After supporting his own reasons for embracing e-mail, Kinsley accommodates readers’ likelyreservations by conceding that e-mail poses certain problems.
To argue effectively, you must often take special care to acknowledge readers’ objections; questions; and alternative positions, causes, or solutions. Occasionally, however, you may have to go even further. Instead of merely acknowledging your readers’ concerns, you may decide to accept some of them and incorporate them into your own argument. This strategy, called concession, can be very disarming to readers, for it recognizesthat opposing views have merit. The following example comes from an essay enthusiastically endorsing e-mail:
To be sure, egalitarianism has its limits. The ease and economy of sending email, especially to multiple recipients, makes us all vulnerable to any bore, loony, or commercial or political salesman who can get our email address. It’s still a lot less intrusive than the telephone, since you can read and answer or ignore email at your own convenience. But as normal people’s email starts mounting into the hundreds daily, . . . filtering mechanisms and conventions of etiquette that are still in their primitive stage will be desperately needed.
Another supposed disadvantage of email is that it discourages face-to-face communication. At Microsoft, where people routinely send email back and forth all day to the person in the next office, this is certainly true. Some people believe this tendency has more to do with the underdeveloped social skills of computer geeks than with Microsoft’s role in developing the technology email relies on. I wouldn’t presume to comment on that. Whether you think email replacing live conversation is a good or bad thing depends, I guess, on how much of a misanthrope you are. I like it.
—MICHAEL KINSLEY, “Email Culture”
Notice that Kinsley’s accommodation or concession is not grudging. He readily concedes that e-mail brings users a lot of unwanted messages and may discourage conversation in the workplace.
How does Patrick O’Malley respond to readers’ objections and alternatives in paragraphs 9 and 10 of his Chapter 7 essay (pp. 302–7) arguing for more frequent exams? What seems successful or unsuccessful in his argument? How do his efforts to acknowledge readers’ concerns or make concessions affect his argument and his credibility?