum among people with a stake in the issue. The information you get from interviews, questionnaires, or open-ended dialogue might provide ideas to enrich your argument or evidence to back up your claims.

Formulating a Claim

For a conventional causal analysis, try to formulate a claim that lets readers know where you stand on some issue involving causes and effects. First, identify the kind of causal argument that you expect to make (see Understanding Causal Arguments for a review of these kinds of arguments) or decide whether you intend, instead, to debunk an existing cause-and-effect claim. Then explore your relationship to the claim. What do you know about the subject and its causes and effects? Why do you favor (or disagree with) the claim? What significant reasons can you offer in support of your position?

End this process by formulating a thesis — a complete sentence that says, in effect, A causes (or does not cause or is caused by) B, followed by a summary of the reasons supporting this causal relationship. Make your thesis as specific as possible and be sure that it’s sufficiently controversial or intriguing to hold a reader’s interest. Of course, feel

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free to revise any such claim as you learn more about a subject.

For causal topics that are more open-ended and exploratory, you may not want to take a strong position, particularly at the outset. Instead, your argument might simply present a variety of reasonable (and possibly competing) explanations and scenarios.

Examples of Causal Claims

Right-to-carry gun laws have led to increased rates of violent crime in states that have approved such legislation. Sophisticated use of social media like Twitter is now a must for any political candidate who hopes to win. Grade inflation is lowering the value of a college education. The proliferation of images in film, television, and education is changing the way we read and use information. The disappearance of rewarding blue-collar jobs and careers will likely further polarize the country between haves and have-nots.

Preparing a Proposal

If your instructor asks you to prepare a proposal for your project, here’s a format that may help:

State your thesis completely. If you’re having trouble doing so, try outlining it in Toulmin terms:

Claim:

Reason(s):

Warrant(s):

Alternatively, you might indicate an intention to explore a particular causal question in your project, with the thesis perhaps

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coming later.

Explain why this issue deserves attention. What’s at stake? Identify whom you hope to reach through your argument and why this group of readers would be interested in it. Briefly discuss the key challenges you anticipate in preparing your argument. Determine what research strategies you’ll use. What sources do you expect to consult? Briefly identify and explore the major stakeholders in your argument and what alternative perspectives you may need to consider as you formulate your argument.

Considering Genre and Media

Your instructor may specify that you use a particular genre and/or medium. If not, ask yourself these questions to help you make a good choice:

What genre is most appropriate for your causal argument? Does it call for an academic essay, a report, an infographic, a video, or something else? What medium is most appropriate for your argument? Would it be best delivered orally to a live audience? Presented as an audio essay or podcast? Presented in print only or in print with illustrations? Will you need visuals, such as moving or still images, maps, graphs, charts — and what function will they play in your argument? Make sure they are not just “added on” but are necessary components of the argument.

Thinking about Organization

Your causal argument will likely include elements such as the

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following:

a specific causal claim somewhere in the paper — or the identification of a significant causal issue an explanation of the claim’s significance or importance evidence sufficient to support each cause or effect — or, in an argument based on a series of causal links, evidence to support the relationships among the links a consideration of other plausible causes and effects, and evidence that you have thought carefully about these alternatives before offering your own ideas

Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Response

Your instructor may assign you to a group for the purpose of reading and responding to each other’s drafts. If not, ask for responses from serious readers or consultants at a writing center. Use the following questions to evaluate a colleague’s draft. Be sure to illustrate your comments with examples; specific comments help more than general observations.

The Claim

Does the claim state a causal argument? Does the claim identify clearly what causes and effects are being examined? What about the claim will make it appeal to readers? Is the claim too sweeping? Does it need to be qualified? How might it be narrowed and focused? How strong is the relationship between the claim and the reasons given to support it? How could that relationship be made more explicit?

Evidence for the Claim

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What’s the strongest evidence offered for the claim? What, if any, evidence needs to be strengthened? Is enough evidence offered to show that these causes are responsible for the identified effect, that these effects result from the identified cause, or that a series of causes and effects are linked? If not, what additional evidence is needed? What kinds of sources might provide this evidence? How credible will the sources be to potential readers? What other sources might be more persuasive? Is evidence in support of the claim analyzed logically? Is more discussion needed? Have alternative causes and effects been considered? Have objections to the claim been carefully considered and presented fairly? Have these objections been discussed?

Organization and Style

How are the parts of the argument organized? Is this organization effective? Will readers understand the relationships among the claims, supporting reasons, warrants, and evidence? If not, how might those connections be clearer? Does every visual serve a clear purpose? Are more transitions needed? Would headings or graphic devices help? Are the transitions or links from point to point, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph effective? If not, how could they be improved? Are all visuals (or other elements such as audio or video clips) carefully integrated into the text? Is each visual introduced and commented on to point out its significance? Is each visual labeled as a figure or a table and given a caption as well as a citation? Is the style suited to the subject? Is it too formal, casual, or technical? Can it be improved? Which sentences seem effective? Which ones seem weaker, and

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how could they be improved? Should short sentences be combined, and any longer ones be broken up? How effective are the paragraphs? Too short or too long? How can they be improved? Which words or phrases seem effective? Do any seem vague or inappropriate for the audience or the writer’s purpose? Are technical or unfamiliar terms defined?

Spelling, Punctuation, Mechanics, Documentation, and Format

Are there any errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like? Is the documentation appropriate and consistent? (See Chapter 22.) Does the paper or project follow an appropriate format? Is it appropriately designed and attractively presented?

PROJECTS●

1. Develop an argument exploring one of the cause-and-effect topics mentioned in this chapter. Just a few of those topics are listed below:

Disappearance of honeybees in the United States

The implications of fracking in the United States on the

global oil market

Increasing numbers of obese children and/or adults

Ramifications of identity politics on efforts to build

consensus

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Long-term consequences of food or healthcare choices

Psychological influences of smartphones on people who

have grown up with them

How career patterns affect professional achievement and

income

What is lost/gained as paper books disappear

2. Write a causal argument about a subject you know well, even if the topic does not strike you as particularly “academic”: What accounts for the popularity of superhero movie franchises or series on streaming services like Netflix or Hulu? What are the likely consequences of students living more of their lives via social media? How are video games changing the way students you know learn or interact? Why do women love shoes? In this argument, be sure to separate precipitating or proximate causes from sufficient or necessary ones. In other words, do a deep and revealing causal analysis about your subject, giving readers new insights.

3. In “Forever Alone (and Perfectly Fine)” (see p. 280), Laura Tarrant argues that remaining single is a valid option many people choose for many different reasons. In a project of your own, describe and analyze causally the trends in personal relationships that you have experienced or seen among your family, friends, coworkers, or neighbors, including such choices as remaining single, living with a significant other, getting married, remaining childless by choice, choosing to have children, etc. Why are people making these decisions? Clearly, Tarrant is comfortable being single, but you or those around

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you may feel differently about your own relationship or family status.

4. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s essay “America’s Birthrate Is Now a National Emergency” explores some of the consequences for societies that produce fewer children. After reading the Gobry piece, list any comparable situations you know of where a largely unnoticed change may have long-term consequences. The changes you list need not be as consequential as the one Gobry has identified. Choose your most intriguing situation, do the necessary research, and write or present a causal argument about it, using whatever media work best to make your point.

Two Sample Causal Arguments

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America’s Birthrate Is Now a National Emergency

PASCAL-EMMANUEL GOBRY

August 12, 2016

The new birth rate numbers are out, and they’re a disaster.

There are now only 59.6 births per 1,000 women, the lowest rate

ever recorded in the United States. Some of the decrease is due

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to good news, which is the continuing decline of teen

pregnancies, but most of it is due to people getting married later

and choosing to have fewer children. And the worst part is,

everyone is treating this news with a shrug.

It wasn’t always this way. It used to be taken for granted that the

best indicator of a nation’s health was its citizens’ desire and

capacity to reproduce. And it should still seem self-evident that

people’s willingness to have children is not only a sign of

confidence in the future, but a sign of cultural health. It’s a

signal that people are willing to commit to the most enduring

responsibility on Earth, which is raising a child.

But reproduction is also a sign of national health in a more

dollars-and-cents way. The more productive people you have in

your society, the healthier your country’s economy. It’s an idea

that was obvious back in the 17th century, when economist Jean

Bodin wrote “the only wealth is people.”

Today we see the problems wrought by the decline in

productive populations all over the industrialized world, where

polities are ripping each other to shreds over how to pay for

various forms of entitlements, especially for old people. The

debates play out in different ways in different countries, but in

other ways they are exactly the same. That’s because they are

ruled by the same ruthless math: The fewer young, productive

people you have to pay for entitlements for old, unproductive

people, the steeper the bill for the entire society becomes. This

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basic problem is strangling Europe’s economies. And while the

United States is among the least bad of the bunch, it is still

headed in the wrong direction.

It doesn’t have to be this way. While the evidence for

government programs that encourage people to have more

children is mixed, the fact of the matter is that in contemporary

America, 40 percent of women have fewer children than they

want to.

And there are plenty of policies that could help close that gap,

whether from the left or from the right. Not just pro-maternity

policies, but also policies that encourage healthy child-rearing,

like child tax credits, family savings accounts, and tax-free

children savings accounts. Or education reforms that would

make fewer parents feel that they have to pony up for private

school to give their kids a decent shot at life. Perhaps one of the

biggest things we could do is to reduce the countless state and

local regulations that make housing expensive.

But put policy aside for a second. The United States literally

exports more oil than Saudi Arabia and has the world’s top

expertise in both renewable and traditional energy forms. It is

the world’s biggest food producer and a gargantuan country

with very little density. There is no reason for the United States

to have a weak birth rate — and it is a national emergency that it

does.

Yet no one seems worried. And that might be the biggest worry

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of all.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, who has written for Forbes, the Atlantic, Commentary, and the National Review, among other publications, is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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CHAPTER 12 Proposals

A student looking forward to spring break proposes to two

friends that they join a group that will spend the vacation

helping to build a school in a Haitian village.

Members of a business club at a community college talk about

their common need to create informative, appealing,

interactive résumés. After much discussion, three members

suggest that the club develop a résumé app designed especially

for students looking for a first job.

A project team at a large architectural firm works for three

months developing a response to an RFP (request for proposal)

to convert a university library into a digital learning center.

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Understanding and Categorizing Proposals We live in an era of big proposals—complex schemes for

reforming health care, bold dreams to privatize space

exploration, multibillion-dollar prototypes for hyperloop

transport systems, serious calls for free post-secondary

education, and so many other such ideas usually shot down to

earth by budget realities. As a result, there’s often more talk

than action because persuading people (or legislatures) to do

something—or anything!—is always hard. But that’s what

proposal arguments do: they provide compelling reasons for

supporting or sometimes resisting change.

Such arguments, whether national or local, formal or casual,

are important not only on the national scene but also in all of

our lives. How many proposals do you make or respond to in

one day to address problems and offer solutions? A neighbor

might suggest that you volunteer to help revitalize a neglected

city park; a campus group might demand more reasonably

priced student/staff parking; a supervisor might ask for

employee suggestions to improve customer satisfaction at a

restaurant; or you might propose to a friend that you both

invest in a vinyl record outlet. In each case, the proposal

implies that there are good reasons for new action or that

you’ve found a solution to a problem.

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In their simplest form, proposal arguments look something like

this:

Proposals come at us so routinely that it’s not surprising that

they cover a dizzyingly wide range of possibilities. So it may

help to think of proposal arguments as divided roughly into two

kinds—those that focus on specific practices and those that

focus on broad matters of policy. Here are several examples of

each kind:

Proposals about Practices The college should allow students to pay tuition on a month-by-month basis. Conventional businesses should learn to compete with nontraditional competitors like Airbnb and Uber within the sharing economy. College athletes should be paid for the entertainment they provide.

Proposals about Policies The college should guarantee that in any disciplinary hearings students charged with serious misconduct be

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assured of regular due-process protections. The United Nations should make saving the oceans from pollution a global priority. Major Silicon Valley firms should routinely reveal the demographic makeup of their workforces.

RESPOND● People write proposal arguments to address problems and to

change the way things are. But problems aren’t always obvious:

what troubles some people might be no big deal to others. To get an

idea of the range of issues people face at your school (some of which

you may not even have thought of as problems), divide into groups

and brainstorm about things that annoy you about your institution,

including things such as complex or restrictive registration

procedures, poor scheduling of lab courses, and convoluted

paperwork for student aid applications. Ask each group to aim for at

least a half dozen gripes. Then choose three problems and, as a

group, discuss how you’d prepare a proposal to deal with them.

