Arguments

Essays and other kinds of college writing are arguments, though it might not seem so at first. Are these arguments?

　　A textual reading for an English course
　　A paper analyzing a historical event for a history course
　　A presentation of survey results for a psychology or marketing course
　　A lab report for a biology course
　　A review of leadership theories for a political science course

　　These are all arguments. In each case your job is to persuade your reader that your account or explanation is an appropriate and sensible way to understand whatever it is you're looking at—that you've perceived a plausible pattern, drawn on pertinent data, and ordered your material in a sensible and useful pattern. Now to call an essay an argument means something rather different than that the writer disagrees with somebody else. It means more than taking a side or"winning." In the context of writing a college essay, good argument means fair-minded consideration and rational persuasion. The word rational is key. College essays, by and large, fall within an intellectual tradition of rational discourse: claim, evidence, consideration and rebuttal of objections, and conclusion, all intended to appeal to the reader's open mind and reasoned judgment. Different types of essays may be more or less informal in their tone and sources and have all sorts of superficial differences, but the basic argumentative framework tends to remain.

　　Adding complexity to this is that different audiences and even individual readers will have different standards about what constitute interesting claims, pertinent evidence, and reasonable consideration of opposing views. In general the kinds of scholarly audiences students write for are open-minded about claims, but have high expectations about the quality of the evidence and the reasonableness of the assumptions linking evidence and claims.