Your short argumentative paper activity consists of the following steps:
1.Formulating your thesis statement
2.Writing your abstract
3.Constructing your argument outline
4.Completing your final draft
Here is a brief description of each step.
Formulating your thesis statement 25 EP
Now that youve had practice identifying and evaluating the arguments provided in your reading assignments, youre ready to start constructing and developing your own arguments.
The first step is coming up with your thesis statement: the claim you want to argue for. Your thesis statement can address any relevant topic, as long as its connected in some way to something thats made an appearance in the reading assignments or in class discussion. So I would encourage you to focus on whichever topic you have found most interesting. (And Im happy to provide suggestions if desired. In addition, Intelligence2 has a lot of interesting claims that theyve covered in their debates; looking through those can be a good way to get ideas.)
Although I encourage you to be creative in what youre arguing for, it might be helpful to consider some of the common forms that a thesis statement might take:
It can be a straightforward normative claim (e.g., X is morally impermissible, We should all Y, etc.);
or it can be a claim about how some argument fails (e.g., The argument that we should all Y fails because its invalid or the first premise is false, or the second premise is false, etc.);
or it could also be a defense of someones argument: Smiths objection to Joness argument fails because .
There are numerous other options as well, but many thesis statements will resemble one of those forms to some extent.
Writing your abstract 40 EP
Now that youve formulated a thesis statement, its time to begin developing the argument in support of that thesis. What you want to do is summarize, in 150300 words, the main line of argument that youll be running in your paper. (This means that your abstract should include the thesis statement that you have just formulated.) Try to capture the essence of what youre going to be doing in the full paper, but without going into too much detail on any one point. The pyramid of specificity activity will hopefully have given you a sense of the kinds of decisions you need to make as you try to summarize a 1,000-word paper in a 300-word abstract. (And if your paper is going to be a response to a chapter or an article, then you could do a pyramid of specificity on that article and then use the result as a portion of your abstract.)
Constructing your argument outline 60 EP
Your argument outline should be a development of and elaboration on your abstract: this is the activity where you put some meat on the bones of your argument.
Your argument outline should be at least one full page long, but no more than two pages long. Also, please note that each point in the outline should be a complete sentence.
A good argument outline can take various forms, but one good strategy would be to let the premises of your argument serve as the main points in the outline, with supporting details filling in as subpoints. Thus, one good way to produce your argumentative outline is to start with the highest level and then complete your outline in a series of elaborations. Heres a schematic example of what the structure might look like:
1.Statement of your thesis
2.Background assumptions (if applicable)
3.First premise of your argument
1.Support for this premise (which might involve further subpoints)
2.First objection to this premise (if applicable)
1.First point in response to first objection
2.Second point in response to first objection
3.Second objection to this premise (if applicable)
4.Second premise of your argument
1.Support for this premise (which might involve further subpoints)
2.Objection(s) to this premise (if applicable)
5.Third premise of your argument (if your argument has three premises)
6.Conclusion of your argument
Note, however, that your outline, should not say first premise (second objection, etc.)! Instead, you should actually state the premise (the objection, etc.) in a complete sentence. And each statement should be self-contained (if at all possible), so that the reader doesnt need to refer to other parts of the outline in order to understand it.
Completing your final draft 75 EP
Your final draft should be at least 1,000 words long and should be turned in electronically as a shared Google document. The best way to go about writing the final draft is to treat it as the next step in elaborating on your argumentative outline. Now that the structure of your argument is clear, its time to build on that structure (while incorporating feedback youve gotten from me and from your peers).
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Added on 08.12.2015 14:48
I already wrote he first three steps. You need to write the final draft based on what I wrote. You can also improve my outline or make changes if you think it will be better. Thank you.