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Characterizing Proposals 1. They call for change, often in response to a problem. 2. They focus on the future. 3. They center on the audience.

Proposals always call for some kind of action. They aim at

getting something done—or sometimes at preventing something

from being done. Proposals marshal evidence and arguments to

persuade people to choose a course of action: Let’s make the

campus safer for people taking night courses. Let’s create an

organization for first-generation or working-class students.

Let’s ban drones from local airspace, especially at sporting and

entertainment venues. Let’s investigate incentives for

supporting small business start-ups in our community. But you

know the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you

can’t make it drink.” It’s usually easier to convince audiences

what a good course of action is than to persuade them to take it

(or pay for it). Even if you present a cogent proposal, you may

still have work to do.

Proposal arguments must appeal to more than good sense.

Ethos matters, too. It helps if a writer suggesting a change

carries a certain gravitas earned by experience or supported by

knowledge and research. If your word and credentials carry

weight, then an audience is more likely to listen to your

proposal. So when the commanders of three Apollo moon

missions, Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan,

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wrote an open letter to President Obama in 2010 expressing

their dismay at his administration’s decision to cancel NASA’s

plans for advanced spacecraft and new lunar missions, they

won a wide audience:

For the United States, the leading space faring nation for

nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth

orbit and with no human exploration capability to go

beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the

future, destines our nation to become one of second or

even third rate stature. While the President’s plan

envisages humans traveling away from Earth and

perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack

of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that

ability will not be available for many years.

But even their considerable ethos was not enough to carry the

day with the space agency or the man who made the decision.

Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have since acted

on their own to privatize (at least partially) what had been a

government monopoly, offering new proposals for innovative

rockets and spacecraft.

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Who thought this crazy idea could work? A fourteen-story tall SpaceX first-stage booster rocket successfully lands on a barge at sea after helping to launch a supply mission to the International Space Station (April 8, 2016).

Yet, as the photo demonstrates, proposal arguments inevitably

focus on the future—what individuals, institutions, or entire

governments should do over the upcoming weeks, months, or

even decades. This orientation toward the future presents

special challenges, since few of us have crystal balls. Proposal

arguments must therefore offer the best evidence available to

suggest that actions we recommend can achieve what they

promise.

Proposals must also be tailored to reach and convince

audiences to support, possibly approve, and quite often pay for

them. Not surprisingly, politicians making public policy

proposals not infrequently exaggerate the benefits and

minimize the costs or disadvantages.

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It makes sense that proposals aimed at general audiences make

straightforward and relatively simple points, avoid technical

language, and use visuals like charts, graphs, and tables to

make supporting data comprehensible. You can find such

arguments, for example, in newspaper editorials, letters to the

editor, and actual proposal documents. Such appeals to broad

groups make sense when a project—say, to finance new toll

roads or build a sports arena—must surf on waves of

community support.

But just as often, proposals need to win support from specific

groups or individuals (such as bankers, developers, public

officials, and legislators) who have power to make change

actually happen. Arguments to them will usually be far more

technical, detailed, and comprehensive than those aimed at the

general public because such people likely know the subject

already and they may be responsible eventually for

implementing or financing the proposal. You can expect these

experts or professionals—engineers, designers, administrators,

bureaucrats—to have specific questions and, possibly,

formidable objections.

So identifying your potential and most powerful audiences is

critical to the success of any proposal. On your own campus, for

example, a plan to alter admissions policies might be directed

both to students in general and (perhaps in a different form) to

the university president and provost, members of the faculty

council, and admissions officers.

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An effective proposal also has to be compatible with the values

of the audience. Some ideas sound appealing, but cannot be

enacted immediately—as California legislators discovered when

in 2017 they first tried to implement single-payer, universal

health care for that state. Citizens favored the idea, but

legislators blanched at the considerable costs. Or consider a less

complicated matter: many American towns and suburbs have a

significant problem with expanding deer populations. Without

natural predators, the deer are moving closer to homes, dining

on gardens and shrubbery, and endangering traffic. Yet one

obvious and feasible solution—culling the herds through

hunting—is usually not saleable to communities (perhaps too

many people remember Bambi).

RESPOND● Work in a group to identify about half a dozen problems on your

campus or in the local community, looking for a wide range of

issues. (Don’t focus on problems in individual academic classes.)

Once you have settled on these issues, then use various resources—

social media, the phone book (if you can find one), a campus

directory—to locate specific people, groups, or offices whom you

might address or influence to deal with the issues you have

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identified.

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In compiling their report “Hunger on Campus: The Challenge of Food Insecurity for College Students,” the researchers used surveys at thirty-four colleges and universities to identify the problem of food insecurity. Their study found that 48 percent of students surveyed were food insecure in the previous month.

LINK TO Dubick et al., “Hunger on Campus,” in Chapter 24

Developing Proposals In developing a proposal, you will have to do some or all of the

following:

Define a problem that lacks a good solution or describe a need that is not currently addressed—and convince audiences the matter deserves attention. Make a strong claim that addresses the problem or need. Your solution should be an action directed at the future. Show why your proposal will fix the problem or address the need. Demonstrate that your proposal is feasible.

This might sound easy, but writing a proposal argument can be

a process of discovery. At the outset, you think you know

exactly what ought to be done, but by the end, you may see (and

even recommend) other options.

Defining a Need or Problem

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To make a proposal, first establish that a need or problem

exists. You’ll typically dramatize the problem that you intend to

fix at the beginning of your project and then lead up to a

specific claim that attempts to solve it. But in some cases, you

could put the need or problem right after your claim as the

major reason for adopting the proposal:

Let’s ban cell phones for students walking (or biking!)

across college property. Why? Because we’ve become

dangerous zombies. The few students not browsing the

Web or chatting have to dodge their clueless and self-

absorbed colleagues. Worse, no one speaks to or even

acknowledges the people they pass on campus. We are

no longer a functional community.

How can you make readers care about the problem you hope to

address? Following are some strategies:

Paint a vivid picture of the need or problem. Show how the need or problem affects people, both those in the immediate audience and the general public as well. Underscore why the need or problem is significant and pressing. Explain why previous attempts to address the issue may have failed.

For example, were you to propose that the military draft be

restored in the United States or that all young men and women

give two years to national service (a tough sell!), you might

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begin by drawing a picture of a younger generation that is self-

absorbed, demands instant gratification, and doesn’t

understand what it means to participate as a full member of

society. Or you might note how many young people today fail to

develop the life skills they need to strike out on their own. Or

you could define the issue as a matter of fairness, arguing that

the current all-volunteer army shifts the burden of national

service to a small and unrepresentative sample of the American

population. Of course, you would want to cite authorities and

statistics to prove that any problem you’re diagnosing is real

and that it touches your likely audience. Then readers may be

willing to hear your proposal.

In describing a problem that your proposal argument intends to

solve, be sure to review earlier attempts to fix it. Many issues

have a long history that you can’t afford to ignore (or be

ignorant of). Understand too that some problems seem to grow

worse every time someone tinkers with them. You might think

twice before proposing any new attempt to change the current

system of financing federal election campaigns when you

discover that previous reforms have resulted in more

bureaucracy, more restrictions on political expression, and

more unregulated money flowing into the system. “Enough is

enough” can be a potent argument when faced with such a

mess.

RESPOND● If you review “My Free-Range Kids Manifesto” at the end of this

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chapter (p. 313), a proposal by blogger and columnist Lenore

Skenazy, you’ll see that she spends quite a bit of time arguing that

American children had more fun and learned more life skills in the

past, when parents were (in general) less protective than she

believes they are today. Chances are, you grew up in the highly

protective environment she describes. If so, do you relate to the

problem she defines in her manifesto? Or does the piece fail to

engage your interest? If so, why?

Making a Strong and Clear Claim After you’ve described and analyzed a problem, you’re prepared

to offer a fix. Begin with your claim (a proposal of what X or Y

should do), followed by the reason(s) that X or Y should act and

the effects of adopting the proposal:

Claim Americans should encourage and support more scientists running for political office.

Reason Scientists are trained to think more systematically and globally and may have greater respect for facts than the lifelong politicians who currently dominate American government.

Effects Scientists will move our governments at all levels (local, state, federal) to make decisions based on facts and evidence rather than on emotions or the politics of the moment.

In “The Power of Words,” the Japanese American Citizens League advocates using precise, clear terms instead of euphemisms to describe the experience of Japanese Americans during World War II. Instead of “relocation,” for instance, they recommend “forced removal.”

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LINK TO Japanese American Citizens League, “The Power of Words,” in Chapter 25

Having established a claim, you can explore its implications by

drawing out the reasons, warrants, and evidence that can

support it most effectively:

Claim In light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that ruled that federal drug laws cannot be used to prosecute doctors who prescribe drugs for use in suicide, our state should immediately pass a bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide for patients who are terminally ill.

Reason Physician-assisted suicide can relieve the suffering of those who are terminally ill and will die soon.

Warrant The relief of suffering is desirable.

Evidence Oregon voters have twice approved the state’s Death with Dignity Act, which has been in effect since 1997, and to date the suicide rate has not risen sharply, nor have doctors given out a large number of prescriptions for death-inducing drugs. At least four other states, as well as the District of Columbia, have legalized physician-assisted suicide.

The reason sets up the need for the proposal, whereas the

warrant and evidence demonstrate that the proposal is just and

could meet its objective. Your actual argument would develop

each point in detail.

RESPOND●

For each problem and solution below, make a list of readers’ likely

objections to the solution offered. Then propose a solution of your

own, and explain why you think it’s more workable than the

original.

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Problem Future deficits in the Social Security system

Solution Raise the age of retirement to seventy-two.

Problem Severe grade inflation in college courses

Solution Require a prescribed distribution of grades in every class: 10% A; 20% B; 40% C; 20% D; 10% F.

Problem Increasing rates of obesity in the general population

Solution Ban the sale of high-fat sandwiches and entrees in fast-food restaurants.

Problem Increase in sexual assaults on and around campus

Solution Establish a 10:00 p.m. curfew on weekends.

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A proposal argument in four panels

Showing That the Proposal

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Addresses the Need or Problem An important but tricky part of making a successful proposal

lies in relating the claim to the need or problem that it

addresses. Facts and probability are your best allies. Take the

time to show precisely how your solution will fix a problem or

at least improve upon the current situation. Sometimes an

emotional appeal is fair play, too. Here, for example, is a

paragraph from a group called YesCalifornia backing a

referendum for that state to secede from the United States, a

proposal that gained traction after the 2016 presidential

election. The group explains what type of government

California might expect after it leaves the United States:

[O]ur referendum is a way to gauge the sense of the

people on whether we Californians prefer the status quo

of statehood, or if we want to see a change towards

nationhood. Voting yes on the referendum is essentially

voting yes to reform our system of government as well as

our political and elections process to guarantee a more

responsible and responsive government; move away

from a two-party system; reduce the influence of big

money in elections; restore the principle of one person,

one vote; establish a system of proportional

representation; and, engage disenfranchised voters.

These are goals Californians and others are currently

fighting for, yet under the corrupt U.S. political system,

they are unlikely to be achieved.

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The advocacy group seems to be claiming that an independent

California would guarantee a more responsive government and

a more engaged citizenry no longer swayed by big-money

elections and two-party politics. Wishful thinking perhaps, but

powerful rationale for change?

Alternatively, when you oppose an idea, these strategies work

just as well in reverse: if a proposal doesn’t fix a problem, you

have to show exactly why. Perhaps you are skeptical about a

proposal mentioned earlier in this chapter to reinstate a

military draft in the United States. You might ask for proof that

forced military conscription would, in fact, improve the moral

fiber of young Americans. Or you might raise doubts about

whether any new draft could operate without loopholes for

well-connected or favored groups. Or, like Doug Bandow

writing for Forbes, you might focus on the monetary and social

costs of a restored draft: “Better to make people do grunt work

than to pay them to do it? Force poorer young people into

uniform in order to save richer old people tax dollars. . . . It

would be a bad bargain by any measure.”

Finally, if your own experience backs up your claim or

demonstrates the need or problem that your proposal aims to

address, then consider using it to develop your proposal.

Consider the following questions in deciding when to include

your own experiences in showing that a proposal is needed or

will in fact do what it claims:

Is your experience directly related to the need or problem

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that you seek to address or to your proposal about it? Will your experience be appropriate and speak convincingly to the audience? Will the audience immediately understand its significance, or will it require explanation? Does your personal experience fit logically with the other reasons that you’re using to support your claim?

