WHAT IS ARGUMENTATION

1) Argumentation is a reasoned, logical way of convincing an audience of the soundness of a position belief, or conclusion.

2) Argumentation takes a stand – supportive by evidence – and urges people to share the writer’s perspective and insights.

3) Unlike an informal exchange of opinion, formal arguments follow rules designed to ensure that ideas are presented fairly and logically.

4) The first rules governing argument were formulated thousands of years ago by the ancient Greeks.

I. One purpose of argument is to convince reasonable people to accept your position.

II. Another is simply to defend your position, to establish its validity even if other people cannot be convinced to agree.

III. A third purpose of argumentation is to question or refute some position you believe to be misguided, untrue, or evil, without necessarily offering an alternative of your own.

ARGUMENTATION AND PERSUASION

1) Although persuasion and arguments are terms frequently used interchangeably in everyday speech, they are quite different.

2) Persuasion is a general term used to describe a technique a writer uses to move an audience to adopt a belief or follow a course of action.

3) To persuade an audience a writer relies on various appeals – to the emotions, to reasons, or to ethics.

4) Argument is the appeal to reason. In an argument a writer connects a series of statements in an orderly way so that they lead to a conclusion.

5) Argument is different from persuasion in that it does not try to move an audience that certain ideas are valid and that others are not.

6) Unlike persuasion, argumentation has a formal structure: To support a conclusion, an argument makes points, supplies evidence, establishes a logical chain of reasoning, refutes opposing arguments, and accommodates the views of an audience.

7) Most effective argumentation essays appeal to the emotions as well as to reason.

8) For Example: A combination of logical and emotional appeals to argue against lowering the drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen years of age.

9) One can appeal to reason by constructing an argument that leads to the conclusion that policies that have a high probability of injuring and killing citizens should not be condoned.

10) One can appeal to the emotions by telling a particular sad story about an eighteen-year-old alcoholic.

11) What appeals, you decide and how you balance them depend in part on your purpose and your sense of your audience. But ethical questions are also involved.

12) Some extremely effective means of persuasion are quite simple unfair.

13) Although most people would agree that lies, threats, and appeals to greed and prejudice are unacceptable ways of motivating an audience to action, such appeals are commonly used in political campaigns, international diplomacy, and daily conversation.

14) One, however, should use only those appeals to emotion that most people would perceive as being fair.

CHOOSING A TOPIC

1) In an argumentative essay, choosing the right topic is important.

2) It should be one in which you have an intellectual or emotional interest.

3) Nevertheless, you should be open-minded and willing to consider all sides of a question.

4) If the evidence goes against your position, you should be able to change your thesis or even the subject.

5) You should also be able, in advance, to consider your topic from other people’s viewpoints so that you understand what they believe and can build logical case. If you cannot, then you should abandon your topic and pick another one that you can deal with more objectively.

6) You should be well informed about your topic.

7) You should select a limited issue, narrow enough to be treated effectively in the space available to you.

8) Confine your discussion to a particular aspect of a wider (broad) issue.

9) Also consider your objective/purpose what you expect your argument to accomplish and how you wish your audience to resend.

10) If your topic is so far-reaching that you cannot identify what you want yo convince a reader to think, or so idealistic that your expectations are impossible or unreasonable, your essay will not be effective.

TAKING A STAND

1) To state the position you will argue in the form of a thesis.

2) Before going any further you should examine your thesis to make sure that it is Debatable.

3) There is no point in arguing a statement of fact or a point that people accept as self-evident.

4) A good argumentative thesis would contain a proposition that has at least two sides and could function as the basis of an argument.

5) A good way to test the suitability of your thesis for an argumentation essay is to formulate an antithesis, a statement that asserts the opposite position.

6) It is also imperative that your own attitude toward your thesis should be tested.
7) If you are so convinced you are right that you cannot understand or respect opposing views and the people who hold them, you do not have the objectivity you need to develop a sound and persuasive argument.

8) Argument is demanding, and it requires clear thought and a reasonably cool head.

9) Of course, you should care about your subject and believe you position is right, but the strength of your conviction will not guarantee a strong argument.

ANALYZING YOUR AUDIENCE

1) One must analyze the characteristics, values, and interests of your audience.

2) After assessing your audience, you need to assess what beliefs or opinions they are likely to hold and whether they are friendly, neutral, or hostile to your thesis.

3) It is probably best to assume that some, if not most, of your readers are at least skeptically neutral and possibly hostile.

4) This assumption will keep you from making claims you cannot support.

5) If your position is controversial, you should assume an informed and determined opposition is looking for holes in you argument.

6) Often you begin with a purpose in mind but must decide on an audience.

7) If you want to make something happen, who has the power to do it? Whom do you have to persuade, and how would those readers respond to your efforts? Sometimes you will need to appeal to several different audiences, tailoring your persuasive method and approach to each.

8) Each of these considerations influences your approach to your subject.

9) You could be reasonably sure, in advance, that each group would be friendly and would agree with your position.

10) But argument requires more than telling people what they already believe.

11) Whether your readers are mildly sympathetic, neutral or even hostile to your position, your purpose is to change their views to match your own more closely.

