Writing a Successful
Argumentative Essay
You're having a fight
with your brother over the television remote. You
fuss and whine over how he alllways gets to watch the hockey game
when you've been waiting all week for the continuation of the love
triangle drama on your favourite soap opera. He argues that he
never watches television and that chances are the game won't be
shown on rerun like your show probably will be. You shoot back that
he can get the highlights on the sportscast later on, but there's
no sportscast for prime time shows.
You slump back annoyed and frustrated and then you think to
yourself, "can I label this an argument? Or is it merely an
opinion?"
The difference between argument and opinion is what you used to
back it up. An argument uses evidence, facts, statistics,
testimonials etc. to persuade an audience to a point. An opinion on
the other hand is a personal response using logic and personal
experience and background.
According to rhetoric, persuasion and argumentation are art forms
of the written world. It is through persuasive writing that we can
use our written word to use evidence and prove a point. In an
argumentative essay, it is these facts and background information
that persuade an audience to follow in your argument and what you
side with.
Socrates was one of the primary writers and speakers who used
rhetoric and persuasion in his actions. He once said…
After you have found your information in all sorts of forms and
stating bias and opinions of their own, you must establish your
thesis. Your thesis is where you will state your
position on an issue and what you will show with reasoning and the
evidence you've found to try to argue. This thesis should occur in
the first paragraph of your essay. It needs to be clear, concise
and defined. This means that it relates to the question posed as
well as states how you will go about proving through your
research.
In your introduction, it is important to show why
the issue you'll be talking about is significant. You should make
it clear to the audience why it is important that they care about
the topic. The persuasiveness in your essay should really be shown
through the evidence you'll be mentioning. This can be brought into
the introduction paragraph briefly to entice the reader into
reading your body paragraphs. The introduction is used to bring
your audience into the context of your topic, get them interested
and state your thesis or argument/perspective on the issue and how
you'll use evidence to back it up.
The body paragraphs are where you show the
evidence and research you've done. The important thing is to
reference correctly in the style you're asked to
use or one that you're comfortable using. Most professors are fine
with you using any style of referencing as long as you use the same
one throughout. Make sure that the evidence you use is always tied
back to your thesis. You can even have a body paragraph that shows
"on the other hand" evidence that goes against your thesis and
argument. This provides a great opportunity for you to create a
rebuttal paragraph in which to persuade your audience of your
thesis further.
Your conclusion is not merely a summary and
restatement of your thesis, but it shows a new light on the topic
with the inclusion of the evidence just stated. This is very
important because it sums up everything that was mentioned and
brings your argument to its fullest form. It is not wise to
introduce new information in your conclusion however you can state
what further research would help your argument even more.
After writing your argumentative essay, you'll discover that
research is central, rather than personal opinion. It really is a
skill to be able to pull your research together to support an
argument rather than purely arguing as you would with your brother
over the remote control.
References
The OWL at Purdue. Essay
Writing: The Argumentative Essay.
<http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/685/05/>
"I incline to Cain's heresy,"
he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his
own
way." In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the
last
reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives
of
downgoing men. And to such as these, so long as they came about
his
chambers, he never marked a shade of change in his demeanour.
-THE STRANGE
CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, by Robert Louis Stevenson, STORY OF THE DOOR
"And no one who knows the small-minded cynicism of our
plutocracy, its
secrecy, its gambling spirit, its contempt of conscience, can doubt
that
the artist-advertiser will often be assisting enterprises over
which he
will have no moral control, and of which he could feel no moral
approval.
He will be working to spread quack medicines, queer investments;
and will
work for Marconi instead of Medici. And to this base ingenuity he
will
have to bend the proudest and purest of the virtues of the
intellect, the
power to attract his brethren, and the noble duty of praise."
-Chesterton, G.K., Utopia of Usurers and other Essays
"But complexity is no guarantee of accuracy-in clockwork or in
anything else.
A clock can be as wrong as the human head; and a clock can stop, as
suddenly as the human heart."
-Chesterton, G.K., Utopia of Usurers and other Essays
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/science/nature/8478770.stm
05:004:024 For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.