Be careful. If a proposal seems crafted to serve mainly your own

interests, you won’t get far.

Showing That the Proposal Is Feasible To be effective, proposals must be feasible—that is, the action

proposed can be carried out in a reasonable way.

Demonstrating feasibility calls on you to present evidence—

from similar cases, from personal experience, from

observational data, from interview or survey data, from

Internet research, or from any other sources—showing that

what you propose can indeed be done with the resources

available. “Resources available” is key: if the proposal calls for

funds, personnel, or skills beyond reach or reason, your

audience is unlikely to accept it. When that’s the case, it’s time

to reassess your proposal, modify it, and test any new ideas

against these revised criteria. This is also when you can

reconsider proposals that others might suggest are better, more

effective, or more workable than yours. There’s no shame in

admitting that you may have been wrong. When drafting a

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proposal, ask friends to think of counterproposals. If your own

proposal can stand up to such challenges, it’s likely a strong

one.

Considering Design and Visuals Because proposals often address specific audiences, they can

take a number of forms—a letter, a memo, a Web page, a

feasibility report, an infographic, a video, a prospectus, or even

an editorial cartoon (see Andy Singer’s “No Exit” item). Each

form has different design requirements. Indeed, the form of a

proposal may determine its effectiveness.

For example, formal reports on paper or slides typically use

straightforward headings to identify the stages of the

presentation, terms such as Introduction, Nature of the

Problem, Current Approaches or Previous Solutions,

Proposal/Recommendations, Advantages, Counterarguments,

Feasibility, Implementation, and so on. Important data may be

arrayed in tables and charts, all of them clearly labeled.

Infographics making proposals will be more visually intense,

with their claims and data presented in ways designed to grab

readers and then hold their attention as they move through

panels or pages. So before you produce a final copy of any

proposal, be sure its overall design complements and enhances

its messages.

Proposal arguments, especially those aimed at wide audiences,

may rely on a wide range of graphic materials that to convey

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information—photographs, pie charts, scatter charts, timelines,

maps, artist’s renderings, and so on. Such items help readers

visualize problems and then (if need be) imagine solutions. Any

such items you find or create should be carefully designed,

incorporated, and credited when you borrow them: they will

contribute to your ethos.

Images also make proposals more interesting. Architects,

engineers, and government agencies know this. For example,

the rendering below helped viewers imagine what a future

National Museum of African American History & Culture might

look like on the Mall in Washington, D.C.—its structure

suggesting the shape of African baskets. This winning proposal

was offered in 2009 by designer David Adjaye, architect Philip

Freelon, and the Freelon Adjaye Bond/Smith Group.

The proposed design of the National Museum of African American History & Culture

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But the building did evolve, gaining a third terrace and a bronze

color to suggest other themes. Here’s how the Smithsonian Web

site describes the ideas evoked by the finished structure, which

opened on September 24, 2016:

From one perspective, the building’s architecture follows

classical Greco-Roman form in its use of a base and shaft,

topped by a capital or corona. For our Museum, the

corona is inspired by the three-tiered crowns used in

Yoruban art from West Africa. Moreover, the building’s

main entrance is a welcoming porch, which has

architectural roots in Africa and throughout the African

Diaspora, especially the American South and Caribbean.

Finally, by wrapping the entire building in an ornamental

bronze-colored metal lattice, Adjaye pays homage to the

intricate ironwork crafted by enslaved African

Americans in Louisiana, South Carolina, and elsewhere.

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The completed version

GUIDE to writing a proposal

● Finding a Topic or Identifying a Problem

You’re entering a proposal argument when you:

make a claim that supports a change in practice: Bottled water should carry a warning label describing the environmental impact of plastic. make a claim that supports a change in policy: Government workers, especially legislators and administrative officials, should never be exempt from laws or programs imposed on other citizens. make a claim that resists suggested changes in practice or policy: The surest way to guarantee that HOV lanes on freeways improve traffic flow is not to build any.

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explore options for addressing existing issues or investigate opportunities for change: Urban planners need to examine the long-term impact digital technologies may have on transportation, work habits, housing patterns, power usage, and entertainment opportunities in cities of the future.

Since your everyday experience often calls on you to consider problems and to make proposals, begin your brainstorming with practical topics related to your life, education, major, or job. Or make an informal list of proposals that you would like to explore in broader academic or cultural areas—problems you see in your field or in the society around you. Or do some freewriting on a subject of political concern, and see if it leads to a call for action.

● Researching Your Topic

For many proposals, you can begin your research by consulting the following types of sources:

newspapers, magazines, reviews, and journals (online and print) television or radio news reports online databases government documents and reports Web sites, blogs, social media books experts in the field, some of whom might be right on your campus

Consider doing some field research, if appropriate—a survey of student opinions on Internet accessibility, for example, or interviews with people who have experienced the problem you are trying to fix.

Finally, remember that your proposal’s success can depend on the credibility of the sources you use to support it, so evaluate each source carefully (see Chapter 19).

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● Formulating a Claim

As you think about and explore your topic, begin formulating a claim about it. To do so, come up with a clear thesis that makes a proposal and states the reasons that this proposal should be adopted. To start formulating a claim, explore and respond to the following questions:

What do I know about the proposal that I’m making? What reasons can I offer to support my proposal? What evidence do I have that implementing my proposal will lead to the results I want?

Rather than make a specific proposal, you may sometimes want to explore the range of possibilities for addressing a particular situation or circumstance (see, for instance, the last bullet in the following section). In that case, a set of open-ended questions might be a more productive starting point than a focused thesis, suggesting, for instance, what goals any plausible proposal might have to meet.

● Examples of Proposal Claims

Because the one-time costs for a host city/nation staging the Olympics have become staggering, the International Olympics Committee should consider moving the summer games to a permanent site—in Athens, Greece. Every home should be equipped with a well-stocked emergency kit that can sustain inhabitants for at least three days in a natural disaster. Congress should repeal the Copyright Extension Act, since it disrupts the balance between incentives for creators and the right of the public to information as set forth in the U.S. Constitution. To simplify the lives of the soon-to-be significant number of people driving electric cars, manufacturers should quickly settle upon a universal charging system that all e-cars can share rather

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than the individual systems now in place. People from different economic classes, age groups, political philosophies, and power groups (government, Main Street, Wall Street, blue collar labor, immigrants) all have a stake in reforming current budget and tax policies. But how do we get them to speak and to listen to each other? That is the challenge we face if we hope to solve our national economic problems.

● Preparing a Proposal

If your instructor asks you to prepare a proposal for your project, here’s a format that may help:

State the thesis of your proposal completely. If you’re having trouble doing so, try outlining it in Toulmin terms (see Chapter 7 for more on the Toulmin approach):

Claim:

Reason(s):

Warrant(s):

Alternatively, you might describe your intention to explore a particular problem in your project, with the actual proposal (and thesis) coming later.

Explain why this issue deserves attention. What’s at stake? Identify and describe those readers whom you hope to reach with your proposal. Why is this group of readers appropriate? Can you identify individuals who can actually fix a problem? Briefly discuss the major difficulties that you foresee for your proposal. How will you demonstrate that the action you propose is necessary and workable? Persuade the audience to act? Pay for the proposal?

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Determine what research strategies you’ll use. What sources do you expect to consult?

● Considering Genre and Media

Your instructor may specify that you use a particular genre and/or medium. If not, ask yourself these questions to help you make a good choice:

What genre is most appropriate for your proposal? Does the problem call for an academic essay, a report, an infographic, a brochure, or something else? What medium is most appropriate for your argument? Would it be best delivered orally to a live audience? Presented as an audio essay or podcast? Presented in print only or in print with illustrations? Will you need visuals, such as moving or still images, maps, graphs, charts—and what function will they play in your argument? Make sure they are not just “added on” but are necessary components of the argument.

● Thinking about Organization

Proposals can take many different forms but generally include the following elements:

a description of the problem you intend to address or the state of affairs that leads you to propose the action a strong and specific proposal, identifying the key reasons for taking the proposed action and the effects that taking this action will have a clear connection between the proposal and a significant need or problem a demonstration of ways in which the proposal addresses the

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need evidence that the proposal will achieve the desired outcome a consideration of alternative ways to achieve the desired outcome and a discussion of why these may not be feasible a demonstration that the proposal is feasible and an explanation of how it may be implemented

● Getting and Giving Response: Questions for Peer Response

Your instructor may assign you to a group for the purpose of reading and responding to each other’s drafts. If not, ask for responses from serious readers or consultants at a writing center. Use the following questions to evaluate a colleague’s draft or project. Since specific comments help more than general observations, be sure to illustrate your comments with examples. Some of the questions below assume a conventional, thesis-driven project, but more exploratory, open-ended proposal arguments in various media also need to be clearly presented, organized, and supported with evidence.

The Claim

Does the claim clearly call for action? Is the proposal as clear and specific as possible? Is it realistic or possible to accomplish? Is the proposal too sweeping? Does it need to be qualified? If so, how? Does the proposal clearly address the problem that it intends to solve? If not, how could the connection be strengthened? Is the claim likely to get the audience to act rather than just to agree? If not, how could it be revised to do so?

Evidence for the Claim

Is enough evidence furnished to get the audience to support the proposal? If not, what kind of additional evidence is needed? Does

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any of the evidence provided seem inappropriate or otherwise ineffective? Why? Is the evidence in support of the claim simply announced, or are its significance and appropriateness analyzed? Is a more detailed discussion needed? Are objections that readers might have to the claim or evidence adequately and fairly addressed? What kinds of sources are cited? How credible and persuasive will they be to readers? What other kinds of sources might work better? Are all quotations introduced with appropriate signal phrases (such as “As Tyson argues, . . .”) and blended smoothly into the writer’s sentences? Are all visual sources labeled, introduced, and commented upon?

Organization and Style

How are the parts of the argument organized? Is this organization or design effective? Will readers understand the relationships among the claims, supporting reasons, warrants, and evidence? If not, how might those connections be clearer? Is the function of every visual clear? Are more transitions needed? Would headings or graphic devices help? Are the transitions or links from point to point, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph clear and effective? Are transitions evident and helpful in oral presentations or speeches, videos, infographics, or other media? If not, how could they be improved? Are all visuals carefully integrated into the text? Is each visual introduced and commented on to point out its significance? Is each visual labeled as a figure or a table and given a caption as well as a citation? Is the style suited to the subject? Is it too formal, casual, or

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technical? Can it be improved? Which sentences seem effective? Which ones seem weaker, and how could they be improved? Should short sentences be combined, and any longer ones be broken up? How effective are the paragraphs or sections? Too short or too long? How can they be improved? Which words or phrases seem effective? Do any seem vague or inappropriate for the audience or the writer’s purpose? Are technical or unfamiliar terms defined?

Spelling, Punctuation, Mechanics, Documentation, and Format

Are there any errors in spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like? Is the documentation appropriate and consistent? (See Chapter 22.) Does the paper or project follow an appropriate format or design? Is it appropriately formatted and attractively presented?

PROJECTS●

1. Identify a proposal currently in the news or one advocated unrelentingly by the media that you really don’t like. It may be a political initiative, a cultural innovation, a transportation alternative, or a lifestyle change. Spend time studying the idea more carefully than you have before. And then compose a proposal argument based on your deeper understanding of the proposal. You may still explain why you think it’s a bad idea. Or you may endorse it, using your new information and your interesting perspective as a former dissenter.

2. As should be evident from readings throughout this book, the uses and abuses of technology and media—from smartphones

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and smartwatches to social networks—seem to be on everyone’s mind. Write a proposal argument about some pressing dilemma caused by the technological tools and devices that are changing (ruining? improving?) our lives. You might want to explain how to bring traditional instructors into the digital age, or establish etiquette for people installing surveillance equipment in and around their homes, or make suggestions for people discovering the self-driving features in their new cars. Or maybe you want to keep parents off social networks. Or maybe you have a great idea for separating professional and private lives online. Make your proposal in some pertinent medium: print op-ed, cartoon, photo essay, infographic, set of PowerPoint or Prezi slides, TED talk.

3. Write a proposal to yourself diagnosing some minor issue you would like to address, odd personal behavior you’d like to change, or obsession you’d like to curb. Explore the reasons behind your mania and the problems it causes you and others. Then come up with a proposal to resolve the issue and prove that you can do it. Make the paper hilarious.

