Argument and Persuasion: Academic Writers
Kathleen Bell
Argument is not just the art of persuasion as Aristotle would tell us, but it is a way to enter the conversation. Any kind of conversation. Because the argument and the essay as a genre, is a way to put forth new ideas. Or to look at previous ideas in new ways. That is elemental to writing an essay. Whether it's a narrative essay, comparison/contrast essay, process essay, an argument. But argument is not a fight, not a debate. It is a way to find your place in a conversation you want to be a member of.

Robb Lightfoot
When students come to argumentation, one thing, they think it's unpleasant. Being in an argument means yelling at people and calling names and that's not it. It's simply committing to something very difficult which is a pursuit of the truth as best we can know it. Argumentation is extremely time consuming if you do it right, involves a lot of research. It involves listening carefully to what other people are saying, and that can be disturbing. Because if you really listen to someone you may come to realize they have some valid points.

Steven Browning
Your anthropology professor may speak in a very different way than your biology professor as opposed to a philosophy professor, or an engineering professor. So we, it's all very much about audience. What kinds of knowledge do these people make, and what kinds of arguments then will they respond to?

Michael Bertsch
The development of a thesis for an argument paper is really the end product of a process. That process first starts at a topic. A topic is a very broad term. Then you, out of that topic you have to develop an opinion about that. What do you think about gun control, for example? That should spark you to develop what I call a controlling idea. You're going to say, "Gun control is problematic." Well, that's a pretty good controlling idea and that's easy to support because gun control is problematic. However, a good argument paper has a tighter controlling idea. But you may not know what that controlling idea is until you've done some research. So, topic: gun control. Controlling idea: gun control is problematic. Now that arms us, if you will, with information. We can take that information and go into the stacks of the library and convert that information into knowledge.

Betsy Klimasmith
So you want to think about that central point that you're making and then the topic sentences are, I would think of those also as ideas, supporting ideas. You can think of them as claims that you're making, they're also making a claim; they're not facts because the facts come as evidence to support those topic sentences.

Bertsch
If you just have your five points of support and each point of support will be a single sentence. For example, one piece of support might say, 'Saturday Night Specials have no real point except to kill other people.' OK, that's going to require some support, I'm going to have to go to several articles and find statistics about how many Saturday Night Specials are responsible for the death of people and such things. Saturday Night Specials are unsafe guns. Now unsafe doesn't mean that if you point it at the guy and pull the trigger it kills him, no, I'm saying unsafe may mean it blows up in your hand. Or the shells are so poorly manufactured so that they are dangerous and they could blow up if they get too hot, or if they're dropped…now I'm building a case against Saturday Night Specials so I've really illustrated topic: controlling idea, working thesis statement, thesis statement! 'Saturday Night Specials should be outlawed.' Now that's a gun control paper.

Victoria Hindes
All those darn papers that you wrote, you know, in the wee hours in the night, they all make sense after a while. And you remember parts and pieces of it. Writing the argument paper was a chore and a half to be honest with you. And I remember because I always told myself, I always wanted to be a poet. And I just thought, why would I need to do this? I just want to be creative, I just want to do freeform writing and whatever, I just want to be able to say what I feel like it. But that's not the reality of course.

I think telling the story of how you're going to spend the money is part of the proposal game. Maybe you use a different language, you're obviously not going to use all the flowery words and all. You're definitely not going to give them metaphor because they're not going to get it. And you're certainly not going to use a lot of similes and so on. You want to use right on precise words. But you're definitely telling a story of how, what you're going to do with this project. How you're going to make this project be successful for your institution.

You have to have that balance of having the emotion. You have to have the ethics, you and also have to have, you have to use evidence, again, that would be your data, that would be the tables and the charts that you provide. Your stats, you have to have comparison data.

We do make those assumptions, and sometimes in grant writing, of course, those assumptions have been made for you. They've already had their baseline data and they say according to research, students will do better in class if the teacher uses interactive teaching methodology.

You have to be able to say, say it in such a way that it's pleasing to the reader but it's also right on and they say right on, I don't want to have to look for your thesis statement. I don't want to have to look for what you're going to do with our money, I want you to be able to tell me.