Argument, Evidence, and Engagement: Training Students As Critical Investigators and Interpreters of Rhetoric and Culture

Abstract

When students first arrive on campus, even at academically elite institutions, it is highly unlikely that they come with the recognition that all academic writing is argument-based and that all knowledge claims require substantiation. They have often been educationally and culturally conditioned to grant authors too much authority, and for the most part they are quite aware of their position in the knowledge hierarchy. While harshly critical of their own logic leaps, sloppy support, organization flaws, and other cardinal sins, most students are reluctant to acknowledge similar failings in any established author, particularly one assigned by their professor. It is rare, then, that they see themselves as the audience being addressed or as an audience even worth addressing, much less as one that an author is actively attempting to persuade to believe or to act in a certain way. Pedagogically, I have been hesitant to organize argument courses around familiar public debates (capital punishment, drug policy, etc.) for two main reasons. First, these debates tend to produce sides too sharply drawn and arguments too obviously and clearly formulated. Students may choose sides solely because of their emotional response, their perception of which side will be easier to defend, or their sense of where the teacher stands. Second, and more significantly, to restrict the scope of an argument course to explicit debates is to neglect the relationship between argument and knowledge production, a relationship that pervades academic writing across the disciplines but is rarely acknowledged.