What is an academic argument

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Left to right: Imaginechina via AP Images; AP/Invision/Charles Sykes; © Javier Larrea/age fotostock

Academic Arguments 17

Much of the writing you will do in college (and some of what you will no doubt do later in your professional work) is generally referred to as aca- demic discourse or academic argument. Although this kind of writing has many distinctive features, in general it shares these characteristics:

● It is based on research and uses evidence that can be documented.

● It is written for a professional, academic, or school audience likely to know something about its topic.

● It makes a clear and compelling point in a fairly formal, clear, and sometimes technical style.

● It follows agreed-upon conventions of format, usage, and punctuation.

● It is documented, using some professional citation style.

Academic writing is serious work, the kind you are expected to do when- ever you are assigned a term essay, research paper, or capstone project. Manasi Deshpande’s proposal “A Call to Improve Campus Accessibility”

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in Chapter 12 is an example of an academic argument of the kind you may write in college. You will find other examples of such work through- out this book.

Understanding What Academic Argument Is

Academic argument covers a wide range of writing, but its hallmarks are an appeal to reason and a faith in research. As a consequence, such arguments cannot be composed quickly, casually, or off the top of one’s head. They require careful reading, accurate reporting, and a conscien- tious commitment to truth. But academic pieces do not tune out all appeals to ethos or emotion: today, we know that these arguments often convey power and authority through their impressive lists of sources and their immediacy. But an academic argument crumbles if its facts are skewed or its content proves to be unreliable.

Look, for example, how systematically Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, director and codirector of the Pew Internet Project, present facts and evi- dence in arguing that the Internet has been, overall, a big plus for society and individuals alike.

[Today,] 87% of American adults now use the Internet, with near- saturation usage among those living in households earning $75,000 or more (99%), young adults ages 18–29 (97%), and those with college degrees (97%). Fully 68% of adults connect to the Internet with mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers.

The adoption of related technologies has also been extraordinary: Over the course of Pew Research Center polling, adult ownership of cell phones has risen from 53% in our first survey in 2000 to 90% now. Ownership of smartphones has grown from 35% when we first asked in 2011 to 58% now.

Impact: Asked for their overall judgment about the impact of the Internet, toting up all the pluses and minuses of connected life, the public’s verdict is overwhelmingly positive: 90% of Internet users say the Internet has been a good thing for them personally and only 6% say it has been a bad thing, while 3% volunteer that it has been some of both. 76% of Internet users say the Internet has been a good thing for society, while 15% say it has been a bad thing and 8% say it has been equally good and bad.

— Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, “The Web at 25 in the U.S.”

Note, too, that these writers draw their material from research and polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, a well-known and respected

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organization. Chances are you immediately recognize that this para- graph is an example of a researched academic argument.

You can also identify academic argument by the way it addresses its audiences. Some academic writing is clearly aimed at specialists in a field who are familiar with both the subject and the terminology that surrounds it. As a result, the researchers make few concessions to general readers unlikely to encounter or appreciate their work. You see that single-mindedness in this abstract of an article about migraine headaches in a scientific journal: it quickly becomes unreadable to nonspecialists.

Abstract

Migraine is a complex, disabling disorder of the brain that manifests itself as attacks of often severe, throbbing head pain with sensory sen- sitivity to light, sound and head movement. There is a clear familial tendency to migraine, which has been well defined in a rare autoso- mal dominant form of familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM). FHM muta- tions so far identified include those in CACNA1A (P/Q voltage-gated Ca(2+) channel), ATP1A2 (N(+)-K(+)-ATPase) and SCN1A (Na(+) chan- nel) genes. Physiological studies in humans and studies of the experi- mental correlate — cortical spreading depression (CSD) — provide understanding of aura, and have explored in recent years the effect of migraine preventives in CSD. . . .

