Comp I, Unit 3: Academic Argument
Objective: Assist students in entering academic discourse arguments via substantive research.
These seven readings have been selected and sequenced so as to offer students crucial concepts about academic arguments. The intention is to guide students through foundational principles as they begin to conceptualize, research, outline and draft their own argument papers by the end of the unit.
Instructors can use the overview descriptions below (written by the authors themselves) to help decide which chapters might best fit your students’ needs.
by Danielle DeRise
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.
by Dan Melzer
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.
by Lisa Tremain
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.
by Sana Sayed
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.
by Catherine Savini
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.
by Steve Krause
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.
by Cynthia R. Haller
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.