12) Remember, your audience will not just take your word for things. You must provide evidence that will support your thesis and reasoning that will lead to your conclusion.

GATHERING EVIDENCE

1) All the points that you make in your paper must be supported.

2) If they are not, your audience will dismiss them as irrelevant or unclear.

3) Sometimes you can support a statement with appeals to emotion, but most of the time you support the points of your argument by appealing to reason – by providing evidence, material presented in support of your claim.

4) As you gather evidence and assess its effectiveness, keep in mind that evidence in an argumentative essay never proves anything conclusively. If it did there would be no debate and hence no point in arguing.

5) The best that evidence can do is convince your audience that an assertion is reasonable and worth believing. Choose you evidence with this goal in mind.

6) Evidence can consist of fact or opinion. Facts are statements that most people agree are true and that can be verified independently.

7) Examples are the most common type of factual evidence, but statistics – evidence expressed as numbers – are also factual.

8) Facts may be drawn from your own experience as well as from reading and observation.

9) Quite often, facts alone are not enough to support an assertion. In such cases, you need opinions, interpretations of facts.

10) Keep in mind that not all opinions are equal. You may form opinions based on personal experience and observation and use such opinions to support an argument.

11) Still the opinions of experts are more convincing than are those of individuals who have less experience with or knowledge of an issue.

12) Your personal opinions can be excellent evidence provided you are knowledgeable about your subject, but they seldom constitute enough evidence to support a major assertion of your argument.

13) In the final analysis, what is important is not just the quality of the evidence, but also the credibility of the person offering the evidence.

14) As soon as you decide a topic, you should begin to gather as much evidence as you can.

15) Brainstorm to think of experiences and observations that would support your claims.

16) If your topic is technical or demands support beyond your own knowledge of the subject, go to the library and search the card catalog, periodical indexes, and reference books to locate the information that you need.

17) When selecting and reviewing material, remember three things about your evidence: -

I. YOUR EVIDENCE SHOULD BE RELEVANT. Your evidence should support your thesis and should contribute to the argument that you are making. As you present evidence, you may concentrate so much on a specific example that you lose sight of the point you are supporting. As a result, you digress from your point, and your readers become confused.

II. YOUR EVIDENCE SHOULD BE REPRESENTATIVE. Your evidence should represent the full range of opinions about your subject, not just one side or the other. Examples and expert opinions should be typical, not aberrant. Look especially hard at opinions that disagree with the position you plan to take. They will help you understand your opposition and enable you to refute it effectively when you write your paper.

III. YOUR EVIDENCE SHOULD BE SUFFICIENT. Your evidence should be sufficient to support your claims. The amount of evidence that you need depends on your audience and your thesis. It stands to reason that you would use fewer examples in a two-page paper than in a ten-page research assignment. Similarly, an audience that is favorably disposed to your thesis might need only one or two examples to be convinced, while a skeptical audience would need many more. As you develop your thesis, consider the level of support that you will need as you write your paper. You may decide that a narrower more limited thesis might be easier to support than one that is more expansive.

18) As you can see, the evidence and reasoning you use in an argument depend to a great extent on whom you want to persuade and what you know about them.

DEALING WITH THE OPPOSITION

1) Arguments against the author’s position must be deal effectively; this has to be kept in mind from the very start of the essay.

2) One should address the most obvious objections to the case.

3) It is imperative to think of objections that may logically be raised against your opinion.

4) Directly addressing such objections in your essay helps the audience to get convinced that arguments in your essay are sound and show both sides of the coin.

5) IMP: This part of the essay, in classical rhetoric, is called refutation and is considered essential to making the strongest case possible on behalf of your thesis.

6) Opposing arguments can be refuted by showing their weakness, unsoundness and unfairness.

7) Contrasting evidence is used frequently to show how weak the opposing arguments really are.

8) While refuting an opposite argument one must not distort it or make it seem weaker than it actually is. This technique is called creating a straw man and can put your work in harm’s way.

9) A strong argument that can not be totally eliminated should be acknowledged, this will portray you as a sensible and fair-minded person.

10) Many times a strong point represents only one element in a multifaceted problem. For this reason your ability to use process and classification and division will be important in establishing the strength of your argument.

11) When planning argumentative essay, one should write down all the objections to the thesis that one can identify.

12) These objections can than be scrutinized to make a list of those which may be refuted.

13) It, however, be reminded that audience and specifically sensible readers expect the author to refute intelligently the most compelling of your opponent’s arguments.

DEDUCTIVE AND INDUCTIVE ARGUMENTS

Deductive: General to Specific

Inductive: Specific to General

1) Deductive reasoning proceeds from a general premise or assumption to a specific conclusion.

2) It is what most people mean when they speak of logic. Using strict logical form, deduction holds that if all the statements in the argument are true, the conclusion must also be true.

3) Inductive reasoning proceeds from individual observations to a more general conclusion and uses no strict form.

4) It requires only that all the relevant evidence be stated and that the conclusion fit the evidence better than any other conclusion would.

