3/15: Being Good at Arguing

Okay, so P1 is done! You've got your first major paper in, and judging from what I saw in the drafts, you'll probably do well. Grades on P1 and the narrative essay coming soon--the shoulder injury set me back, but I'm getting there.

We'll start today with some general points I saw in your drafts (what's this? customized teaching? how responsive!) before moving on to this week's project.

General Writing Tips

Using First-Person Pronouns

So, you may have heard in high school that you aren't allowed to use "I" in academic essays. This is incorrect, but your old teacher lied to you for a good reason. You are allowed to use "I" (or "we" for groups) in academic writing, especially when describing your own experiences, but you need to avoid the following bad habits:

Do not use "I" to hide your voice. For instance, using the phrase "I think" or "in my opinion" does nothing but inflate the word count--we know these are your thoughts, that's why you wrote them. Using these phrases is a classic rookie mistake, and makes you sound like you're scared/uncertain of your audience.
Do not use "I" to make a statement that's probably applicable to your audience. For instance, in P1, you might have said "I found the pathos to be very effective," which actually takes away from making this point: if you found it effective, why? Wouldn't a general reader reasonably agree with you? If so, say "the pathos is very effective for the audience because X" instead. It gives you an opportunity to show off you evidence-using skills.
Do not use "I" when writing in the sciences. This is a style norm for science, engineering, and social science majors. It's really just an absolute application of point #1 above: you're writing evidence-based research, so there's no reason to try to disguise your conclusions as personal opinion. Gravity is not an opinion. Climate change is not an opinion. Math is not an opinion. Also, you tend to work in teams, so "I" just feels like credit-stealing.

Formatting

The titles of big things should be in italics, and the titles of small things should be "in quotation marks." Rule: if I printed it out and threw it at you, if it would hurt, its title goes in italics. Large works containing smaller units follow this rule too: the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an episode called "Once More, With Feeling." See how that works?

Finally: check your file types/file extensions. Nobody in the world uses .pages documents for real work. Just because it came with your Apple device doesn't mean it's good.

Pronouns and Stuff

Two notes on pronouns:

First, make sure it's clear who the pronoun is referring to. If you talk about an author for a while, it's a good thing to mention their name every paragraph or so, or the she/he/theys get confusing. This is especially true if there's more than one person being discussed.

Second, and this is really should be something you already learned in a class somewhere, but genders and sexes are not synonymous. The English language has different words for these things because, except for two kinda dumb generations recently, we knew they weren't the same. Your sex is the set of chromosomes you have and the physical features your body has. Words like male, female, intersex, etc. refer to possible configurations of human bodies. Bodies are complex.

Your gender is a social role assigned by your culture. Words like man, woman, nonbinary, boy, girl, etc. are terms for genders. Genders are culturally determined--what a gender is supposed to do (and who it even includes) in one place and time changes if you go to a different place and time (for instance, ancient Romans considered it gross and vulgar for adult men to wear pants). Gender tends to evolve and change a lot and there's usually a zillion subtle variations, because it's basically just a role you play.

In the Arak Journal essay on equality in sports, notably, the author tends to mix these up a bit in making the argument. It doesn't make the argument invalid, but it's a confusing writing habit.

No matter how loud your racist uncle yells on the internet, the distinction between sex and gender exists and has existed ever since we started doing culture. So basically forever. This is a topic that should not be spicy, but it is for some reason.

Paragraphs

Nobody will ever, for the rest of your life, ask you to write a certain number of paragraphs. Paragraphs should contain one key point, one or two examples, and one explanation, along with all the transition language to make it smooth. If it contains more than that, it should be more than one paragraph. Paragraphs are a free and renewable resource, so when in doubt, use more, smaller ones rather than single, gigantic ones.

Note how this Lesson Post is formatted, in terms of paragraphing. I am a master of paragraphs. (I'll teach you the secret method later in the course.)

Okay, time for the actual lesson.

This Week: Arguing Well and In a Hurry

Instead of a big paper, this week is all about the blog post--that's right, you're posting to this blog again. Your post this week is a quick argument where you’ll take a position on one of the three weird issues using those issues’ Wikipedia articles. The idea is basically to be confronted by a new and unusual issue, learn about it, and put together a good argument in less than a week.

The Wikipedia Issues are linked in this week’s Canvas Module. Pick one, and read the whole article. They are also linked here:

By the end of the week, you'll write a blog post where you take a position on some aspect or issue related to these ideas, but probably not a position on the entire issue itself, since they're all big. I encourage you to choose and read one of these soon, so you can sit on the idea for a few days before forming an opinion of some kind.