"But Douglass's work in direct behalf of his race was not yet
entirely
done. In fact, he realized very distinctly the vast amount of
work
that would be necessary to lift his people up to the level of
their
enlarged opportunities; and, as may be gathered from some of
his
published utterances, he foresaw that the process would be a long
one,
and that their friends might weary sometimes of waiting, and
that
there would be reactions toward slavery which would rob
emancipation
of much of its value. It was the very imminence of such
backward
steps, in the shape of various restrictive and oppressive laws
promptly enacted by the old slave States under President
Johnson's
administration, that led Douglass to urge the enfranchisement of
the
freedmen. He maintained that in a free country there could be no
safe
or logical middle ground between the status of freeman and that
of
serf. There has been much criticism because the negro, it is
said,
acquired the ballot prematurely. There seemed imperative
reasons,
besides that of political expediency, for putting the ballot in
his
hands. Recent events have demonstrated that this necessity is as
great
now as then. The assumption that negroes-under which
generalization
are included all men of color, regardless of that sympathy to
which
kinship at least should entitle many of them-are unfit to have
a
voice in government is met by the words of Lincoln, which have all
the
weight of a political axiom: "No man can be safely trusted to
govern
other men without their consent." The contention that a class
who constitute half the population of a State shall be entirely
unrepresented in its councils, because, forsooth, their will
there
expressed may affect the government of another class of the
same
general population, is as repugnant to justice and human rights as
was
the institution of slavery itself. Such a condition of affairs has
not
the melodramatic and soul-stirring incidents of chattel slavery,
but
its effects can be as far-reaching and as debasing. There has
been
some manifestation of its possible consequences in the recent
outbreaks of lynching and other race oppression in the South.
The
practical disfranchisement of the colored people in several
States,
and the apparent acquiescence by the Supreme Court in the
attempted
annulment, by restrictive and oppressive laws, of the war
amendments
to the Constitution, have brought a foretaste of what might be
expected should the spirit of the Dred Scott decision become again
the
paramount law of the land."
ancient Rome, "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."
Slavery for him was conceived in greed,
born in sin, cradled in shame, and worthy of utter and
relentless
condemnation.
In 1871 Douglass was elected president of the Freedmans
Bank.
This ill-starred venture was then apparently in the full tide
of
prosperity, and promised to be a great lever in the uplifting
of
the submerged race. Douglass, soon after his election as
president,
discovered the insolvency of the institution, and insisted that it
be
closed up. The negro was in the hands of his friends, and was
destined
to suffer for their mistakes as well as his own.
Other honors that fell to Douglass were less empty than the
presidency
of a bankrupt bank. In 1870 he was appointed by President Grant
a
member of the Santo Domingo Commission, the object of which was
to
arrange terms for the annexation of the mulatto republic to the
Union.
Some of the best friends of the colored race, among them
Senator
Sumner, opposed this step; but Douglass maintained that to
receive
Santo Domingo as a State would add to its strength and importance.
The
scheme ultimately fell through, whether for the good or ill of
Santo
Domingo can best be judged when the results of more recent
annexation
schemes [1898: Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, and
de
facto Cuba] become apparent. Douglass went to Santo Domingo on
an
American man-of-war, in the company of three other commissioners.
In
his Life and Times he draws a pleasing contrast between
some of his
earlier experiences in travelling, and the terms of cordial
intimacy
upon which, as the representative of a nation which a few years
before
had denied him a passport, he was now received in the company of
able
and distinguished gentlemen.
-Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, Frederick Douglass, A Biography
Keep in mind I didn't even read all that, but I think Aristotle ruled everything and Plato ruled destroying civilization.
That being said, we might want to continue this in a thread in my community (if we do continue it) instead of hijacking this one!
All of science has brought us closer to Plato's ideals using
Aristotles methods. In a way, Plato showed us our destination and
Aristotle showed us the way.
What is scientific endevour if not cutting away all the chaff and
reveal the gleaming nugget of ideal truth. Think Maxwell's
equations, think Unified Field Theory, think the Genome project. We
now know that Truth is usually simple and beautiful and all
manifestations of it on our "shadow" plane are complicated and
encumbered with other shadows, but once we separate the information
from the physicality, we can cast our own shadows in whatever
shapes we like, on a whim. Plato's genius was in recognizing that
there is a cleaner, purer beauty to be found if we can look beyond
what our limited senses tell us prima facie. Aristotles's
was in reminding us that our sensory apparatus is all that we have.