— Peter J. Goadsby, “Recent Advances in Understanding Migraine Mechanisms, Molecules, and Therapeutics,”

Trends in Molecular Medicine (January 2007)

Yet this very article might later provide data for a more accessible argu- ment in a magazine such as Scientific American, which addresses a broader (though no less serious) readership. Here’s a selection from an article on migraine headaches from that more widely read journal (see also the infographic on p. 382):

At the moment, only a few drugs can prevent migraine. All of them were developed for other diseases, including hypertension, depression and epilepsy. Because they are not specific to migraine, it will come as no surprise that they work in only 50 percent of patients — and, in them, only 50 percent of the time — and induce a range of side effects, some potentially serious.

Recent research on the mechanism of these antihypertensive, anti- epileptic and antidepressant drugs has demonstrated that one of their effects is to inhibit cortical spreading depression. The drugs’ ability to prevent migraine with and without aura therefore supports the school

Nicholas Ostler’s conference paper

“Is It Globalization That Endangers

Languages?” meets the criteria listed

here for academic argument and

provides a potential model for your

own writing.

LINK TO P. 589

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of thought that cortical spreading depression contributes to both kinds of attacks. Using this observation as a starting point, investiga- tors have come up with novel drugs that specifically inhibit cortical spreading depression. Those drugs are now being tested in migraine sufferers with and without aura. They work by preventing gap junc- tions, a form of ion channel, from opening, thereby halting the flow of calcium between brain cells.

— David W. Dodick and J. Jay Gargus, “Why Migraines Strike,” Scientific American (August 2008)

Such writing still requires attention, but it delivers important and com- prehensible information to any reader seriously interested in the subject and the latest research on it.

Infographic: The Root of Migraine Pain © Tolpa Studios, Inc.

Even when academic writing is less technical and demanding, its style will retain a degree of formality. In academic arguments, the focus is on the subject or topic rather than the authors, the tone is straightfor- ward, the language is largely unadorned, and all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed. Here’s an abstract for an academic paper written by a scholar of communications on the Burning Man phenomenon, demonstrating those qualities:

Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information tech- nologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren

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stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, tech- nology, and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation, and interviews, this paper explores the ways that Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world — including the build- ing of a socio-technical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor, and the fusion of social and professional interaction — help shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The paper thus develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay Area’s new media industries.

— Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production”

You might imagine a different and far livelier way to tell a story about the annual Burning Man gathering in Nevada, but this piece respects the conventions of its academic field.

Another way you likely identify academic writing — especially in term papers or research projects — is by the way it draws upon sources and builds arguments from research done by experts and reported in journal articles and books. Using an evenhanded tone and dealing with all points of view fairly, such writing brings together multiple voices and

A scene from Burning Man Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images

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intriguing ideas. You can see these moves in just one paragraph from a heavily documented student essay examining the comedy of Chris Rock:

The breadth of passionate debate that [Chris] Rock’s comedy elicits from intellectuals is evidence enough that he is advancing discussion of the foibles of black America, but Rock continually insists that he has no political aims: “Really, really at the end of the day, the only important thing is being funny. I don’t go out of my way to be politi- cal” (qtd. in Bogosian 58). His unwillingness to view himself as a black leader triggers Justin Driver to say, “[Rock] wants to be caustic and he wants to be loved” (32). Even supporters wistfully sigh, “One wishes Rock would own up to the fact that he’s a damned astute social critic” (Kamp 7).

— Jack Chung, “The Burden of Laughter: Chris Rock Fights Ignorance His Way”

Readers can quickly tell that author Jack Chung has read widely and thought carefully about how to support his argument.

As you can see even from these brief examples, academic arguments cover a broad range of topics and appear in a variety of media — as a brief note in a journal like Nature, for example, a poster session at a con- ference on linguistics, a short paper in Physical Review Letters, a full research report in microbiology, or an undergraduate honors thesis in history. What do all these projects have in common? One professor we know defines academic argument as “carefully structured research,” and that seems to us to be a pretty good definition.

Conventions in Academic Argument Are Not Static.