A. Deductive Arguments

1) The basic form of a deductive argument is a syllogism*. A syllogism consists of a major premise, which is a general statement: a minor premise, which is a related but more specific statement; and a conclusion, which has to be drawn from those premises.

*SYLLOGISM: A basic form of deductive reasoning. Every syllogism includes three parts, i) Major premise: Makes a general statement ii) Minor Premise: Makes a related but specific statement iii) Conclusion: Drawn from the above two statements.

2) For Example:

Major Premise : All Olympic runners are fast
Minor Premise: John is an Olympic runner
Conclusion : Therefore, John is fast.

3) From the example, if you grant each of the premises, then you must also grant the conclusion – and it is the only conclusion that you can properly draw.

4) Any conclusion except this, e.g. John is slow, John is tall etc, is wrong because these contradict the premises.

5) A deductive argument can be powerful, and its premises can be fairly elaborated.

6) From the essay of Jonathan, The Declaration of Independence, following core evidence may be seen:
Major Premise: Tyrannical rulers deserve no loyalty.
Minor Premise: King George III is a tyrannical ruler.
Conclusion : Therefore, King George III deserves no loyalty.

7) When a conclusion follows logically from the major and minor premises, then the argument is said to be valid. But if the syllogism is not logical, the argument is not valid and the conclusion is not sound, for example
Major Premise: All dogs are animals.
Minor Premise: All cats are animals.
Conclusion : Therefore, All dogs are cats.

8) The above conclusion is absurd (irrational, illogical). The reason is, although cats and dogs are animals, cats are not included in the major premise of the syllogism. Thus the form of the syllogism is defective, and the argument is invalid. To be sound, the syllogism must be both logical and true.

9) Advantage of a deductive argument is that if you convince your audience to accept your major and minor premises, they should also accept your conclusion. The problem is to establish your basic assumptions. You try to select premises that you know your audience accepts or that are self-evident – that is, premises that most people would believe to be true.

10) All aspects and ideas are to be kept in consideration. Not all opinions should be in support of your idea. Opposing ideas should strictly be included so that the audience may get satisfied with your opinion.

11) If premises are too controversial or difficult to establish firmly, you should use inductive reasoning.

B. Inductive Arguments

12) i) Induction has no distinctive form, and its conclusions are less definitive than those of syllogisms whose forms are valid and whose premises are clearly true.

ii) First, you decide on a question to be answered – or, especially in scientific work, a tentative (uncertain, not final) answer to such a question, called a hypothesis.

iii) You than gather all the evidence you can find that is relevant to the question and that may be important to finding the answer.

iv) Finally, you draw a conclusion often called the inference that answers the question and takes the evidence into account.

v) For Example:
Question: How did that living-room window got broken.
Evidence: There is a baseball on the living-room floor
That baseball was not there this morning.
Some children were playing baseball this afternoon.
They were playing in the vacant lot across from the window.
They stopped playing a little while ago.
They aren’t in the vacant lot now.
Conclusion: One of the children hit or threw the ball through the window.
Then they all ran away.

The conclusion seems obvious. That is because it takes all of the evidences into account. But if it turned out that the children had been playing softball, not baseball, that one additional piece of evidence would make the conclusion very doubtful – and the true answer would be much harder to infer…..

vi) Inductive leap: With induction conclusions are never certain, only highly probable. Although the form of induction does not point to any particular type of conclusion the way deduction does, making sure that your evidence is relevant, representative, and sufficient can increase the probability of your conclusion’s being sound.

vii) Considering alternate conclusions is a good way to avoid reaching an unjustified or false conclusion.

viii) Jumping on to conclusions without assessing the evidence is what audience accuses an author the most. A hasty conclusion is one that is not borne out by the facts.

ix). In induction, an hypothesis is merely the starting point. The rest of the inductive process continues as if the questions were to be answered – as in fact it is until all the evidence has been taken into account.

Fallacies of Argument

1). Fallacies are statements that may look like arguments but are not logically defensible and may actually be deceptive. When detected they can backfire and turn even a sympathetic audience against your position. Here are some of the more common fallacies that you should try to avoid.

I. Begging the question: is a logical fallacy that assumes in the premise what the arguer is trying to prove in the conclusion. This tactic asks us to agree that certain points are self-evident when they are not.

Example: The unfair and shortsighted legislation that limits free trade is clearly a threat to the American economy.

II. Argument from Analogy: An analogy is a comparison of two unlike things. Although analogies can explain an abstract or unclear idea and can be quite convincing, they never prove anything. When you base an argument on an analogy and ignore important dissimilarities between the two things being compared, you create a fallacy.

Example: The overcrowded conditions in some parts of our city have forced people together like rats in a cage. Like rats, they will eventually turn on one another, fighting and killing until a balance is restored. It is therefore, necessary that we vote to appropriate funds to build low-cost housing.

III. Personal Attack (Argument Ad Hominem): This fallacy tries to turn attention away from the facts of an issue by attacking the motives or character of one’ opponent.

Example: The Public should not take seriously Dr. Mason’s plan for upgrading county health services. He is a former alcoholic whose second wife recently divorced him.

IV. Hasty and Sweeping Generalization: This fallacy occurs when a general principle is applied mistakenly to a special case.