Structured Argumentation Project

Structured Argumentation Project

By this point in the term, you’ve spent a good deal of time thinking about arguments structurally—stripping away rhetorical devices to look at the pure logos underneath. This final unit will ask you to think in this way in the most sustained form yet. Rather than being an analytical process, this will be a generative one. You will be asked to create an argument first, only to adorn it later. You have learned strong rhetorical analysis skills through the first assignment in this course, and you have developed excellent skills of logical precision in the second. In this assignment, you will put the two of them together. You will use both of these skills in a truly generative fashion. You will need to determine which rhetorical strategies will work best to ornament the precisely defined terms and arguments that you are fashioning from the ground up. This will be an individually graded assignment, but it will be heavily work-shopped at each step. Related Course Outcomes: Critical thinking, rhetorical development, and development of the writing process. Step 1: Adorn Your Argument (60% of grade) You are now asked to write an essay based on the argument that you have already outlined. At this point, you have several pages that are as close as possible as the humanities get to pure, platonic logos. Your task is to use all the rhetorical devices and techniques that you have in the toolbox to present this argument in essay form. You will, of course, have to ask the standard series of questions with which you are already familiar: Who is my audience? What should my tone be? What are the rhetorical and stylistic conventions to which I am beholden? How long is the paper? But you will also have to ask more interesting questions: What do I make implicit, and what do I make explicit? What of my argument should be presented as-is, and what by way of rebuttal? What do I have to make axiomatic—that is, leave unproven? This essay will have at least one footnote per paragraph with a sentence or two explaining how the paragraph relates to specific, numbered points in the outline.