4. Working in a group initially, come up with a list of problems— local, national, or international—that seem just about insoluble, from persuading nations to cut down on their CO emissions to figuring out how to keep tuition or textbook costs in check. After some discussion, focus on just one or two of these matters and then discuss not the issues themselves but the general reasons that the problems have proven intractable. What exactly keeps people from agreeing on solutions? Are some people content with the status quo? Do some groups profit from the current arrangements? Are alternatives to the status quo just too costly or not feasible for other reasons? Do people find change uncomfortable? Following the discussion,

2

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work alone or collaboratively on an argument that examines the general issue of change: What makes it possible in any given case? What makes it difficult? Use the problems you have discussed as examples to illustrate your argument. Your challenge as a writer may be to make such an open-ended discussion interesting to general readers.

Two Sample Proposals

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My Free-Range Parenting Manifesto

LENORE SKENAZY

July 22, 2015

Back in 2009, the parenting site Babble listed the top 50 “mom”

blogs in America—funniest, most fashionable, etc., and “most

controversial.”

That would be my blog, Free-Range Kids. Then it was voted

most controversial again, a year later.

What crazy idea was I pushing? Don’t vaccinate your kids?

Clobber them when they cry? Teach them to play piano by

threatening to burn their stuffed animals? Actually, my message

was—and is—this: Our kids are just as safe and smart as we were

when we were young. There’s no reason to suddenly be afraid of

everything they do, see, eat, wear, hear, touch, read, watch,

lick, play or hug.

That idea runs smack up against the big, basic belief of our era:

That our kids are in constant danger. It’s an erroneous idea that

is crippling our children and enslaving us parents.

Luckily, there’s new pushback in the Capitol. Last week, Sen.

Mike Lee introduced the first federal legislation in support of

free-range parenting.

* * *

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You’ve heard of me. I’m the New York City mom who let her 9-

year-old ride the subway alone back in 2008. I wrote a column

about it and two days later ended up on The Today Show,

MSNBC, Fox News and (for contrast) NPR, defending myself as

NOT “America’s Worst Mom.” But if you search that phrase

you’ll find me there for 77 Google pages.

I started my blog the weekend after the column ran to explain

that I love safety—helmets, carseats, seatbelts—I just don’t

believe kids need a security detail every time they leave the

house. As people found the site, I started hearing just how little

we let kids do at all.

For instance, thanks to a mistaken belief that “We can’t let our

kids play outside like we did because times have changed!” only

13 percent of kids walk to school. One study found that in a

typical week, only 6 percent of kids 9–13 play outside

unsupervised. And Foreign Policy recently ran a piece about

how army recruits are showing up for basic training not

knowing to skip or do a somersault. It’s like they totally missed

the physical, frolicking part of childhood—along with its

lessons. How are they going to roll away from an explosion, or

skip over a landmine? And then of course there’s the rise in

childhood obesity, diabetes and depression.

That rise does not strike me as a coincidence. But here’s the

killer irony: The crime rate today is actually lower than it was

when we were growing up. (And it’s not lower because of

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helicopter parenting. We don’t helicopter adults and yet crimes

against them—murder, rape, assault—are all down.) We’re back

to the crime rate of 1963. So if it wasn’t crazy for our parents to

let us play outside, it is even less crazy today. But gripped by the

fear of extremely rare and random tragedies hammered home

by a hyperventilating news cycle, we are actually putting our

kids at risk for increasingly common health risks.

Beyond those, however, there is something even sadder

happening to the kids we keep indoors, or in adult-run activities

“for their safety.” By having their every moment supervised,

kids don’t get a chance to play the way we did—free play,

without a coach or trophy or parents screaming from the

bleachers.

This is catastrophic. Free play turns out to be one of the most

important things a kid can do to develop into the kind of adult

who’s resilient, entrepreneurial—and a pleasure to be around.

You see, when kids play on their own, they first of all have to

come up with something to do. That’s called problem solving:

“We don’t have a ball, so what can we play?” They take matters

into their own hands. Then, if they don’t all agree, they have to

learn to compromise—another good skill to have.

If there are a bunch of kids, someone has to make the teams.

Leadership! If there’s a little kid, the big kids have to throw the

ball more gently. Empathy! For their part, the little kids want to

earn the big kids’ respect. So they act more mature, which is

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how they become more mature. They rise to the occasion.

Responsibility!

And here’s the most important lesson that kids who are “just”

playing learn. How to lose. Say a kid strikes out. Now he has a

choice. He can throw a tantrum—and look like a baby. He can

storm off—and not get to play anymore. Or he can hold it

together, however hard that is, and go to the back of the line.

Because play is so fun, a kid will usually choose the latter. And

in doing that difficult deed—taking his lumps—the child is

learning to control himself even when things are not going his

way. The term for this is “executive function.”

It’s the crucial skill all parents want their kids to learn, and the

easiest way to learn it is through play. In fact, Penny Wilson, a

thought leader on play in Britain, calls fun the “orgasm” of play.

Kids play because it’s fun—not realizing that really they are

actually ensuring the success of the species by learning how to

function as a society.

Unfortunately, thanks to the belief that kids are in danger any

second we’re not watching them, this kind of play has all but

evaporated. Walk to your local park the next sunny Saturday

and take a look: Is there any child there who isn’t a toddler with

a caregiver, or a kid in uniform with a team?

Instead of letting our kids make their own fun, we enroll them

in programs (fearful they’d otherwise “waste” some teachable

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time), or we keep them inside (fearful they’d otherwise be

kidnapped). And if we do boldly say, “Go out and play!” often

there’s no one else out there for them to play with.

Can you imagine a country full of people who have been

listening to Mozart since they were in the womb, but have no

idea how to organize a neighborhood ballgame? My friend was

recently telling a high school-age cousin about how he used to

play pick-up basketball in the park, and the cousin couldn’t

understand how this was possible without supervision. “What

happened if someone decided to cheat and fouled all the time?”

the kid asked. “We just wouldn’t play with him anymore,” my

friend replied. Said the cousin: “That’s exclusion!” and that, he

added, was a “form of” bullying.

Agghh! We are crippling kids by convincing them they can’t

solve any issues on their own. And as depressing as all this is,

now there’s another barrier to free play: The government.

You’ve all heard the story of the Alexander and Danielle Meitiv,

the parents investigated by child protective services not once

but twice for letting their kids walk home from the playground

in Silver Spring, Maryland. While they were eventually found

not guilty on both accounts, it seemed to require massive public

outrage before the authorities let them go. Maryland has since

“clarified” its CPS policy, which now states, “It is not the

department’s role to pick and choose among child-rearing

philosophies and practices.”

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It sure isn’t. But the authorities have a habit of doing just that. A

mom in Austin was visited by the cops for letting her 6-year-old

play within sight of the house. A mom in Chicago is on the child

abuse registry for letting her children 11, 9 and 5 play in the

park literally across the street from her house—even though she

peeked out at them every 10 minutes. And I’ve heard from

parents investigated for letting their kids walk to the library, the

post office and the pizza shop.

Want more tales from the annals of government

overprotection? Last year, four Rhode Island legislators

proposed a bill that would make it illegal for a school bus to let

off any children under 7th grade—that’s age 11—unless there

was an adult waiting there to walk them home from the bus

stop. Naturally this was presented as just another new measure

to keep kids safe. Fortunately—and perhaps just a bit due to

agitation by the “most controversial” blog in America—the bill

ended up shelved.

Another triumph: A library in Boulder, Colorado, had actually

prohibited anyone under age 12 to be there without a guardian,

because, “Children may encounter hazards such as stairs,

elevators, doors, furniture, electrical equipment, or, other

library patrons.” Ah, yes, kids and furniture. What a recipe for

disaster!

But that library regulation was beaten back, too.

The biggest ray of hope to date? Republican Sen. Mike Lee from

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Utah just added a groundbreaking “Free-Range” provision to the

Every Child Achieves Act. It would permit kids to walk or ride

their bikes to school at an age their parents deem appropriate,

without the threat of criminal or civil action—provided this

doesn’t pre-empt state or local laws. “‘Helicopter parents’

should be free to hover over their own kids, but more ‘Free-

Range’ parents have the exact same rights,” the senator told me.

“And government at all levels should trust loving moms and

dads to make those decisions for their own families.”

The Act, including Lee’s amendment, passed the Senate on

Thursday (although in the end Lee could not support the final

version of the bill) and now must be reconciled with the House

version.

Support for Lee’s provision was bi-partisan. So if Free-Range

was once “controversial,” now it is the people’s will. We are sick

of seeing childhood through the kaleidoscope of doom. Sick of

thinking, “A stranger near the school? Abduction!” “A child

waiting in the car while mom returns a book? Instant death!” “A

non-organic grape? That kid’s a goner!”

Enough! It is time to stop making ourselves crazy with fear. All

we need to do is adopt a new skepticism whenever we hear the

words “for the safety of our precious children.”

Those words precede grandstanding and bad laws. They

precede sanctimony and scapegoating. They turn rational

parents into outlaws and exuberant children into gelatinous

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lumps on the couch.

The way to keep kids safe is not by forbidding them to go

outside. It’s by giving them the freedom we loved when we were

kids, to play, explore, goof up, run around, take responsibility

and get lost in every sense of the expression. Here, then, is The

Free-Range Kids’ and Parents’ Bill of Rights:

“Our kids have the right to some unsupervised time (with our

permission) and parents have the right to give it to them

without getting arrested.”

Take this bill to your local legislators, or Congress, or the

president (or his “Let’s Move!” wife), and remind them: This is

how we grew up. Why are we denying our kids a healthy, all-

American upbringing?

It’s time to save childhood—and the country. How can we be the

home of the brave when we’re too scared to let our kids go out

and become smart, successful, resilient, resourceful and

independent by doing what we all did at their age?

Playing.

Lenore Skenazy offers a proposal argument with passion, humor, and what used to be called common sense. Blogger, writer, and columnist, Skenazy became famous in 2008 when she allowed her nine-year-old son to ride by himself in a New York City subway. He survived.

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PART 3 STYLE AND PRESENTATION IN arguments

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CHAPTER 13 Style in Arguments

The images above all reflect the notable styles of musicians

from different times and musical traditions: Yo-Yo Ma, Count

Basie, Kiss, and Beyoncé. One could argue that these

performers craft images to define their stage personalities, but

how they present themselves also reflects the music they play

and the audiences they perform for. Imagine Yo-Yo Ma

appearing in Kiss makeup at Carnegie Hall. Weird!

Writers, too, create styles that express their ethos and life

experiences. But in persuasive situations, style is also a matter

of the specific choices they make—strategically and self-

consciously—to influence audiences. And today, style is

arguably more important than ever before in getting messages

across. In a time when we are overcome with a veritable fire-

hose of information 24 hours a day, getting and holding an

audience’s attention is often difficult. So what can do the job for

writers today? STYLE.

It’s not surprising, then, that writers take questions of style very

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seriously, that they adapt their voices to a range of rhetorical

situations, from very formal to very casual. At the formal and

professional end of the scale, consider the opening paragraph

of a dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to a Supreme Court

decision affecting affirmative action in Michigan public

universities. Writing doesn’t get much more consequential than

this, and that earnestness is reflected in the justice’s sober,

authoritative, but utterly clear style:

We are fortunate to live in a democratic society. But

without checks, democratically approved legislation can

oppress minority groups. For that reason, our

Constitution places limits on what a majority of the

people may do. This case implicates one such limit: the

guarantee of equal protection of the laws. Although that

guarantee is traditionally understood to prohibit

intentional discrimination under existing laws, equal

protection does not end there. Another fundamental

strand of our equal protection jurisprudence focuses on

process, securing to all citizens the right to participate

meaningfully and equally in self-government. That right

is the bedrock of our democracy, for it preserves all other

rights.

—Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting opinion, April 22, 2014

Contrast this formal style with the far more casual style in a

blog item by Huffington Post book editor Claire Fallon, arguing

(tongue-in-cheek) that Shakespeare’s Romeo is one of those

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literary figures readers just love to hate. The range of Fallon’s

vocabulary choices—from “most romantic dude” to “penchant

for wallowing”—suggests the (Beyoncé-like?) playfulness of the

exercise. Style is obviously a big part of Fallon’s game:

Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou such a wishy-washy

doofus? . . . [Romeo] spends his first scene in the play

insisting he’s heartbroken over a girl he goes on to

completely forget about the second he catches a glimpse

of Juliet! . . . Romeo’s apparent penchant for wallowing in

the romantic misery of unrequited love finds a new target

in naive Juliet, who then dies for a guy who probably

would have forgotten about her as soon as their

honeymoon ended.

