Hi, welcome back. My name is Satu, and in this video, I'm going to talk about argumentative writing. When you think about the word argument, what is it that first springs to mind? One definition of an argument is a heated and angry disagreement. Perhaps you know someone who is argumentative and maybe you see this person as someone who enjoys confrontation and fails to see reason. But what does argument mean in an academic context? Arguing in an academic essay is very different from having an argument in the real world. In an essay, you are not engaging in a heated shouting match with another person. Instead, you are trying to convince your target reader of your position in a calm, considered, and rational way. But what does it mean exactly to write an argumentative essay rather than, say, a descriptive one? In descriptive writing, you merely present facts or background information. This kind of writing might be useful for setting the scene for the argument that you will present in an argumentative essay. But descriptive writing isn't in itself argumentative. Argumentative writing is about persuasion. Creating a convincing argument is about making claims and providing convincing evidence for these claims. At the center of an argumentative essay is one main claim, this is often called the "thesis statement". The main claim, or the thesis statement, is then supported by a series of sub-claims. Each sub-claim is backed up with reasons and evidence and presented in an order that makes logical sense in relation to the overall argument. In constructing an argument, you might also need to consider possible counter-claims. What objections might your specific target audience have to your main claim and to the various sub-claims? And what objections might they have to the underlying assumptions that are not explicitly stated in your text, but are still assumed to be connected to your claims? If you say, for example, that it is justified to ban smoking in all public areas because smoking causes lung cancer, the unstated assumption that is not explicitly stated in your text, is that lung cancer is a bad thing. Your target audience might then either, attack your claim and its reasons that smoking should be banned in all public areas because it causes lung cancer, or the unstated assumption, that having lung cancer is a bad thing. Demonstrating that you are aware of possible counter-claims in your essay doesn't undermine your own arguments but actually increases your persuasive power. By addressing some of the possible objections to your claims, to their reasons or to the unstated assumptions, you are showing your reader that you know your stuff and have done your homework. Basically, you are more likely to be taken seriously by your target audience if you can show them that you have knowledge of your topic and that you can think of more than one possible solution to the problems that you are trying to solve. Unfortunately, there's no one size fits all formula to creating a successful argument but it can be useful to consider the following questions. Firstly, what does argument mean in your own discipline? Secondly, what do you need to do to convince your target audience? What counts as convincing evidence? In many fields, evidence means facts, examples, summaries of research articles, statistics, and so on. But what kinds of facts, examples, and other types of evidence do you need? And finally, how will you need to structure your argument to make it as clear and convincing as possible? And here's a final thing for you to ponder, even if you're not writing a strictly argumentative text at this time, you will probably find yourself engaged in some sort of persuasion. Actually, most academic writing is argumentative in some sense of the word. As soon as the text leaves the world of facts and becomes concerned with selection, interpretation, and evaluation, it becomes argumentative. Even seemingly objective scientific writing has an argumentative element to it. If you are presenting the results of a scientific experiment, for instance, it's up to you, the author, to select and present your material in a way that tells the particular story you want to tell. This kind of writing has an argumentative dimension since you are trying to persuade your reader about the validity of your claims. Language doesn't represent the world in an unbiased objectivity, but rather shapes how our reality is viewed. [MUSIC]