Concepts: Getting Down to Basics

You know about the rhetorical burrito ingredients and how to balance them in a paper. You probably already have a coherent style you like best. But here’s how arguments work, deep down in the human psyche.

You’ve encountered an internet troll before—they pick some ideologically-charged issue, and bait people into getting mad at them. They do this by 1. Identifying their audience/target’s underlying assumptions about reality and 2. manipulating or challenging those in order to 3. make a bad-faith argument, or an argument where you have no intention of genuinely debating anything, just making somebody mad instead. While trolls suck, there’s something to learn from this strategy:

Knowing your audience’s ideology and therefore their underlying assumptions, is the first step to framing your argument in a way that they can digest.

Ideology – the system of ideas that constitute your idea of “normal.” Often, you learn these things early in life without realizing you learned them, and they stick with you even after reality tells you they might be B.S.

Here are some examples of concepts that are ideological:

your religion
cultural ideas about "correct" gender roles
which animals count as food, and which ones count as friend
the scientific method (technically, "positive empiricism")

In most cases, you developed these ideas by learning them from parents or guardians, and you did it so early in your life that you probably can't point to the day or moment when you got it. An important thing to realize is that these ideological concepts are made by people, which means they've changed over time. (Yes, even your religion. Christians, for example, should keep Kosher, since it's an offshoot of Judaism, but they don't because of gradual cultural changes.) The second thing to realize is that these ideas constitute part of your basic identity, and so people tend to react poorly when these are challenged by reality, circumstances, or other people. More on that in a minute.

Here's an example: the scientific method--the idea that we should make conclusions by observing reality, making theories, experimenting, and adjusting for the results--is a relatively new concept. In a society where, say, people believe that life is an exam and the reward for passing that exam is a pleasant afterlife, they may conclude that parts of reality are deliberately trying to deceive or test them, and thus, that relying on observation to determine truth isn't a good idea. This was basically how medieval Christian Europe worked. (Spoilers: this did not go especially well. See also: plague.)

This is also how some contemporary political and religious movements work--how can you prove something to someone who believes that reality is conspiring against them? (Spoilers: Anti-vax Facebook Moms, Anti-Maskers, Q, Flat Earthers. See also: plague...again.)

This brings us to our second concept:

Underlying Assumptions: parts of an ideology that you can point to, that shape how you think of stuff.

Ideologies produce underlying assumptions. For instance, if you're part of Medieval Christian Europe and its ideology, your underlying assumption is that life is a test, and that tests can have trick questions. If, on the other hand, you're part of modern scientific civilization, your underlying assumption is that, most of the time, reality is accessible to you through your senses and observations. You build on that assumption in order to have other ideas. It's like a foundation idea.

Here's a great reading on how these ideas get formed, and why they're so hard to un-form: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

Key Point: Angle of Vision

If you want people to believe your argument, you have to select your evidence, and shape your style, to cater to the things they are capable of understanding—you have to get them from what they already believe to what you want them to believe. In other words, you select a version of your argument that makes sense from their angle of vision.

Also, you should work, as an adult, to understand your own ideological foundations and underlying assumptions--this will help you to understand these same things in others. This is often hard work, since sometimes you find things you don't like (or are contradictory) about yourself and have to work to change them. You also have an angle of vision.

Angle of Vision – So you and a bunch of your friends are sitting around a sculpture. You see the sculpture based on where you’re sitting—you might see the front of it, but you can’t see the stuff on the back of it. Your friend, sitting six feet to the left, might only be able to see one side of it. If you get into a discussion about what the sculpture looks like, you’ll have different opinions. If you’re dumb about it (like people on the internet), you’ll insist that everyone is wrong, when really it’s about where they sit in relation to the sculpture*. If you’re a Nazi, you’ll try to kill everyone not sitting where you’re sitting. Basically, where you are in life (things like race, economic station, life history, favorite color, region, language, zip code, psychological state, et cetera) shapes how you interpret things. This is as true for you as it is for other people.

Example, from The Lion King: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-antelope-from-the-lion-king-wonders-why-he-was-invited-to-the-celebration-of-simbas-birth

*Note that someone can still be wrong about a thing--not everything is an opinion--but that this wrongness is often a result of them missing something from their angle and drawing bad conclusions from that lack of perspective. There's a big difference between seeing the front of a sculpture and asserting that only the front of the sculpture exists. This is why research and keeping an open mind for new, valid information is important. It's also why grand, universal, un-questionable generalizations about things tend to backfire.