—Claire Fallon, “11 Unlikeable Classical Book Characters

We Love to Hate”

These examples use different styles but are written in standard

English, with a bit of slang mixed into the blog post. In the

multilingual, polyglot world we live in today, however, writers

are also mixing languages (as Gloria Anzaldúa does when she

shifts from English to Spanish to Spanglish in her book

Borderlands: La Frontera) as well as mixing dialects and

languages. This translingual turn recognizes that English itself

exists in many forms (Singaporean English, Canadian English,

New Zealand English, and so on), that many writers of English

speak and write a variety of other languages, and that many if

not most writers “code mesh,” a term scholar Suresh

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Canagarajah defines as “a strategy for merging local varieties

with standard written Englishes in a move toward more

gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing

multilingual competence for transnational relationships” (“The

Place of World Englishes in Composition,” CCC, June 2006).

Here is an example of code-meshing in an article by Professor

Donald McCrary:

Like my students, I know the value of my native

language, black English, and the significance it has

played in both my public and private life. However, many

would challenge my claim that black English is both a

public and private language. For example, in “Aria: A

Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood,” Richard Rodriguez

argues for the separation of home and school languages

because he believes the former is private while the latter

is public. . . . I, however, view black English as a public

language because it is the language with which I learned

about the world, including the perils of racism, the

importance of education, and the consequences of

improper conduct. When Moms told me, “Don’t go

showin’ your ass when I take you in this store,” I knew

she was telling me to behave respectfully, and I knew

what would happen if I didn’t. The black English I

learned at home is the same black English I used outside

the home. It got black people through slavery, and it

saved my black behind a thousand times.

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Hold up. I know what you gonna say. Talkin’ that black

English is okay at home and with your friends, but don’t

be speakin’ that foolishness in school or at the j-o-b. And

don’t be tellin’ no students they can speak that mess

either. You want people (read: white) to think they

ignorant? Right.

Right. I hear you. I hear you. But let’s be real. America

loves itself some black English. Half the announcers on

ESPN speak it, and I’m talking about the white dudes, too.

Americans know more black English than they like to

admit. Black English is intelligible and intelligent, and

just because somebody tells you different, don’t

necessarily make it so. And that’s what I want the

academy to understand. My students don’t speak no

broken English. They speak a legitimate dialect that

conveys legitimate meanings.

—Donald McCrary, “Represent, Representin’,

Representation: The Efficacy of Hybrid Texts in the

Writing Classroom”

McCrary, who teaches at Long Island University, “meshes”

elements of African American language with “standard” written

English to create a style that speaks to both academic and

nonacademic audiences. His use of colloquialisms (“I hear

you”), features of spoken English (“at the j-o-b”), and what he

refers to as “black English” establish a connection between

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speaker and listener (“But let’s be real”) as he argues for a more

pluralistic and inclusive “translingual approach” to language.

RESPOND● Write a paragraph or two (or three!) about your own use of

languages and dialects. In what ways do you ordinarily “mesh”

features of different dialects and/or languages? What languages did

you grow up speaking and hearing and how do those languages

enter into your writing today? How would you describe your own

style of writing (and speaking)?

As you might guess from these examples, style always involves

making choices about language across a wide range of situations.

Style can be public or personal, conventional or creative, and

everything in between. When you write, you’ll find that you have

innumerable tools and options for expressing yourself exactly as

you need to. This chapter introduces you to some of them.

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In her essay about the language we use to describe sexual violence, Roxane Gay presents a compelling example of the impact of subtle stylistic choices.

LINK TO Gay, “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence,” in Chapter 25

Style and Word Choice

Words matter—and those you choose will define the style of

your arguments.

In spite of the extensive work on translingualism and code

meshing, many academic arguments today still call for a formal

or professional style using standard written English. Such

language can sound weighty, and it usually is. It often uses

technical terms and conventional vocabulary because that’s

what readers of academic journals or serious magazines and

newspapers generally expect. Formal writing also typically

avoids contractions, phrases that mimic speech, and sometimes

even the pronoun I. (For information about the use of pronouns

in contemporary writing, see the Cultural Contexts for

Argument box in this chapter.) But what may be most

remarkable about the style is how little it draws attention to

itself—and that’s usually deliberate. Here’s a paragraph from

Annette Vee’s Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is

Changing Writing, published by MIT Press in 2017:

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[T]he concept of coding literacy helps to expand access,

or to support “transformative access” to programming in

the words of rhetorician Adam Banks. For Banks,

transformative access allows people “to both change the

interfaces of that system and fundamentally change the

codes that determine how the system works.” Changing

the “interface” of programming might entail more

widespread education on programming. But changing

“how the system works” would move beyond material

access to education and into a critical examination of the

values and ideologies embedded in that education.

Programming as defined by computer science or

software engineering is bound to echo the values of those

contexts. But a concept of coding literacy suggests

programming is a literacy practice with many

applications beyond a profession defined by a limited set

of values. The webmaster, game maker, tinkerer,

scientist, and citizen activist can benefit from coding as a

means to achieve their goals. As I argue in this book, we

must think of programming more broadly—as coding

literacy—if the ability to program is to become

distributed more broadly. Thinking this way can help

change “how the system works.”

In this passage, Vee uses conventional standard written English,

fairly complex syntax, and abstract terms (transformative

access, interfaces, coding literacy) that she expects her readers

will make sense of, though she draws the line at employing

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25

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highly technical terms that only computer scientists would be

familiar with. Also note the two footnote markers that identify

her sources, also a staple of formal academic discourse. The

tone is efficient and cool, the style academic and somewhat

distanced.

Colloquial words and phrases, slang, and even first- and second-

person pronouns (I, me, we, you) can create relationships with

audiences that feel much more intimate. When you use

everyday language in arguments, readers are more likely to

identify with you personally and, possibly, with the ideas you

represent or advocate. In effect, such vocabulary choices lessen

the distance between you and readers.

Admittedly, some colloquial terms simply bewilder readers not

tuned in to them. A movie review in Rolling Stone or a music

review in Spin might leave your parents (or some authors)

scratching their heads. Writing for the music Web site

Pitchfork, Meaghan Garvey has this to say about Spanish R&B

singer Bad Gyal’s 2018 release:

On “Blink,” slow-winding dancehall rhythms with pulsing

bass and staccato hand-claps climax in thumping

reggaeton with hypnotic synth washes. Bad Gyal’s voice

stutters and chops along with the dembow drum loops,

her melodies evoking an R-rated lullaby as she sings

sweetly about grinding the club (“Me gusta el perreo”).

—Meaghan Garvey, “Bad Gyal, ‘Blink’”

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Huh? we say. But you probably get it.

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

A Note on Pronoun Preference Conventions about personal pronouns are in flux right now, and particularly traditional third-person singular pronouns. You may have been asked what pronouns you prefer, since many people identify with neither of the traditional personal pronouns, namely he and she. For this reason, writers and speakers are sensitive to members of their audiences, realizing that some may prefer the use of singular they as in “Jamie called me and I called them back.” Others prefer to use an alternate gender-neutral pronoun such as ze or zir. Linguist Peter Smagorinsky notes that it was only several decades ago that women, tired of having to be either Mrs. or Miss, coined the title Ms. It took some time, but eventually caught on:

It may well be that “ze” and “zir” will replace current pronouns over time. For those who reject “they” as grammatically improper while also recognizing that “he” and “she” are inadequate, it may become a reasonable development.

And of course, still others are just fine with the traditional he or she. The important point for writers and speakers is to be sensitive to these differences and to choose terms appropriately.

You will want to be careful, as Annette Vee is, with the use of

jargon, the special vocabulary of members of a profession,

trade, or field. Although jargon serves as shorthand for experts,

it can alienate readers who don’t recognize technical words or

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acronyms.

Another verbal key to an argument’s style is its control of

connotation, the associations that surround many words.

Consider the straightforward connotative differences among

the following three statements:

Students from the Labor Action Committee (LAC) carried

out a hunger strike to call attention to the below-

minimum wages that are being paid to campus

temporary workers, saying, “The university must pay a

living wage to all its workers.”

Left-wing agitators and radicals tried to use self-induced

starvation to stampede the university into caving in to

their demands.

Champions of human rights put their bodies on the line

to protest the university’s tightfisted policy of paying

temporary workers scandalously low wages.

The style of the first sentence is the most neutral, presenting

facts and offering a quotation from one of the students. The

second sentence uses loaded terms like agitators, radicals, and

stampede to create a negative image of this event, while the

final sentence uses other loaded words to create a positive view.

As these examples demonstrate, the words you choose can

change everything about a sentence.

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Watch how Jason Collins, the first openly gay NBA star (see

image here), uses the connotations of a common sports term to

explain why he decided to come out:

Now I’m a free agent, literally and figuratively. I’ve

reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty

much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play

basketball. . . . At the same time, I want to be genuine and

authentic and truthful.

Collins plays on the professional and figurative meanings of

“free agent” to illustrate his desire to be honest about his sexual

orientation.

RESPOND● Exercise your critical reading muscles by reviewing the excerpts in

this section and choose one or two words or phrases that you think

are admirably selected or unusually interesting choices. Then

explore the meanings and possibly the connotations of the word or

words in a nicely developed paragraph or two.

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Sentence Structure and Argument Writers of effective arguments know that “variety is the spice of

life” when it comes to stylish sentences. A strategy as simple as

varying sentence length can keep readers attentive and

interested. For instance, the paragraph from Coding Literacy in

the preceding section (pp. 324–25) has sentences as short as ten

words and as lengthy as twenty-seven. Now the author almost

certainly didn’t pause as she wrote and think, hmm, I need a

little variation here. Instead, as an experienced writer, she

simply made sure that her sentences complemented the flow of

her ideas and also kept readers engaged.

Sentences, you see, offer you more options and special effects

than you can ever exhaust. To pull examples from selections

earlier in this chapter, just consider how dramatic, punchy, or

even comic short sentences can be:

Hold up. I know what you gonna say.

—Donald McCrary

Longer sentences can explain ideas, build drama, or sweep

readers along:

I, however, view black English as a public language

because it is the language with which I learned about the

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world, including the perils of racism, the importance of

education, and the consequences of improper conduct.

—Donald McCrary

Bad Gyal’s voice stutters and chops along with the

dembow drum loops, her melodies evoking an R-rated

lullaby as she sings sweetly about grinding the club (“Me

gusta el perreo”).

—Meaghan Garvey, “Bad Gyal, ‘Blink’”

Meanwhile, sentences of medium length handle just about any

task assigned without a fuss. They are whatever you need them

to be: serviceable, discrete, thoughtful, playful. And they pair

up nicely with companions:

But without checks, democratically approved legislation

can oppress minority groups. For that reason, our

Constitution places limits on what a majority of the

people may do.

—Sonia Sotomayor

Balanced or parallel sentences, in which clauses or phrases are

deliberately matched, as highlighted in the following example,

draw attention to ideas and relationships:

Ulysses can be finished . The Internet is never

finished .

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—Alexis C. Madrigal

And sentences that alternate sentence length can work

especially well in much writing. For example, after one or more

long sentences, the punch of a short sentence can be dramatic:

Previously, Ms. Collins was the first woman at The Times

to hold the post of editorial page editor. The author of six

books, she took time off in 2007—between the editorial

page editor job and her column—and returned to write

about the 2008 presidential election. She’s been at it ever

since.

—Susan Lehman, The New York Times, March 22, 2016

Sentences with complicated structures or interruptions make

you pay attention to their motions and, therefore, their ideas:

As other voting requirements were gradually stripped

away—location of birth, property ownership, race, and

later sex—literacy and education began to stand in for

those qualities in defining what it meant to be an

American citizen.

—Annette Vee

Even sentence fragments—which don’t meet all the

requirements for full sentence status—have their place when

used for a specific effect:

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Right. Right. —Donald McCrary

You see, then, that there’s much more to the rhetoric of

sentences than just choosing subjects, verbs, and objects—and

far more than we can explain in one section. But you can learn a

lot about the power of sentences simply by observing how the

writers you admire engineer them—and maybe imitating some

of those sentences yourself. You might also make it a habit to

read and re-read your own sentences aloud (or in your head) as

you compose them to gauge whether words and phrases are

meshing with your ideas. And then tinker, tinker, tinker—until

the sentences feel and sound right.

