For this assignment, you are required to write an argumentative/persuasive essay. Topic: think about something that is wrong as you see it in america or another country i.e. Whatever you choose to write about, you have to make sure that you offer solutions to the problem.

This is not a definition essay where you will just define and explain your problem you have to argue persuasively why the problem exists and how the problem can be solved. Sample topics: teen pregnancy, gay marriages, homelessness, advertising, race relations, restaurants and oversized portions, christian religion in schools, etc. Note: abortion, smoking from any perspective , capital punishment, global warming, stem cell research, legalizing marijuana, banning or allowing handguns are unacceptable topics.

Refutation: every argumentative essay must include counterarguments refuting the opposing viewpoint. an arguable thesis has an anti thesis, or opposite point of view. an effective argument recognizes and addresses the opposition’s viewpoints. the writer who acknowledges, accommodates, and refutes the opposition’s concerns can win the audience’s respect and sometimes their agreement. Refutations: denouncing or negating counterarguments to show that your line of reasoning is more logical. Acknowledge the opposition’s viewpoint: the writer summarizes the opposition’s viewpoint openly and honestly. Ignoring the opposition is futile in that the audience is aware of the opposing arguments and will doubt the credibility of a presentation that chooses to ignore the opposition rather than deal with it.

Accept all or part of the opposition: the writer acknowledges the opposition’s claim in his argument, and still shows that his own claim is the strongest. although slightly altered, they provide both a solid description of the features of the academic argument and help in improving your own argumentative essays. i offer this information because i believe that the argumentative essay represents the crucial genre of writing you will do in college. The purpose of these notes is to give you some sense of the nature of the argumentative essay. You will notice that despite the negative connotations argument has accrued over the years, it is actually productive. It seems to me that any time you talk or write you are trying to conform people to your view in fact, there’s a well known book in which lunsford and ruszkiewicz argue that everything’s an argument .

Format of Speech Writing for Students

When you argue, you merely have to defend your position effectively based on the evidence you have gathered. To break the essay down to its bare bones: i want you to assert, offer proof, and defend. Defining an argumentative essay an argumentative essay states and defends a thesis sentence. A thesis is a claim that can be defended and must be defended if it is to be accepted. The thesis should be a substantiated observation that can teach others something about a subject. It does not need defended any one reading the story will notice, so this is not teaching, nor is it debatable. Lysistrata shows that women in the ancient world were always treated equally by men.

Although this is a debatable response, it cannot be supported by the text or history. The odyssey is a story about telemachus’ coming of age and odysseus’ acceptance of his son as an equal. There are other ways to read the story and the claim requires analysis and explanation of the work. One might learn something from this claim if, that is, the author defends the validity of his or her reading.

Improving Sentence Structures for Academic Writing

Don't despair if you think of more 1's and 2's than 3's that is okay for starters. What does odysseus’ journey signify or symbolize? why is that important? as you brainstorm for ideas, pose questions to yourself. Remember: great essays often don’t start with great ideas but often do result from the smart handling of simple ones. To read the work once is to sample it, not to understand it it’s a first meeting rather than a meaningful conversation.

Make notes about what you find interesting, comments about what the author seems to be saying or doing, comparisons between this work and others by the same author or another author. For example, notes on machiavelli might develop like this: men are evil a category 1, right? it is better to be feared than loved a clarification of narrative facts mach’s advice is old. Is leadership the end all be all? does mach ask too big a price? what about order? does our desire for ultimate freedom keep us from electing rulers who are effective? armed leaders are not virtuous. The idea is to begin to collect ideas and get some words on paper maybe to sketch out tentative responses or to elaborate on some of your responses. Staying with the machiavelli example, now you begin to acknowledge the issues and problems you are seeing with mach.

Doing Research Is a Fulfilling Experience

Don’t worry about spelling, syntax, or anything that will keep you from writing. You might even set a timer for 10 minutes during which you write without stopping. If you can’t think of anything to write, write, i can’t think of anything to write at this point boredom might force productive thoughts on you. Another technique brainstorming is just jotting down phrases and ideas, perhaps drawing arrows among them to suggest connections you would like to explore and perhaps cross referencing them to page or line numbers from the text. Drafting, outlining, drafting again prewriting and early drafting are thesis seeking activities: you are writing to discover what you want to say. One way to move from a free write or brainstorm to a draft is to identify a part of your free write that seems interesting to you. Jot down this idea at that top of a page and write out a few more thoughts on the matter.

Many promising but only promising essays stop at this point, but more careful writers will take this idea and use it as a working thesis a tentative claim that needs to be tested against the text and then modified, perhaps toned down or complicated. An outline might help at this point because it’s a way to test the working thesis. You will fine tune the thesis the firmer the thesis gets, the more useful it is in helping you determine what stays in and what gets cut from the essay. As you work on drafting and redrafting, remember that argument begins with an assertion followed by the defense of that assertion. In contrast, a narrative a story often moves from a position of uncertainty something has happened, but we might not know who did it to one of certainty we learn the details and retroactively make sense of the previous data. The rhetorician tells the reader precisely what he or she is going to argue, then goes ahead and does it. Is your thesis stated clearly and does everything in the essay clearly relate to the thesis? make sure your own voice is the strongest one in the paper.