Was it Metaphysical in any way, what Plato said, or were his
thoughts just a victim of the very same flaw of which he accused
all creation? He was grasping at the nature of knowledge,
meta-knowledge, but his own theory of Forms and Ideas was
a sullied shadow of the true Theory of Knowledge, which we are
still contending with.
I agree with the fact that modern definitions of Science and Philosophy are a by-product of the Aristotle vs. Plato debate. There is a fundamental difference between Plato and the "philosophers" of today, in that Plato was among the first to propose ideas that led to scientific thought, and Aristotle carried these further in a way that is much more identifiable with modern science. Plato was not attempting to study "metaphysics". Rather, we tend to separate the objects of his study from those of his successors and label these as metaphysics. When I call the interpretation of the gestures in the painting as conjecture, I simply argue that the fundamental disparity in the beliefs of Aristotle and Plato is overstated more often than not. In many ways Aristotle's ideas were a natural progression of what Plato postulated, even if his inherent inclination towards empirical observation took him closer to the scientific truth as we understand it today. Also, his "science" was not the same as ours, as it included the "arts" of today as well. He learned a large portion of what to study from his master, but applied his own method on how to study it. Some of his treatises, such as Politics, mirror the path trodden by Plato in his works on the same subject. Come to think of it, he studied similar things as his teacher (maybe the word "master" was misconstrued, but inasmuch as Aristotle was a student of Plato, and there's no denying that, the latter was most certainly the teacher), but his approach varied, and that too only marginally in many cases. Debates on the existence or non-existence of separate forms or the relevance of the cave allegory border on the abstract, as does the entire universals vs. particulars issue. Even Aristotle's critique of Plato's theory about universals can't be empirically verified, and all latter improvements on Plato's theory, including Aristotle's, concede the existence of universals outside the usual spatiotemporal bounds. If that is not a reference to the heavens, I don't know what is.
Avicster my dear dear friend, you are slightly off the mark. It's not really natural phenomena vs. the heavens. It's much bigger. It's more like empirical epistemology vs well, Platonic epistemology. You know.. all that crap about the Forms and the Cave and denying the mundane reality. It's a debate about the way science and philosophy are "known" to us. Aristotle's ideas were what got us to where we are, at least till science and philosophy were the same thing. Now, I think, Aristotle rules Science and Plato rules Philosophy. Maybe it's because of this debate between these old buggers that we define Science and Philosophy the way we do.
You're right.
When you say this is just conjecture do you mean you're guessing that that's the reason or that the popular belief that that is why he painted it that way is just conjecture? I'm really, really confident that is the idea. Even if there isn't stated explanations by Rapheal, which I was under the impression there is, just knowing both philosophers thoroghly and seeing that makes it way too consistent to be a coincidence.
I didn't recognize the quote, but yeah, it is unfortunate she put the Socrates quote beside Plato now that I'm aware of it.. I would find it less of a problem if the quote were from a 20th or 21st century scholar and not someone closely related to the person in the picture; it would feel less misleading.
Haha Krista you got the philosophy nerds coming on and being anal about the details of your arguement essay!
P.S. Krista you mispelt always. This is Learnhub's peer review in action.
P.P.S. Plato wasn't exactly Aristotle's "master" and my strong preference for the second makes me slightly unhappy with that way of describing it =P
It is either an extremely twisted joke/game, or ignorance of the worst kind to accompany the most enduring image of Plato ever with a quote by Socrates.
Anyway, here's for the points:
The image is from Raphael's "Scuola di Atene" or "School of
Athens". The figure beside Plato is that of Aristotle, who is
pointing towards the earth, as opposed to his master who's pointing
towards the heavens. The popular theory is that this is to
differentiate their fundamental beliefs - one studied natural
phenomena, and in a sense was "down to earth", the other propounded
theories on the heavens and afterlife. However, this is just
conjecture.
Nice Renaissance painting of Plato by Raphael.
Ten points to anyone who can tell me who is beside Plato in the full version of the painting, and fifty to anyone who can tell me why Plato is pointing up while the person beside him is pointing down.
I was already planning to write about that painting and answer those questions in the first lesson for the philosophy community.
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