RESPOND● Working with a classmate, first find a paragraph you both admire,

perhaps in one of the selections in Part 2 of this book, and read it

carefully and critically, making sure you understand its structure,

syntax, and word choice. Then, individually write paragraphs of your

own that imitate the sentences within it—making sure that both

these new items are on subjects different from that of the original

paragraph. When you are done, compare your paragraphs and pick

out a few sentences you think are especially effective.

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Punctuation and Argument In a memorable comment, actor and director Clint Eastwood

said, “You can show a lot with a look. . . . It’s punctuation.” He’s

certainly right about punctuation’s effect, and it is important

that as you read and write arguments, you consider punctuation

closely.

“You can show a lot with a look. . . . It’s punctuation.”

Eastwood may have been talking about the dramatic effect of

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end punctuation: the finality of periods; the tentativeness of

ellipses (. . .); the query, disbelief, or uncertainty in question

marks; or the jolt in the now-appearing-almost-everywhere

exclamation point! Yet even exclamations can help create tone

if used strategically. In an argument about the treatment of

prisoners at Guantánamo, consider how Jane Mayer evokes the

sense of desperation in some of the suspected terrorists:

As we reached the end of the cell-block, hysterical

shouts, in broken English, erupted from a caged exercise

area nearby. “Come here!” a man screamed. “See here!

They are liars!… No sleep!” he yelled. “No food! No

medicine! No doctor! Everybody sick here!”

—Jane Mayer, “The Experiment”

Punctuation that works within sentences can also do much to

enhance meaning and style. The semicolon, for instance, marks

a pause that is stronger than a comma but not as strong as a

period. Semicolons function like “plus signs”; used correctly,

they join items that are alike in structure, conveying a sense of

balance, similarity, or even contrast. Do you recall Nathaniel

Stein’s parody of grading standards at Harvard University (see

pp. 114–15)? Watch as he uses a semicolon to enhance the

humor in his description of what an A+ paper achieves:

Nearly every single word in the paper is spelled

correctly; those that are not can be reasoned out

phonetically within minutes.

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—Nathaniel Stein, “Leaked! Harvard’s Grading Rubric”

In many situations, however, semicolons, with their emphasis

on symmetry and balance, can feel stodgy, formal, and maybe

even old-fashioned, and lots of writers avoid them, perhaps

because they are very difficult to get right. Check a writing

handbook before you get too friendly with semicolons.

Much easier to manage are colons, which function like pointers

within sentences: they say pay attention to this. Philip

Womack’s London Telegraph review of Harry Potter and the

Deathly Hallows, Part 2 demonstrates how a colon enables a

writer to introduce a lengthy illustration clearly and elegantly:

The first scene of David Yates’s film picks up where his

previous installment left off: with a shot of the dark lord

Voldemort’s noseless face in triumph as he steals the

most powerful magic wand in the world from the tomb of

Harry’s protector, Professor Dumbledore.

—Philip Womack

And Paul Krugman of the New York Times shows how to use a

colon to catch a reader’s attention:

Recently two research teams, working independently

and using different methods, reached an alarming

conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed.

—Paul Krugman, “Point of No Return”

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Colons can serve as lead-ins for complete sentences, complex

phrases, or even single words. As such, they are versatile and

potentially dramatic pieces of punctuation.

Like colons, dashes help readers focus on important,

sometimes additional details. But they have even greater

flexibility since they can be used singly or in pairs. Alone,

dashes function much like colons to add information. Here’s the

Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson commenting

pessimistically on a political situation in Iraq, using a single

dash to extend his thoughts:

The aim of U.S. policy at this point should be minimizing

the calamity, not chasing rainbows of a unified,

democratic, pluralistic Iraq—which, sadly, is something

the power brokers in Iraq do not want.

—Eugene Robinson, “The ‘Ungrateful Volcano’ of Iraq”

And here are paired dashes used to insert such information in

the opening of the Philip Womack review of Deathly Hallows 2

cited earlier:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2—the eighth

and final film in the blockbusting series—begins with our

teenage heroes fighting for their lives, and for their

entire world.

As these examples illustrate, punctuation often enhances the

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rhythm of an argument. Take a look at how Maya Angelou uses

a dash along with another punctuation mark—ellipsis points—to

create a pause or hesitation, in this case one that builds

anticipation:

Then the voice, husky and familiar, came to wash over us

—“The winnah, and still heavyweight champeen of the

world . . . Joe Louis.”

—Maya Angelou, “Champion of the World”

It’s probably worth mentioning that today we are seeing an

upsurge in the use of ellipses on social media—a virtual

onslaught of these little dots. Of course, in the very informal

style of many texts and tweets, writers may be likely to omit end

punctuation entirely. The use of ellipsis dots can signal a

trailing off of a thought, leave open the possibility of further

communication, or mimic conversational-style pauses. But they

can also be a sign of laziness, as Matthew J. X. Malady points

out in “Why Everyone and Your Mother Started Using Ellipses . .

. Everywhere”:

Ellipses, then, . . . can help carefully structure a bit of

written communication so that it mimics some of the

more subtle, meaningful elements of face-to-face

conversation. But when we want to be lazy, they also

allow us to avoid thinking too much while crafting a

message.

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RESPOND● First, read several movie reviews carefully and critically. Then try

writing a brief movie review for your campus newspaper,

experimenting with punctuation as one way to create an effective

style. See if using a series of questions might have a strong effect,

whether exclamation points would add or detract from the message

you want to send, and so on. When you’ve finished the review,

compare it to one written by a classmate, and look for similarities

and differences in your choices of punctuation.

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Special Effects: Figurative Language You don’t have to look hard to find examples of figurative

language adding style to arguments. When a writing teacher

suggests you take a weed whacker to your prose, she’s using a

figure of speech (in this case, a metaphor) to suggest you cut the

wordiness. To indicate how little he trusts the testimony of John

Koskinen, head of the Internal Revenue Service, political pundit

Michael Gerson takes the metaphor of a “witch hunt” and flips it

on the bureaucrat, relying on readers to recognize an allusion to

Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

Democrats were left to complain about a Republican

“witch hunt”—while Koskinen set up a caldron, added

some eye of newt and toe of frog and hailed the Thane of

Cawdor.

—Michael Gerson, “An Arrogant and Lawless IRS”

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The three witches from Macbeth, at their cauldron

Figurative language like this—indispensable to our ability to

communicate effectively—dramatizes ideas, either by clarifying

or enhancing the thoughts themselves or by framing them in

language that makes them stand out. As a result, figurative

language makes arguments attractive, memorable, and

powerful. An apt simile, a timely rhetorical question, or a

wicked understatement might do a better job bringing an

argument home than whole paragraphs of evidence. Figurative

language is not the icing on the cake: it’s the cake itself!

Figures of speech are usually classified into two main types:

tropes, which involve a change in the ordinary meaning of a

word or phrase; and schemes, which involve a special

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arrangement of words. Here is a brief alphabetical listing—with

examples—of some of the most familiar kinds.

Tropes To create tropes, you often have to think of one idea or claim in

relationship to others. Some of the most powerful—one might

even say inevitable—tropes involve making purposeful

comparisons between ideas: analogies, metaphors, and similes.

Other tropes such as irony, signifying, and understatement are

tools for expressing attitudes toward ideas: you might use them

to shape the way you want your audience to think about a claim

that you or someone else has made.

Allusion An allusion is a connection that illuminates one situation by

comparing it to another similar but usually more famous one,

often with historical or literary connections. Allusions work

with events, people, or concepts—expanding and enlarging

them so readers better appreciate their significance. For

example, a person who makes a career-ending blunder might

be said to have met her Waterloo, the famous battle that

terminated Napoleon’s ambitions. Similarly, every impropriety

in Washington brings up mentions of Watergate, the only

scandal to lead to a presidential resignation; any daring venture

becomes a moon shot, paralleling the ambitious program that

led to a lunar landing in 1969. Using allusions can be tricky:

they work only if readers get the connection. But when they do,

they can pack a wallop. Earlier in this section Michael Gerson

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mentions “eye of newt” and “toe of frog” in the same breath as

IRS chief John Koskinen, he knows what fans of Macbeth are

thinking. But other readers might be left clueless.

Analogy Analogies compare two things, often point by point, either to

show similarity or to suggest that if two concepts, phenomena,

events, or even people are alike in one way, they are probably

alike in other ways as well. Often extended in length, analogies

can clarify or emphasize points of comparison, thereby

supporting particular claims.

Here’s the first paragraph of an essay in which a writer who is

also a runner thinks deeply about the analogies between the two

tough activities:

When people ask me what running and writing have in

common, I tend to look at the ground and say it might

have something to do with discipline: You do both of

those things when you don’t feel like it, and make them

part of your regular routine. You know some days will be

harder than others, and on some you won’t hit your mark

and will want to quit. But you don’t. You force yourself

into a practice; the practice becomes habit and then

simply part of your identity. A surprising amount of

success, as Woody Allen once said, comes from just

showing up.

—Rachel Toor, “What Writing and Running Have in

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Common”

This cartoon creates an analogy in the way it depicts the relationship between North Korea and the United States.

To be effective, an analogy has to make a good point and hold

up to scrutiny. If it doesn’t, it can be criticized as a faulty

analogy, a fallacy of argument (see Faulty Analogy in Chapter

5.)

Antonomasia Antonomasia is an intriguing trope that simply involves

substituting a descriptive phrase for a proper name. It is

probably most familiar to you from sports or entertainment

figures: “His Airness” still means Michael Jordan; Aretha

Franklin remains “The Queen of Soul”; Cleveland Cavaliers star

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LeBron James is “the King”; and Superman, of course, is “The

Man of Steel.” In politics, antonomasia is sometimes used

neutrally (Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper”), sometimes as a

backhanded compliment (Margaret Thatcher as “The Iron

Lady”), and occasionally as a crude and racist put-down

(Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas”). As you well know if you

have one, nicknames can pack potent arguments into just one

phrase.

Hyperbole Hyperbole is the use of overstatement for special effect, a kind

of fireworks in prose. The tabloid gossip magazines that scream

at you in the checkout line survive by hyperbole. Everyone has

seen these overstated arguments and perhaps marveled at the

way they sell.

Hyperbole can, however, serve both writers and audiences

when very strong opinions need to be registered. One senses

exasperation in this excerpt from a list of the worst movies of

2017, which ranks Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No

Tales as one of the most boring and worst films of that year:

The (sigh) fifth movie in Disney’s deathless series finds

Johnny Depp and co. dead in the water. Remember when

we loved the star’s loose-and-boozy portrayal of Capt.

Jack Sparrow, so fresh and charismatic 14 years ago? He

was a joy. Now, you just want to smack the tri-cornered

hat off his head and see him stranded on a godforsaken

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rock somewhere near the Marianas Trench.

—John Serba, mlive.com

Irony Irony is a complex trope in which words convey meanings that

are in tension with or even opposite to their literal meanings.

Readers who catch the irony realize that a writer is asking them

(or someone else) to think about all the potential connotations

in their language. One of the most famous uses of satiric irony

in literature occurs in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when Antony

punctuates his condemnation of Caesar’s assassins with the

repeated word honourable. He begins by admitting, “So are

they all, honourable men” but ends railing against “the

honourable men / Whose daggers have stabb’d Caesar.” Within

just a few lines, Antony’s funeral speech has altered the

meaning of the term.

In popular culture, irony often takes a humorous bent in

publications such as the Onion and the appropriately named

Ironic Times. Yet even serious critics of society and politics use

satiric devices to undercut celebrities and politicians,

particularly when such public figures ignore the irony in their

own positions.

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Louise Linton, the Scottish actress, made news on

Monday when she posted a photo to her Instagram

account showing her and her husband [Secretary of the

Treasury Steven Mnuchin] deplaning on an official trip to

Kentucky. In her white wide-legged trousers and slim

blouse, handbag held as though being presented in the

crook of her arm, she looked every bit the jet-setting

style-grammer. As any aspiring social media celebrity

would, she took the opportunity to let her followers know

not only what she thought of the bluegrass state, but also

who she was wearing.

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—Tony Bravo, “Louise Linton’s Fashion Instagram Post

Reveals Her Entitlement”

The ironically negative responses to Linton came instantly:

“Glad we could pay for your little getaway,” Instagram user

@jennimiller29 replied to Linton, ending with the hashtag

“#deplorable.” “Please don’t tag your Hermes scarf,”

@emily.e.dickey responded, calling the hashtagging

“Distasteful.”