Far from it. In fact, the rise of new technologies and the role that blogs, wikis, social media sites, and other digital discourses play in all our lives are affecting academic writing as well. Thus, scholars today are pushing the envelope of traditional academic writing in some fields. Physicians, for example, are using narrative (rather than charts) more often in medi- cine to communicate effectively with other medical personnel. Profes- sional journals now sometimes feature serious scholarly work in new formats — such as comics (as in legal scholar Jamie Boyle’s work on intel- lectual property, or Nick Sousanis’s Columbia University PhD disserta- tion, which is entirely in comic form). And student writers are increasingly producing serious academic arguments using a wide vari- ety of modalities, including sound, still and moving images, and more.

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Developing an Academic Argument

In your first years of college, the academic arguments you make will probably include the features and qualities we’ve discussed above — and which you see demonstrated in the sample academic arguments at the end of this chapter. In addition, you can make a strong academic argu- ment by following some time-tested techniques.

Choose a topic you want to explore in depth. Unless you are assigned a topic (and remember that even assigned topics can be tweaked to match your interests), look for a subject that intrigues you — one you want to learn more about. One of the hardest parts of producing an academic argument is finding a topic narrow enough to be manageable in the time you have to work on it but also rich enough to sustain your interest over the same period. Talk with friends about possible topics and explain to them why you’d like to pursue research on this issue. Look through your Twitter feeds and social network postings to identify themes or topics that leap out as compelling. Browse through books and articles that interest you, make a list of potential subjects, and then zero in on one or two top choices.

Get to know the conversation surrounding your topic. Once you’ve chosen a topic, expect to do even more reading and browsing — a lot more. Familiarize yourself with what’s been said about your subject and espe- cially with the controversies that currently surround it. Where do schol- ars agree, and where do they disagree? What key issues seem to be at stake? You can start by exploring the Internet, using key terms that are associated with your topic. But you may be better off searching the more specialized databases at your library with the assistance of a librarian who can help you narrow your search and make it more efficient. Library databases will also give you access to materials not available via Google or other online search engines — including, for example, full-text ver- sions of journal articles. For much more on identifying appropriate sources, see Chapter 18, “Finding Evidence.”

Assess what you know and what you need to know. As you read about your topic and discuss it with others, keep notes on what you have learned, including what you already know about it. Such notes should soon reveal where the gaps are in your knowledge. For instance, you may discover a need to learn about legal issues and thus end up doing research in a law school library. Or perhaps talking with experts about your topic might be

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helpful. Instructors on your campus may have the knowledge you need, so explore your school’s Web site to find faculty or staff to talk with. Make an appointment to visit them during office hours and bring the sorts of questions to your meeting that show you’ve done basic work on the subject. And remember that experts are now only a click away: a student we know, working on Internet privacy concerns, wrote a brief message to one of the top scholars in the field asking for help with two particular questions — and got a response within two days!

Come up with a claim about your topic. The chapters in Part 2, “Writing Arguments,” offer instruction in formulating thesis statements, which most academic arguments must have. Chapters 8–12, in particular, explain how to craft claims tailored to individual projects ranging from arguments of fact to proposals. Remember here, though, that good claims are controversial. After all, you don’t want to debate something that everyone already agrees upon or accepts.

In addition, your claim needs to say something consequential about that important or controversial topic and be supported with strong evi- dence and good reasons (see Chapter 18). Here, for example, is the claim that student Charlotte Geaghan-Breiner makes after observing the alien- ation of today’s children from the natural world and arguing for the redesign of schoolyards that invite children to interact with nature: “As a formative geography of childhood, the schoolyard serves as the perfect place to address nature deficit disorder.” Charlotte develops her claim and supports it with evidence about the physical, psychological, aca- demic, and social benefits of interacting with the natural world. She includes images illustrating the contrast between traditional school- yards and “biophilic,” or nature-oriented, schoolyards and establishes guidelines for creating natural play landscapes. (See Charlotte’s complete essay, reprinted at the end of this chapter.)

Consider your rhetorical stance and purpose. Once you have a claim, ask yourself where you stand with respect to your topic and how you want to represent yourself to those reading your argument:

● You may take the stance of a reporter: you review what has been said about the topic; analyze and evaluate contributions to the conversa- tion surrounding it; synthesize the most important strands of that conversation; and finally draw conclusions based on them.

● You may see yourself primarily as a critic: you intend to point out the problems and mistakes associated with some view of your topic.

