Argument Exercise Continued

Sample Exam Prompt

Turn in Argument Exercise before you leave

Reminder:

Meet in C-129 for exam on Wednesday

Exam will begin promptly at 9 a.m. Latecomers will not be able to enter the room after the exam has begun.

Assignment:

Prep for Exam

     (See another sample prompt at the bottom of this page)

 

 

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Position Practice

 

 

 

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=163098594&m=163179068

 

On young children using digital devices

"Children are getting these phones earlier and earlier. These are years when children need to develop this capacity for solitude, this capacity to feel complete playing alone. If you don't have a capacity for solitude, you will always be lonely, and my concern is that the tethered child never really feels that sense that they are sort of OK unto themselves; and I talk to college students who've grown up with the habit of being in touch with their parents five, 10, 15 times a day. And it's no longer Huckleberry Finn as a model of adolescence, you know, sailing down the Mississippi alone — we've developed a model of adolescence and childhood where we sail down the Mississippi together with our families in tow."

 

 

 

Sample Position Prompt:

 

Sherry Turkle suggests that cell phones are inhibiting children's personal and social development. She argues that because children are always "connected" to their parents via cell phones, many children do not learn how to be competent, independent, or alone.

 

In a well-developed essay, present and support your position on this issue of children, digital devices, and healthy separation identity.

 

 

 

 

Complete Argument Exercise for this prompt

 

 

Step One:

Brainstorming: What DO YOU THINK?

Is this a valid argument?

What do I agree with?

What do I disagree with?

I agree with (what aspect of the argument), but I cannot agree with (what?).

 

Related issues to consider:

Cell phones at a young age: Pros and Cons

Why is it important for children to develop healthy separation identities? Is it important? What are the results?

Are there other causes to this problem?

 

 

Step Two: Compose a thesis statement

(3 ways to respond)

 

 

Step Three: Outline and Composition

 

I. Introduction: Joining the conversation/ Cultural Landscape

 

Thesis (a clear statement of where you stand on the issue and why) ROAD MAP

 

II. Topic sentence directly linked to thesis

Support

 

III. Topic sentence directly linked to thesis

Support

 

IV. Topic sentence directly linked to thesis

Support

 

V. Conclusion

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Sample Exam Prompt:  Superficial Learning: Reading and Thinking in the Google Age

Background

In “Is Google Making us Stupid? What the Internet is

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 Doing to our Brains” (2012), Nicholas Carr examines how not just Google, but technology in general, changes the way we think. Carr explains, “As media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.” Carr continues, “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

 

Carr points out that the Web has turned Americans into different types of readers and that the more we use the Web, the more we “have to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”  According to Carr, “the style of reading promoted by the Internet, a style that puts ‘efficiency’ and ‘immediacy’ above all else,” may be weakening our capacity for deep reading.”  However, Carr also questions if this capacity for deep reading is necessary in an age where traditional media outlets (television, magazines, newspapers, text books, etc.)  have adapted  their formats in order to fit  their audience’s new expectations. For example, Carr points out how television shows add text crawls and pop-up ads and how magazines shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse-info-snippets. Even the prestigious newspaper The New York Times devotes the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts—“shortcuts” to give readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles.  Carr acknowledges that in the Google Age, this new attitude toward learning and reading has mislead our culture into believing that “the more pieces of information we can ‘access’ and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”

 

Position

Carr acknowledges that the Internet has opened up numerous educational opportunities; however, he argues that these advancements are not without consequences. He describes his overall argument in the following passage:

            “Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, and foster our own ideas. Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces or fill them up with ‘content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. We are not only what we read. We are also how we read. And when we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, our intelligence follows suit. We become efficient and immediate information processors, yet, in a sense, our knowledge of the world and of ourselves becomes overly universal and virtually artificial.”

 

Write a position essay that directly responds to Carr’s argument about the Internet’s effect on our modes of reading and on the acquisition of knowledge.

 

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Sample Position Prompt for Final

 

 

 

An excerpt from

"A's for Everyone!" by Alicia C. Shepard

 

 (published in The Washington Post in 2005)

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/02/AR2005060201593.html

 

John Watson, who teaches journalism ethics and communications law at American, has noticed another phenomenon: Many students, he says, believe that simply working hard -- though not necessarily doing excellent work -- entitles them to an A. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student dispute a grade, not on the basis of in-class performance," says Watson, "but on the basis of how hard they tried. I appreciate the effort, and it always produces positive results, but not always the exact results the student wants. We all have different levels of talent."

 

It's a concept that many students (and their parents) have a hard time grasping. Working hard, especially the night before a test or a paper due date, does not necessarily produce good grades.

 

"At the age of 50, if I work extremely hard, I can run a mile in eight minutes," says Watson. "I have students who can jog through a mile in seven minutes and barely sweat. They will always finish before me and that's not fair. Or is it?"

 

Later in the essay, Shepard quotes another colleague:

 

"One of the things an education should do is let you know what you do well in and what you don't," he says. "If everybody gets high grades, you don't learn that."

 

 

Shepard argues that many college students feel entitled to good grades based on their effort rather than on their actual academic performance in a course. She also asserts that that grade inflation is not beneficial to students--that it is a misleading practice that distorts students' understanding of the dynamics of competition in real life.

 

Write a position essay that directly responds to Shepard's argument about college students, academic performance, and grading.

 

 

 

 

Your tasks:

 

1. Brainstorm ideas/directions/issues (Organize your thoughts)

2. Compose a complex, sophisticated thesis using one of the three strategies we discussed on Monday.

3. Compose an outline that follows the structure of your thesis. Include topic sentences that build your argument. List ideas for examples/support for each paragraph.

 

 

 

 

3 Ways to respond:

 

1.Disagree and Explain Why

 

Disagreeing means more than adding "not" to what someone else has said. IE: Cell phones are "not"inhibiting children's personal and social development.

Such a response merely contradicts the view it responds to and fails to add anything interesting or new. To make an argument, you need to give reasons why you disagree: because another's argument fails to take relevant factors into account; because it is based on faulty or incomplete evidence; because it rests on questionable assumptions; or because it uses faulty logic, is contradictory, or overlooks what you take to be the real issue.

 

Examples

 

2. Agree but with a difference

 

You need to do more than just echo views you agree with. Even as you agree, it's important to bring something new and fresh to the table, adding something that makes you a valuable participant in the conversation.

 

Examples:

I agree that ( ), a point that needs emphasizing since so many people believe ( ).

X's theory of ( ) is extremely useful because it sheds insight on the difficult problem of ( ).

 

 

3. Agree and Disagree Simultaneously

 

The "yes and no" approach.

 

IE: Although X makes the valid point that ( ), X's argument about ( ) is less convincing because ( ).

 

 

 

Composition:

I. Introduction: Joining the conversation/ Cultural Landscape

Thesis (a clear statement of where you stand on the issue and why) ROAD MAP

 

II. Topic sentence directly linked to thesis

Support

 

III. Topic sentence directly linked to thesis

Support

 

IV. Topic sentence directly linked to thesis

Support

 

V. Conclusion