Metaphor A bedrock of our language, metaphor creates or implies a

comparison between two things, illuminating something

unfamiliar by correlating it to something we usually know

much better. For example, to explain the complicated structure

of DNA, scientists Watson and Crick famously used items

people would likely recognize: a helix (spiral) and a zipper.

Metaphors can clarify and enliven arguments. In the following

passage, novelist and poet Benjamin Sáenz uses several

metaphors (highlighted) to describe his relationship to the

southern border of the United States:

It seems obvious to me now that I remained always a son

of the border , a boy never quite comfortable in an

American skin, and certainly not comfortable in a

Mexican one. My entire life, I have lived in a liminal

space, and that space has both defined and confined me.

That liminal space wrote and invented me. It has been

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my prison , and it has also been my only piece of sky .

—Benjamin Sáenz, “Notes from Another Country”

In an example from Andrew Sullivan’s blog, he quotes an 1896

issue of Munsey’s Magazine that uses a metaphor to explain

what, at that time, the bicycle meant to women and to clarify

the new freedom it gave women who weren’t accustomed to

being able to ride around on their own:

To men, the bicycle in the beginning was merely a new

toy , another machine added to the long list of devices

they knew in their work and play. To women, it was a

steed upon which they rode into a new world .

And here is Kurt Andersen in the Atlantic writing about what he

calls America’s “lurch toward fantasy”:

For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the

1960s—the main decade of my childhood—I saw that

those years had also been the big-bang moment for

truthiness . And if the ’60s amounted to a national

nervous breakdown , we are probably mistaken to

consider ourselves over it.

Metonymy Metonymy is a rhetorical trope in which a writer uses a

particular object to stand for a general concept. You’ll recognize

the move immediately in the expression “The pen is mightier

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than the sword”—which obviously is not about Bics and sabers.

Metonyms are vivid and concrete ways of compacting big

concepts into expressive packages for argument: the term Wall

Street can embody the nation’s whole complicated banking and

investment system, while all the offices and officials of the U.S.

military become the Pentagon. You can quickly think of dozens

of expressions that represent larger, more complex concepts:

Nashville, Hollywood, Big Pharma, the Press, the Oval Office,

even perhaps the electorate.

It’s not just a street; it’s a metonym!

Oxymoron Oxymoron is a rhetorical trope that states a paradox or

contradiction. John Milton created a classic example when he

described Hell as a place of “darkness visible.” We may be less

poetic today, but we nevertheless appreciate the creativity (or

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arrogance) in expressions such as light beer, sports utility

vehicle, expressway gridlock, or negative economic growth.

You might not have much cause to use this figure in your

writing, but you’ll get credit for noting and commenting on

oxymoronic ideas or behaviors.

Rhetorical Question Rhetorical questions, which we use frequently, are questions

posed by a speaker or writer that don’t really require answers.

Instead, an answer is implied or unimportant. When you say

“Who cares?” or “What difference does it make?” you’re using

such questions.

Rhetorical questions show up in arguments for many reasons,

most often perhaps to direct readers’ attention to the issues a

writer intends to explore. For example, Erin Biba asks a

provocative, open-ended rhetorical question in her analysis of

Facebook “friending”:

So if we’re spending most of our time online talking to

people we don’t even know, how deep can the

conversation ever get?

—Erin Biba, “Friendship Has Its Limits”

Signifying Signifying, in which a speaker or writer cleverly and often

humorously needles another person, is a distinctive trope found

extensively in African American English. In the following

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passage, two African American men (Grave Digger and Coffin

Ed) signify on their white supervisor (Anderson), who has

ordered them to discover the originators of a riot:

“I take it you’ve discovered who started the riot,”

Anderson said.

“We knew who he was all along,” Grave Digger said.

“It’s just nothing we can do to him,” Coffin Ed echoed.

“Why not, for God’s sake?”

“He’s dead,” Coffin Ed said.

“Who?”

“Lincoln,” Grave Digger said.

“He hadn’t ought to have freed us if he didn’t want to

make provisions to feed us,” Coffin Ed said. “Anyone

could have told him that.”

—Chester Himes, Hot Day, Hot Night

Coffin Ed and Grave Digger demonstrate the major

characteristics of effective signifying—indirection, ironic

humor, fluid rhythm, and a surprising twist at the end. Rather

than insulting Anderson directly by pointing out that he’s asked

a dumb question, they criticize the question indirectly by

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ultimately blaming a white man for the riot (and not just any

white man, but one they’re supposed to revere). This twist

leaves the supervisor speechless, teaching him something and

giving Grave Digger and Coffin Ed the last word—and last laugh.

Take a look at the example of signifying from a Boondocks

cartoon (see below). Note how Huey seems to be sympathizing

with Jazmine and then, in two surprising twists, reveals that he

has been needling her all along.

In these Boondocks strips, Huey signifies on Jazmine, using indirection, ironic humor, and two surprising twists.

Simile A simile uses like or as to compare two things. Here’s a simile

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from an essay about visiting Montana in the August 2017

Hemispheres Magazine:

By now we’ve driven the cows to an open pasture. The

wranglers teach me how to cut a cow from the herd, as

real cowboys do. I find it’s a lot like parallel parking ,

except the curb keeps moving to join the other curbs, and

my car has lost respect for me.

—Jacob Baynham, “Three Perfect Days: Montana”

And here is a series of similes, from an excerpt of a Wired

magazine review of a new magazine for women:

Women’s magazines occupy a special niche in the

cluttered infoscape of modern media. Ask any Vogue

junkie: no girl-themed Web site or CNN segment on

women’s health can replace the guilty pleasure of

slipping a glossy fashion rag into your shopping cart.

Smooth as a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs, feckless as a

thousand-dollar slip dress, women’s magazines wrap

culture, trends, health, and trash in a single, decadent

package. But like the diet dessert recipes they print,

these slick publications can leave a bad taste in your

mouth.

—Tiffany Lee Brown, “En Vogue”

Here, three similes—smooth as a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs

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and feckless as a thousand-dollar slip dress in the third

sentence, and like the diet dessert recipes in the fourth—add to

the image of women’s magazines as a mishmash of “trash” and

“trends.”

Understatement Understatement uses a quiet message to make its point. In her

memoir, Rosa Parks—the civil rights activist who made history

in 1955 by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger

—uses understatement so often that it becomes a hallmark of

her style. She refers to her lifelong efforts to advance civil rights

as just a small way of “carrying on.”

Understatement can be particularly effective in arguments that

might seem to call for its opposite. Outraged that New York’s

Metropolitan Opera has decided to stage The Death of

Klinghoffer, a work depicting the murder by terrorists of a

wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger on a cruise ship in 1985,

writer Eve Epstein in particular points to an aria in which a

terrorist named Rambo blames all the world’s problems on

Jews, and then, following an evocative dash, she makes a quiet

observation:

Rambo’s aria echoes the views of Der Stürmer, Julius

Streicher’s Nazi newspaper, without a hint of irony or

condemnation. The leitmotif of the morally and

physically crippled Jew who should be disposed of has

been heard before—and it did not end well.

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—Eve Epstein, “The Met’s Staging of Klinghoffer Should

Be Scrapped”

“It did not end well” alludes, of course, to the Holocaust.

RESPOND● Use online sources (such as American Rhetoric’s Top 100 Speeches

at americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html) to find the text of an essay or a speech by someone who uses figures of speech

liberally. Pick a paragraph that is rich in figures and read it carefully

and critically. Then rewrite it, eliminating every bit of figurative

language. Then read the original and your revised version aloud to

your class. Can you imagine a rhetorical situation in which your

pared-down version would be more appropriate?

Schemes Schemes are rhetorical figures that manipulate the actual word

order of phrases, sentences, or paragraphs to achieve specific

effects, adding stylistic power or “zing” to arguments. The

variety of such devices is beyond the scope of this work.

Following are schemes that you’re likely to see most often,

again in alphabetical order.

Anaphora Anaphora, or effective repetition, can act like a drumbeat in an

argument, bringing the point home. Sometimes an anaphora

can be quite obvious, especially when the repeated expressions

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occur at the beginning of a series of sentences or clauses. Here

is President Lyndon Johnson urging Congress in 1965 to pass

voting rights legislation:

There is no constitutional issue here. The command of

the Constitution is plain.

There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to

deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in

this country.

There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There

is only the struggle for human rights.

I have not the slightest doubt what will be your answer.

Repetitions can occur within sentences or paragraphs as well.

Here, in an argument about the future of Chicago, Lerone

Bennett Jr. uses repetition to link Chicago to innovation and

creativity:

[Chicago]’s the place where organized Black history was

born, where gospel music was born, where jazz and the

blues were reborn, where the Beatles and the Rolling

Stones went up to the mountaintop to get the new

musical commandments from Chuck Berry and the

rock’n’roll apostles.

—Lerone Bennett Jr. “Blacks in Chicago”

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Antithesis Antithesis is the use of parallel words or sentence structures to

highlight contrasts or opposition:

Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.

—Samuel Johnson

Those who kill people are called murderers; those who

kill animals, sportsmen.

Inverted Word Order Inverted word order is a comparatively rare scheme in which

the parts of a sentence or clause are not in the usual subject-

verb-object order. It can help make arguments particularly

memorable:

Into this grey lake plopped the thought, I know this man,

don’t I?

—Doris Lessing

Hard to see, the dark side is.

—Yoda

Parallelism Parallelism involves the use of grammatically similar phrases

or clauses for special effect. Among the most common of

rhetorical effects, parallelism can be used to underscore the

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relationships between ideas in phrases, clauses, complete sentences, or even paragraphs. You probably recognize the

famous parallel clauses that open Charles Dickens’s A Tale of

Two Cities:

It was the best of times,

it was the worst of times . . .

The author’s paralleled clauses and sentences go on and on

through more than a half-dozen pairings, their rhythm

unforgettable. Or consider how this unattributed line from the

2008 presidential campaign season resonates because of its

elaborate and sequential parallel structure:

Rosa sat so that Martin could walk. Martin walked so that

Obama could run. Obama ran so that our children could

fly.

RESPOND● Identify the figurative language used in the following slogans. Note

that some slogans may use more than one device.

“A day without orange juice is like a day without sunshine.”

(Florida Orange Juice)

“Taste the Feeling” (Coca-Cola)

“Be all that you can be.” (U.S. Army)

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“Breakfast of champions.” (Wheaties)

“America runs on Dunkin’.” (Dunkin’ Donuts)

“Like a rock.” (Chevrolet trucks)

CULTURAL CONTEXTS FOR ARGUMENT

Levels of Formality and Other Issues of Style At least one important style question needs to be asked when arguing across cultures: what level of formality is most appropriate? In the United States, a fairly informal style is often acceptable and even appreciated. Many cultures, however, tend to value formality. If in doubt, err on the side of formality:

Take care to use proper titles as appropriate (Ms., Mr., Dr., etc.). Don’t use first names unless you’ve been invited to do so. Steer clear of slang and jargon. When you’re communicating with members of other cultures, slang may not be understood, or it may be seen as disrespectful. Avoid potentially puzzling pop cultural allusions, such as sports analogies or musical references, if your audience might not understand them.

When arguing across cultures or languages, another stylistic issue might be clarity. When communicating with people whose native languages are different from your own, analogies and similes almost always aid in understanding. Likening something unknown to something familiar can help make your argument forceful—and understandable.

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CHAPTER 14 Visual Rhetoric

During the summer of 2017, protesters and counterprotesters

and counter-counterprotesters gathered across the United

States in attempts to “unite the right,” to “say no to white

supremacy,” to “make fascists afraid again,” to rally for “blood

and soil,” to claim that “you will not replace us.” Often the

protesters carried symbols or flags, including the three depicted

above: the American flag, the Confederate flag, and the flag of

Nazi Germany (others carried a wide range of flags or banners,

from Black Lives Matter and the Anti-Defamation League’s “No

Place for Hate” to the National Socialist Movement flag, the

Southern Nationalist Flag, and the Identity Evropa flag, all three

associated with white nationalism).

These banners and flags are powerful examples of visual

rhetoric and the arguments such images can make. Even so

small a sampling of visual rhetoric underscores what you

doubtless already know: images grab and hold our attention,

stir our emotions, tease our imaginations, provoke intense

responses, and make arguments. In short, they have clout.

