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Comp 1.3: Constructing an Academic Argument
Purpose: Teach students to contribute meaningfully to scholarly conversations by crafting well-reasoned arguments grounded in research, analysis, and awareness of opposing perspectives.
“Armed” now with rhetorical strategies for appealing to an audience (unit 2), students are ready to learn how to engage in academic conversation. This unit asks them to critically assess their sources, listen to the various points being made, and decide how to add their own voice to the discussion.
Image by Jopwell via Pexels.com, CC0
The seven readings in this unit offer multiple perspectives about academic discourse for students to chew on:
Ideally, the unit would end with students writing an argument paper that utilizes multiple academic sources as evidence toward the student’s unique take on an issue.
Instructors can use the overview descriptions below to help decide which chapters might best fit your students.
Author’s Overview — The polarization of American society means almost every topic is ripe for controversy. Students in first year writing classes reflect this noisy information ecosystem, commonly, by focusing on the degree of bias an author displays. In some cases, these observations result in savvy choices about source credibility, but in other instances, a focus on bias can lead students astray, even steering them away from reputable information. This chapter provides four classroom strategies—context awareness, genre awareness, classifying opinions, and evaluating counterarguments—to encourage students toward a more nuanced understanding of bias, which also can be applied to real-world situations.
Discussion Questions
How many different genres do you encounter in a typical day? For which does the author’s or publisher’s bias affect your understanding the most? The least? Why?
Free-write about a past experience of significant importance to you. How does the context surrounding this experience contribute to your memory and retelling? How does your present context compare or contrast with your past context?
Which topics of controversy often simplified into two sides actually have more than two valid positions? How should writers handle topics for which a pervasive viewpoint has little or no credible supporting evidence?
Write down an opinion about which you feel strongly. Is it a preference, a moral belief, or an informed viewpoint? What would it take (if anything) for you to change your mind?
Author’s Overview — This chapter uses John Swales’ definition of discourse community to explain to students why this concept is important for college writing and beyond. The chapter explains how genres operate within discourse communities, why different discourse communities have different expectations for writing, and how to understand what qualifies as a discourse community. The article relates the concept of discourse community to a personal example from the author (an acoustic guitar jam group) and an example of the academic discipline of history. The article takes a critical stance regarding the concept of discourse community, discussing both the benefits and constraints of communicating within discourse communities. The article concludes with writerly questions students can ask themselves as they enter new discourse communities in order to be more effective communicators.
Discussion Questions
The author begins the essay discussing a discourse community he has recently become a member of. Think of a discourse community that you recently joined and describe how it meets Swales’ criteria for a discourse community.
Choose a college class you’ve taken or are taking and describe the goals and expectations for writing of the discourse community the class represents. In small groups, compare the class discourse community you described with two of your peers’ courses. What are some of the differences in the goals and expectations for writing?
Using Swales’ criteria for a discourse community, consider whether the following are discourse communities and why or why not: a) students at your college; b) a fraternity or sorority; c) fans of soccer; d) a high school debate team.
The author of this essay argues that discourse communities use genres for social actions. Consider your major or a field you would like to work in after you graduate. What are some of the most important genres of that discourse community? In what ways do these genres perform social actions for members of the discourse community?
Author’s Overview — This essay explores how discourse communities change over time and through participation, and it shows how we can negotiate the expectations for discourse through translanguaging and code-meshing. As discourse community members learn and practice the language rules of a community, they also act as agents to develop, change, or resist these rules. The essay traces iterations of a popular internet meme to show how creative approaches to language, changing memberships, and modes of communication help negotiate and revise discourse community expectations. Translanguaging and code-meshing are two frameworks writers and speakers can use to understand, interrogate, and negotiate discourse community expectations as they establish agency as members in them.
Discussion Questions
Find and evaluate a meme as representative of a discourse community.
Justify the extent to which the meme is or is not representative of a particular discourse community and explain your rationale.
Analyze language expectations of the discourse community by comparing the meme to another genre from the discourse community.
Evaluate the meme use (if present) of translanguaging or code-meshing. If no translanguaging or code-meshing is present, evaluate how well the meme adheres to its discourse community’s language expectations.
Design a meme for a particular discourse community using its lexis and integrating translanguaging or code-meshing practices as appropriate to your linguistic resources. Be respectful and do not appropriate another cultural language practice or dialect that is not your own.
Consider your language background and history. To what extent has your language use and literacy changed through your participation in a specific discourse community? If you are/are not a monolingual English speaker, for example, how does this interact with your membership in and access to the discourse communities where standard English is expected?
Why do we use the Englishes that we do in particular discourse communities? How is audience a key factor for our communication choices?
How are Englishes different across the communities where you am a member and when does it really matter what language choices you make in the discourse community?
Choose a discourse community that you are a member of—or that you want to join. Analyze the language expectations of this discourse community by considering the following questions:
What would it look like for you or others to utilize linguistic resources, such as the dialects or language styles a person feels most comfortable with, in this community? What are the risks and benefits of doing so?
What do you notice about language expectations and which languages or dialects are and are not valued in this discourse communities?
What are the benefits or challenges of using translanguaging and/or code-meshing in this community? When are the stakes high and where are they low?
How can we better understand the choices people make as writers and speakers and learn to value diverse and interesting language practices?
