232 6 / DEVELOPING AN ARGUMENT OF YOUR OWN (and then thinking about) questions. We append questions to the end of each argumentative essay in this book, not to torment you but to help you to think about the arguments—for instance, to turn your attention to especially important matters. If your instructor asks you to write an answer to one of these questions, you are lucky: Examining the question will stimulate your mind to work in a definite direction. If a topic is not assigned, and you are asked to write an argumenta- tive essay, you will find that some ideas (possibly poor ones, at this stage, but that doesn't matter because you will soon revise) will come to mind if you ask yourself questions. You can begin finding where you stand on an issue (stasis) by asking the following five basic questions: 1. What is X? 2. What is the value of X? 3. What are the causes (or the consequences) of X? 4. What should (or ought or must) we do about X? 5. What is the evidence for my claims about X? Let's spend a moment looking at each of these questions. 1. What is X? We can hardly argue about the number of people sentenced to death in the United States in 2000—a glance at the appro- priate government report will give the answer—but we can argue about whether capital punishment as administered in the United States is dis- criminatory. Does the evidence, we can ask, support the view that in the United States the death penalty is unfair? Similarly, we can ask whether a human fetus is a human being (in saying what something is, must we take account of its potentiality?), and, even if we agree that a fetus is a human being, we can further ask about whether it is a person. In Roe V. Wade the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that even the “viable" unborn human fetus is not a “person" as that term is used in the Fifth and Four- teenth Amendments. Here the question is this: Is the essential fact about the fetus that it is a person? An argument of this sort makes a claim—that is, it takes a stand, but notice that it does not also have to argue for an action. Thus, it may argue that the death penalty is administered unfairly—that's a big enough issue—but it need not go on to argue that the death penalty should be abolished. After all, another possibility is that the death penalty should be administered fairly. The writer of the essay may be doing enough if he or she establishes the truth of the claim and leaves to others the possible responses. 2. What is the value of x? College courses often call for literary judgments. No one can argue with you if you say you prefer the plays of Tennessee Williams to those of Arthur Miller. But academic papers are not mere declarations of preferences. As soon as you say that Will is a bet- ter playwright than Miller, you have based your preference on implicit standards, and it is incumbent on you to support your preference by giving PLANNING, DRAFTING, AND REVISING AN ARGUMENT 233 evidence about the relative skill, insight, and accomplishments of Williams and of Miller. Your argument is an evaluation. The question now at issue is the merits of the two authors and the standards appropriate for such an appraisal. In short, an essay offering an evaluation normally has two purposes: • to set forth an assessment, and • to convince the reader that the assessment is reasonable. In writing an evaluation, you will have to rely on criteria, and these will vary depending on your topic. For instance, if you are comparing the artistic merit of the plays by Williams and by Miller, you may want to talk about the quality of the characterization, the importance of the theme, and so on. But if the topic is “Which playwright is more suitable to be taught in high school?” other criteria may be appropriate, such as • the difficulty of the author's language, • the sexual content of some scenes, and • the presence of obscene words. Or consider a nonliterary issue: On balance, are college fraternities and sororities good or bad? If good, how good? If bad, how bad? What criteria can we use in making our evaluation? Probably some or all of the following: testimony of authorities (for instance, persons who can offer first- hand testimony about the good or bad effects), • inductive evidence (we can collect examples of good or bad effects), • appeals to logic (“it follows, therefore, that ..."), and appeals to emotion (for instance, an appeal to our sense of fairness). 3. What are the causes (or the consequences) of X? Why did the rate of auto theft increase during a specific period? If we abolish the death penalty, will that cause the rate of murder to increase? Notice, by the way, that such problems may be complex. The phenomena that people usually argue about—say, such things as inflation, war, suicide, crime—have many causes, and it is therefore often a mistake to speak of the cause of X. A writer in Time mentioned that the life expectancy of an average American male is about sixty-seven years, a figure that com- pares unfavorably with the life expectancy of males in Japan and Israel. The Time writer suggested that an important cause of the relatively short life span is “the pressure to perform well in business.” Perhaps. But the life expectancy of plumbers is no greater than that of managers and executives. Nutrition authority Jean Mayer, in an article in Life, attrib- uted the relatively poor longevity of American males to a diet th is “ri in fat and poor in nutrients.” Doubtless other authorities propose other causes, and in all likelihood no one cause accounts for the phenomenon. 234 6 / DEVELOPING AN ARGUMENT OF YOUR OWN Or take a second example of discussions of causality, this one concern- ing the academic performance of girls in single-sex schools, middle schools, and high schools. It is pretty much agreed (based on statistical evidence) that the graduates of these schools do better, as a group, than girls who graduate from co-educational schools. Why do girls in single-sex schools tend, as a group, to do better? What is the cause? The administrators of girls' schools usually attribute the success to the fact (we are admittedly putting the matter bluntly) that young women flourish better in an atmosphere free from male intimidation: They allegedly gain confidence and become more expressive when they are not threatened by males. And this may be the answer, but skeptics have attributed the success to two other causes: • Most single-sex schools require parents to pay tuition and it is a documented fact that the children of well-to-do parents do better, academically, than the children of poor parents. • Further, most single-sex schools are private schools, and they select their students from a pool of candidates. Admissions offi- cers naturally select those candidates who seem to be academically promising—that is, they select students who have already done well academically. In short, the girls who graduate from single-sex schools may owe their later academic success not to the atmosphere inside the schools but to the fact that even at the time they were admitted to these schools they were academically stronger—we are, again, speaking of a cohort, not of individuals—than the girls who attend co-ed schools. The lesson? Be cautious in attributing a cause. There may be several causes. The kinds of support that usually accompany claims of cause include: • factual data, especially statistics; analogies (“The Roman Empire declined because of X and Y," "Our society exhibits X and Y, and therefore ..."); and • inductive evidence. 