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RESPOND● Choose a flag or banner that speaks strongly to you and then study

it carefully and critically. What arguments—implicit and explicit—

does the banner or flag make? What are its appeals and who does it

seem to address? How do you respond to the image or symbol, and

why? Are your responses based primarily on emotion, on logic and

reason, on ethical considerations? Then write a paragraph in which

you analyze your connection to this imagery.

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Artist Sonny Assu uses the seemingly lighthearted medium and familiar iconography of breakfast cereals to make a serious claim about the victimization of Native Americans.

LINK TO Assu, “Breakfast Series,” in Chapter 23

The Power of Visual Arguments

Even in everyday situations, images—from T-shirts to billboards

to animated films and computer screens—influence us. Media

analyst Kevin Kelly ponders the role screens and their images

now play in our lives:

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I

watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car.

The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane.

We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in

the most unexpected places—like ATM machines and

supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some

movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These

ever-present screens have created an audience for very

short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while

cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new

generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up

those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

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—Kevin Kelly, “Becoming Screen Literate”

Of course, visual arguments weren’t invented by YouTube, and

their power isn’t novel either. The pharaohs of Egypt lined the

banks of the Nile River with statues of themselves to assert their

authority, and there is no shortage of monumental effigies in

Washington, D.C., today.

Not only the high and mighty: sculpture of a Great Depression–era breadline at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Still, the ease with which all of us make and share images is

unprecedented: people are uploading three billion shots a day

to Snapchat. And most of us have easily adjusted to

instantaneous multichannel, multimedia connectivity (see

Chapter 16). We expect it to be seamless too. The prophet of this

era was Marshall McLuhan, who nearly fifty years ago

proclaimed that “the medium is the massage,” with the play on

message and massage intentional. As McLuhan says, “We shape

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our tools and afterwards our tools shape us. All media works us

over completely.”

McLuhan was certainly prescient, as legendary filmmaker

Werner Herzog makes clear in his 2016 documentary, Lo and

Behold: Reveries of the Connected World. Herzog conducted

interviews with a range of people— from computer scientists at

UCLA and Carnegie Mellon to Silicon Valley denizens like Elon

Musk and Sebastian Thrun to ordinary citizens caught up in

use, abuse, and overuse—associated with the Internet. Herzog’s

instantly recognizable voice-over narrates the film’s ten

sections: as a reviewer for the New Yorker puts it, “It should be

impossible to sound simultaneously droning and clipped, but

somehow Herzog manages it, and it’s delicious to watch the

expressions on the faces of neuroscientists as he inquires,

‘Could it be that the Internet starts to dream of itself?’”

The poster below aims to capture the complexity of “the

connected world” as well as to suggest that we may well have

lost our minds in the enormously complex, hugely wired world

that now seems to “work us over” perhaps more than even

McLuhan imagined. Take a close look at the poster and do some

critical thinking about it and its effects. Note the four stars at

the top under the heading, the figure dominating the poster

(which appears to be a male wearing a suit and tie), the use of

color to highlight the scramble in our Internet-filled heads, the

change in font in the title, and the bottom caption “The human

side of the digital revolution.” How do image and text work

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together to create an argument and how would you express that

argument? Certainly the poster intends to entice viewers to take

in Herzog’s film, but what other arguments can you detect

there? Look back to Chapter 6 for more information on

analyzing texts and images.

“Herzog weaves a fantastical tale. For those looking for a ride through our modern technological world, or indeed a preview of what is to come, this is it.”

RESPOND● Find an advertisement, poster, or flyer—either print or digital—that

uses both verbal and visual elements. Analyze its argument first by

pointing out the claims the ad makes (or implies) and then by

identifying the ways it supports them verbally and/or visually. (If it

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helps, go over the questions about multimodal texts offered in

Analyzing Multimodal Arguments in Chapter 16.) Then switch ads

with a classmate and discuss his/her analysis. Compare your

responses to the two ads. If they’re different—and they probably will

be—how might you account for the differences?

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Using Visuals in Your Own Arguments Given the power of images, it’s only natural that you would use

them in your own composing. In fact, many college instructors

now expect projects for their courses to be posted to the Web,

where digital photos, videos, and design elements are native.

Other instructors invite or even require students to do

multimedia reports or to use videos, photo collages, cartoons,

or other media to make arguments. Using visual media in your

academic writing can have all the reach and versatility of more

conventional verbal appeals to pathos, ethos, and logos. Often

even more.

Using Images and Visual Design to Create Pathos Many advertisements, YouTube videos, political posters, rallies,

marches, and even church services use visual images to trigger

emotions. You can’t flip through a magazine, watch a video, or

browse the Web without being cajoled or seduced by figures or

design elements of all kinds—most of them fashioned in some

way to attract your eye and attention.

Technology has also made it incredibly easy for you to create

on-the-spot photographs and videos that you can use for making

arguments of your own. With a GoPro camera strapped to your

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Consider the design choices made by the creators of the information security posters in Chapter 26. Which ones are most effective?

LINK TO McKenzie, “Getting Personal about Cybersecurity,” in Chapter 26

head, you could document transportation problems in and

around campus and then present your visual evidence in a

paper or an oral report. You don’t have to be a professional

these days to produce poignant, stirring, or even satirical visual

texts.

Yet just because images are powerful doesn’t mean they always

work. When you compose visually, you have to be certain to

generate impressions that support your arguments, not weigh

against them.

Shape Visuals to Convey Appropriate Feelings

To appeal visually to your readers’ emotions, think first of the

goal of your writing: you want every image or use of multimedia

to advance that purpose. Consider, for a moment, the iconic

Apollo 8 “earthrise” photograph of our planet hanging above

the horizon of the moon. You could adapt this image to

introduce an appeal for additional investment in the space

program. Or it might become part of an argument about the

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need to preserve frail natural environments, or a stirring appeal

against nationalism: From space, we are one world. Any of

these claims might be supported successfully without the

image, but the photograph—like most visuals—will probably

touch members of your audience more strongly than words

alone could.

Still striking almost fifty years later, this 1968 Apollo 8 photograph of the earth shining over the moon can support many kinds of arguments.

Consider Emotional Responses to Color As the “earthrise” photo demonstrates, color can have great

power too: the beautiful blue earth floating in deep black space

carries a message of its own. Indeed, our response to color is

part of our biological and cultural makeup. So it makes sense to

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consider what shades are especially effective with the kinds of

arguments you’re making, whether they occur in images

themselves or in elements such as headings, fonts,

backgrounds, screens, banners, and so on. And remember that

a black-and-white image can also be a memorable design

choice.

Here’s an image of the box cover for one of the iconic Zelda

games for Nintendo. Note its simplicity and the use of vivid

color: red dominates, signaling strength and adventure; the

gold background and the gold-emblazoned shield and sword

suggest fantasy. This particular game (A Link to the Past) was

released in the United States in 1992.

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Compare the 1992 box cover art with the most recent Zelda

game, Breath of the Wild (2017). Here the cooler green and blue

colors speak of the natural world and the adventures Link will

encounter there.

When you think about using images like these in your writing,

do some critical analysis of the image before you definitely

decide on it. How does the image, and its use of color, help to

support the argument you are making? Is it a good fit?

If you are creating images of your own, let your selection of

colors be guided by

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your own good taste,

by designs you admire,

or by the advice of

friends or helpful

professionals. Some

design and

presentation software

will even help you

choose colors by

offering dependable

“default” shades or an

array of pre-existing

designs and

compatible colors (for

example, of

presentation slides).

To be emotionally

effective, the colors you choose for a design should follow

certain commonsense principles. If you’re using background

colors on a political poster, Web site, or slide, the contrast

between words and background should be vivid enough to

make reading easy. For example, white letters on a yellow

background are not usually legible. Similarly, bright

background colors should be avoided for long documents

because reading is easiest with dark letters against a light or

white background. Avoid complex patterns; even though they

might look interesting and be easy to create, they often

interfere with other more important elements of a presentation.

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When you use visuals—either ones you’ve created or those you

have taken from other sources—in your college projects, test

them on prospective readers. That’s what professionals do

because they appreciate how delicate the choices of visual and

multimedia texts can be. These responses will help you analyze

your own arguments and improve your success with them.

Eve Arnold took this powerful black-and-white photograph in 1958 at a party in Virginia for students being introduced to mixed-race schools. How might a full- color image have changed the impact of the scene?

Using Images to Establish Ethos If you are on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social

networking sites, you no doubt chose photographs for those

sites with an eye to creating a sense of who you are, what you

value, and how you wish to be perceived. You fashioned a self-

image. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you can boost

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your credibility as a writer by using visual design strategically:

we know one person whose Facebook presentation of images

and media so impressed a prospective employer that she got a

job on the spot. So whether you are using photographs, videos,

or other media on your personal pages or in your college work,

it pays to attend to how they construct your ethos.

Understand How Images Enhance Credibility and Authority You might have noticed that just about every company,

organization, institution, government agency, or club now

sports a logo or an emblem. Whether it’s the Red Cross, the

Canadian Olympic Committee, or perhaps the school you

attend, such groups use carefully crafted images to signal their

authority and trustworthiness. An emblem or a logo can also

carry a wealth of cultural and historical implications. That’s

why university Web sites typically include the seal of the

institution somewhere on the homepage (and always on its

letterhead) or why the president of the United States travels

with a presidential seal to hang on the speaker’s podium.

What do the following posters, which circulated during the 2016

presidential election, suggest about each candidate’s ethos?

Based on these images, how would you describe each candidate

as a politician?

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Posters from the 2016 election

Though you probably don’t have a personal logo or trademark,

your personal ethos functions the same way when you make an

argument. You can establish it by offering visual evidence of

your knowledge or competence. In an essay on safety issues in

competitive biking, you might include a photo of yourself in a

key race, embed a video showing how often serious accidents

occur, or include an audio file of an interview with an injured

biker. The photo proves that you have personal experience with

biking, while the video and audio files show that you have done

research and know your subject well, thus helping to affirm

your credibility.

Predictably, your choice of medium also says something

important about you. Making an appeal on a Web site sends

signals about your technical skills, contemporary orientation,

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and personality. So if you direct people to a Facebook or Flickr

page, be sure that any materials there present you favorably. Be

just as careful in a classroom that any handouts or slides you

use for an oral report demonstrate your competence. And

remember that you don’t always have to be high-tech to be

effective: when reporting on a children’s story that you’re

writing, the most sensible medium of presentation might be

cardboard and paper made into an oversized book and

illustrated by hand.

Take a look at these three government logos, each of which intends to convey credibility, authority, and maybe more. Do they accomplish their goals? Why or why not?

You demonstrate your ethos simply by showing an awareness of

the basic design conventions for any kind of writing you’re

doing. It’s no accident that lab reports for science courses are

sober and unembellished. Visually, they reinforce the

professional ethos of scientific work. The same is true of a

college research paper. So whether you’re composing an essay,

a résumé, a film, an animated comic, or a Web site, look for

successful models and follow their design cues.

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Consider How Details of Design Reflect Your Ethos As we have just suggested, almost every design element you use

in a paper or project sends signals about character and ethos.

You might resent the tediousness of placing page numbers in

the appropriate corner, aligning long quotations just so, and

putting footnotes in the right place, but these details prove that

you are paying attention. Gestures as simple as writing on

official stationery (if, for example, you are representing a club

or campus organization) or dressing up for an oral presentation

matter too: suddenly you seem more mature and competent.

Even the type fonts that you select for a document can mark you

as warm and inviting or as efficient and contemporary. The

warm and inviting fonts often belong to a family called serif.

The serifs are those little flourishes at the ends of the strokes

that make the fonts seem handcrafted and artful:

Cleaner, modern fonts go without those little flourishes and are

called sans serif. These fonts are cooler, simpler, and, some

argue, more readable on a computer screen (depending on

screen resolution):

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Other typographic elements send messages as well. The size of

type can make a difference. If your text or headings are in

boldface and too large, you’ll seem to be shouting:

LOSE WEIGHT! PAY NOTHING!*

Tiny type, on the other hand, might make you seem evasive:

*Excludes the costs of enrollment and required meal purchases. Minimum contract: 12 months.

Finally, don’t ignore the signals you send through your choice

of illustrations and photographs themselves. Images

communicate your preferences, sensitivities, and inclusiveness

—sometimes inadvertently. Conference planners, for example,

are careful to create brochures that represent all participants,

and they make sure that the brochure photos don’t show only

women, only men, or only members of one racial or ethnic

group.

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