Doing the Thing: Competence and Confidence

That was all very conceptual, but let's get into what this looks and sounds like.

So, if every audience and every speaker has an ideology that they carry around that informs how they see things—it shapes their angle of vision. To successfully win an argument, you probably need to be aware at least of the basics of your audience’s ideology, so that you can tailor their argument to use concepts and terms they can understand.

The way to do this is by identifying their discourse community’s rules, selecting and explaining sources, and modifying the approaches of experts to fit your audience’s needs and expectations. Basically, picking your backup and explaining your points carefully. This displays the two most important qualities of an arguer: competence and confidence.

For example: in most cultures now (but perhaps particularly in academic culture), logos or reason tends to be the most popular rhetorical ingredient, which is why smart people tend to trust logical but boring arguments over sensational but ridiculous ones. So being all “fancy but approachable scientist” is a good approach to making arguments because you look competent (you know your audience and your field) and confident (you look like you know what you’re doing).

For this week's assignment, outside research is not required, so we'll talk about evidence and source selection on Thursday. However, you can and should still identify an audience and its underlying assumptions and needs and modify your approach to suit that audience.

Okay, But How?

Arguing quickly and on the internet isn’t really alien to you, probably, so here’s a series of good habits:

Lead with a strong and complex thesis. You don’t have a lot of time for fancy introductions or extended metaphors. Instead, a strong thesis is very direct with the reader, and a complex thesis makes a nuanced but important point.

Example: the thesis “Cats are good for old people to have” is strong, but not complex. Instead: “Our nursing home should allocate funds to buy comfort cats for our residents, because studies strongly indicate companion animals are good for senior health” is a strong and complex thesis. A complex thesis speaks to a specific situation or makes a smaller important point based on a larger idea.

Evidence: you’re making a fast, informal argument using a single document (a Wikipedia article). Instead of searching out other fancy people to agree with you, use logic and your own common sense to extrapolate or re-use from information in the article to support your point.
Authority: avoid logical fallacies and silly mistakes, like typos. Production value, or the visual and user-friendly qualities of an internet thing, matters since it makes your argument accessible and adds to your sense of knowing what you’re talking about.
Audience: Your audience has different learning methods and ideological backgrounds, so use the multimodality* of the blog to make the argument in text and with visuals, where useful. Also, while the internet is serious business, it is not a serious place—a sense of humor can help make a serious argument more approachable for an audience.

*multimodality, or being multimodal, means that a document, person, or event is accessible through different modes or approaches. For instance, a TV show with closed captioning on is multimodal, since you can read the dialogue if you can't hear. Well-taught classes are multimodal, since good teachers *ahem* approach the same idea multiple ways, to accommodate different learning styles.

A few more basic writing-on-the-internet tips:

Visual Clutter is Psychological Clutter: basically, don’t be like a 90s Geocities website or clickbait—use design elements carefully, and maybe don’t choose magenta Comic Sans as your font of choice. Keep it simple, make sure it works.
Make it Skimmable: people tend not to read every word of things. Use straightforward sentences and clear organization (and smaller than normal paragraphs with strong lead sentences) to make it easy to read.
Network the Idea: Hashtags and key terms—use them if appropriate. Especially key terms related to the larger discussion of the issue, so that (in real life) Google’s bots would know to produce your thing when somebody searches about the issue. Use the right jargon.
Pedagogy, not Pedantic: the idea behind a good argument is to teach your readers, not to troll them and make them angry. Give your audience activities or thought experiments, or something to do with the information they’ve now learned. For instance, asking your audience to “imagine a situation where X” is often a good way to get somebody into a complex idea.

Homework

Take a position on one of the three weird Wikipedia issues linked above. Remember that these are complex issues full of questions, so an “I agree” or “I disagree” position makes no sense (it’d be like saying “I agree with the future”): pick an aspect of the issue you want to talk about and make some point about it. Do not attempt to agree or disagree with the whole concept, but choose some aspect or part of it that you have an opinion about, and talk about why you have that opinion.

The post should be about 500 words.

Begin writing your blog post, though you don’t have to post it until Friday--this post is special and due before the weekend: Friday. Your assignment after that is to read some of your peers' posts for fun.

Don't forget the attendance/participation quiz on Canvas!

On Thursday, the Lesson Post will be about the next major assignment--it builds conceptually on today, but will discuss a document that is not due this week.