4. What should (or ought or must) we do about X? Must we always obey the law? Should the law allow eighteen-year-olds to drink alcohol? Should eighteen-year-olds be drafted to do one year of social service? Should pornography be censored? Should steroid use by ath- letes be banned? Ought there to be Good Samaritan laws, making it a 'Until 2004 federal regulations discouraged public schools from separating boys from girls. As of the time of this comment [2009] there are only ninety-five single-sex public schools, twelve of which are in New York City. An article in the New York Times, 11 March 2009, page A20, suggests that there is little evidence that girls do better than boys in these schools. Indeed, in California a much-touted program in which six public middle schools and high schools were turned into single-sex academies has been abandoned. PLANNING, DRAFTING, AND REVISING AN ARGUMENT 235 . legal duty for a stranger to intervene to save a person from death or great bodily harm, when one might do so with little or no risk to one- self? These questions involve conduct and policy; how we answer them will reveal our values and principles. An essay answering questions of this sort usually begins by explaining what the issue (the problem) is, then • states why the reader should care about it, then • offers the proposed solution, then • considers alternative solutions, and finally • reaffirms the merit of the proposed solution, especially in the light of the audience's interests and needs. You will recall that throughout this book we have spoken about devices that help a writer to get ideas. If in drafting an essay concerned with pol- icy you begin by writing down your thoughts on the five bulleted items we have just given, you will almost surely uncover ideas that you didn't know you had. Support for claims of policy usually include . statistics, • appeals to common sense and to the reader's moral sense, and • testimony of authorities. 5. What is the evidence for my claims about X? In commenting on the four previous topics, we have talked about the kinds of support that are commonly offered, but a few additional points can be made. Critical reading, writing, and thinking depend essentially on identi- fying and evaluating the evidence for and against the claims one makes and encounters in the writings of others. It is not enough to have an opinion or belief one way or the other; you need to be able to support your opinions—the bare fact of your sincere belief in what you say or write is not itself any evidence that what you believe is true. So what are good reasons for opinions, adequate evidence for one's beliefs? The answer, of course, depends on what kind of belief or opin- ion, assertion or hypothesis, claim or principle you want to assert. For example, there is good evidence that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, because this is the date for his death reported in standard almanacs. You could further substantiate the date by checking the back issues of the New York Times. But a different kind of evidence is needed to support the proposition that the chemical compo- sition of water is H20. And you will need still other kinds of evidence to support your beliefs about the likelihood of rain tomorrow, the probabil- ity that the Red Sox will win the pennant this year, the twelfth digit in the decimal expansion of pi, the average cumulative grades of the gradu- ating seniors over the past three years in your college, the relative merits 236 6 / DEVELOPING AN ARGUMENT OF YOUR OWN of Hamlet and Death of a Salesman, and the moral dimensions of sexual harassment. None of these issues is merely a matter of opinion; yet about some of them, educated and informed people may disagree over the rea- sons and the evidence and what they show. Your job as a critical thinker is to be alert to the relevant reasons and evidence and to make the most of them as you present your views. Again, an argument may answer two or more of these five basic ques- tions. Someone who argues that pornography should (or should not) be censored • will have to mark out the territory of the discussion by defining por- nography (our first question: What is X?). The argument probably • will also need to examine the consequences of adopting the pre- ferred policy (our third question) and • may even have to argue about its value (our second question). Some people maintain that pornography produces crime, but others maintain that it provides a harmless outlet for impulses that other- wise might vent themselves in criminal behavior. • Further, someone arguing about the wisdom of censoring pornog- raphy might have to face the objection that censorship, however desirable on account of some of its consequences, may be un- constitutional and that, even if censorship were constitutional, it would (or might) have undesirable side effects, such as repressing freedom of political opinion. • And one will always have to keep asking oneself our fifth ques- tion, What is the evidence for my claims? Thinking about one or more of these questions may get you going. For instance, thinking about the first question, What is X?, will require you to produce a definition, and as you work at producing a satisfactory definition, you may find new ideas arising. If a question seems relevant, start writing, even if you write only a fragmentary sentence. You'll prob- ably find that one word leads to another and that ideas begin to appear. Even if these ideas seem weak as you write them, don't be discouraged; you have put something on paper, and returning to these words, per- haps in five minutes or perhaps the next day, you will probably find that some are not at all bad and that others will stimulate you to better ones. It may be useful to record your ideas in a special notebook or in a private blog or a Google Doc reserved for the purpose. Such a journal can be a valuable resource when it comes time to write your paper. Many students find it easier to focus their thoughts on writing if dur- ing the period of gestation they have been jotting down relevant ideas on something more substantial than slips of paper or loose sheets. The very act of designating a notebook or blog as your journal for a course can be the first step in focusing your attention on the eventual need to write a paper.
Purchase answer to see full attachment