Author’s Overview — This chapter draws from Aja Martinez’s concept of counterstories as a rhetorical research methodology in rhetoric and writing studies and encourages you, a first year writing student, to draw upon your experiential knowledge to both challenge and reframe master narratives that are accepted by the majority. In first-year composition classrooms, you can use counterstories to give legitimacy to your diverse background and varied lived experiences by interrogating and challenging the master narrative. Counterstories foster agency, which first year writing students use to build navigational capital as undergraduates. This chapter begins by explaining what counterstory is, followed by an example of a counterstory. Then, you learn the importance of counterstories and how they help you interrogate your own rhetorical decisions in writing. Afterwards, practical applications are provided to understand how counterstory, as a rhetorical approach, helps multilingual learners achieve linguistic freedom and justice.
Discussion Questions
Have you ever been in a situation where you felt excluded or othered? How did this make you feel and why? How did power/powerlessness feed into your feelings?
Oftentimes we hear and read stories that have nothing to do with us and who we are. Why is it important to expose ourselves to these stories? What can these stories teach us about ourselves, our positionality, our privilege, and/or our being in the world?
How does counterstory contribute to or rewrite how histories are told?
Think of your lived experiences thus far. Whose stories do we traditionally hear about in our academic experiences? How about through the media? Why is it important to also hear the voices of minority communities? What can their experiences teach us, and how does counterstory contribute to social justice and change?
How can counterstories contribute to our larger understandings of diversity, social issues (i.e., poverty, homelessness, working conditions, food justice, immigration, refugee experiences), gender identity, linguistic discrimination, and/or learning differences?
What are some of the stock stories you have encountered as a multilingual learner, both inside and outside of the classroom? How did these experiences make you feel? If you are not a multilingual learner, what are some of dominant narratives or myths you have heard for people who speak English as their second, third, or fourth language?
Author’s Overview — How can we help students become invested in their writing? How can we help students write interesting papers that we look forward to reading? Students can learn to write interesting papers that develop complex ideas if they begin by “looking for trouble.” This chapter provides students with a step-by-step process for finding their way into assignments by focusing on tensions within texts or between themselves and texts, articulating problems, and raising questions. Given that all good academic writing, regardless of discipline, wrestles with meaningful problems and pursues fruitful questions, you can help students use this approach whenever they are given a writing assignment.
Discussion Questions
What is your process for developing an argument or a thesis? How do you approach a writing assignment that does not provide you with a specific problem or question?
Examine the writing assignments you’ve received in your classes. Have your instructors provided you with problems and/or questions? How do the types of problems and questions provided differ form course to course? What types of problems and questions are characteristic of writing in your major?
Look at papers you’ve written over the course of your academic career. Do you tend to present problems, pose questions, and identify what is at stake? How do your introductions unfold?
Examine the introductions of several newspaper and scholarly articles and books. For each text, identify the problem, the question, and what is at stake.
Author’s Overview — During the research process, many first year writing students can become attached to their rhetorical positions which suggests an involvement in projects that help students learn and grow as researchers. However, if student researchers explore their stance at the exclusion of other viewpoints, they unintentionally limit their understanding of an issue and their opportunities to persuade those who might disagree. This chapter will help you teach the importance of examining “antithetical writing,” a strategy that can help students revise and refine their thesis during the research writing process.
Discussion Questions
When was the last time you had to argue for a specific position on an issue? What was the issue? Were you alone or did you have friends to back you up? How did you find evidence to support your position? Did you “win” the argument by getting your way or by convincing the opponents of you were right? Why did you win or not win?
What are some issues have you recently talked about in courses (other than writing)? What were some theses offered by students in those classes (or by the professor)? Pick one or two of the theses you found most intriguing (or that elicited the most conversation) and see if you can write the antithesis. Is this impossible without doing some research? Why or why not? What would you do next, if you needed to follow up on this thinking exercise as a writing project?
Because of research on a particular issue, have you ever changed your mind about what you believed was right? What was the issue? Why did you change your mind? Or why not?
When you’ve been in classes and not agreed with other students or the professor, did you offer your differing opinion? Was that based on research or your gut instinct or your own experience? What was the most effective process you’ve used for participating in debate in classes? Or has this been something you’re unwilling to be involved in? Why has that been the case?
Author’s Overview — Teaching students to write well with sources involves much more than teaching them to summarize, paraphrase, quote, and provide documentation. You can use this dialogue, in which a college student seeks writing advice about using sources from an online professor, to help students understand what it means to use sources thoughtfully, appropriately, and rhetorically. Four metaphors help you to articulate how students can work effectively with sources illuminating a different aspect of source-based writing: walking, talking, cooking, and eating. The walking metaphor captures how to find and document sources. The talking metaphor is a reminder that all sources are authored and connected through overlapping knowledge networks. The metaphor of cooking with sources describes how to analyze source-based assignments and integrate source materials. Finally, the eating metaphor explains the effects of using sources on one’s personal identity.
Discussion Questions
What writing assignments have you received from your various professors? How many of them involve working with sources? What kinds of sources do your professors ask you to use?
What difficulties have you encountered in finding good sources for writing assignments? How have you overcome those difficulties?
How helpful is the “recipe analysis” technique for understanding how to go about your assignments? What other analysis techniques have you used to understand writing assignments?
The metaphors in this dialogue explain some aspects of using sources, but not others. What other metaphors can you think of for working with sources? How would those other metaphors add to an understanding of writing with sources?