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● You may prefer the role of an advocate: you present research that strongly supports a particular view on your topic.

Whatever your perspective, remember that in academic arguments you want to come across as fair and evenhanded, especially when you play the advocate. Your stance will always be closely tied to your purpose, which in most of your college writing will be at least twofold: to do the best job in fulfilling an assignment for a course and to support the claim you are making to the fullest extent possible. Luckily, these two purposes work well together.

Think about your audience(s). Here again, you will often find that you have at least two audiences — and maybe more. First, you will be writing to your instructor, so take careful notes when the assignment is given and, if possible, set up a conference to nail down your teacher’s expecta- tions: what will it take to convince this audience that you have done a terrific job of writing an academic argument? Beyond your instructor, you should also think of your classmates as an audience — informed, intelligent peers who will be interested in what you have to say. Again, what do you know about these readers, and what will they expect from your project?

Finally, consider yet another important audience — people who are already discussing your topic. These will include the authors whose work you have read and the larger academic community of which they are now a part. If your work appears online or in some other medium, you will reach more people than you initially expect, and most if not all of them will be unknown to you. As a result, you need to think carefully about the various ways your argument could be read — or misread — and plan accordingly.

Concentrate on the material you are gathering. Any academic argument is only as good as the evidence it presents to support its claims. Give each major piece of evidence (say, a lengthy article that addresses your sub- ject directly) careful scrutiny:

● Summarize its main points.

● Analyze how those points are pertinent.

● Evaluate the quality of the supporting evidence.

● Synthesize the results of your analysis and evaluation.

● Summarize what you think about the article.

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In other words, test each piece of evidence and then decide which to keep — and which to throw out. But do not gather only materials that favor your take on the topic. You want, instead, to look at all legitimate perspectives on your claim, and in doing so, you may even change your mind. That’s what good research for an academic argument can do: remember the “conscientious commitment to truth” we mentioned ear- lier? Keep yourself open to discovery and change. (See Chapter 19, “Eval- uating Sources,” and Chapter 20, “Using Sources.”)

Give visual and nonprint materials the same scrutiny you would to print sources, since these days you will likely be gathering or creating such materials in many fields. Remember that the graphic representa- tion of data always involves an interpretation of that material: numbers can lie and pictures distort. (For more information on evaluating visuals, see Chapter 14.) In addition, infographics today often make complex academic arguments in a visual form. (See p. 164 for one such example.)

Take special care with documentation. As you gather materials for your academic argument, record where you found each source so that you can cite it accurately. For print sources, develop a working bibliography either on your computer or in a notebook you can carry with you. For each book, write the name of the author, the title of the book, the city of publication, the publisher, the date of publication, and the place that you found it (the section of the library, for example, and the call number for the book). For each print article, write the name of the author, the title of the article, the title of the periodical, and the volume, issue, publication date, and exact page numbers. Include any other information you may later need in preparing a works cited list or references list.

For electronic sources, keep a careful record of the information you’ll need in a works cited list or references list. Write the author and title information, the name of the database or other online site where you found the source, the full URL, the date the document was first pro- duced, the date it was published on the Web or most recently updated, and the date you accessed and examined it. The simplest way to ensure that you have this information is to print a copy of the source, highlight source information, and write down any other pertinent information.

Remember, too, that different academic fields use different systems of documentation, so if your instructor has not recommended a style of documentation to you, ask in class about it. Scholars have developed these systems over long periods of time to make research in an area reliable and routine. Using documentation responsibly shows that you

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understand the conventions of your field or major and that you have paid your dues, thereby establishing your position as a member of the academic community. (For more detailed information, see Chapter 22, “Documenting Sources.”)

Think about organization. As you review the research materials you have gathered, you are actually beginning the work of drafting and designing your project. Study the way those materials are organized, especially any from professional journals, whether print or digital. You may need to include in your own argument some of the sections or fea- tures you find in professional research:

● Does the article open with an abstract, summarizing its content?

● Does the article give any information about the author or authors and their credentials?

● Is there a formal introduction to the subject or a clear statement of a thesis or hypothesis?

● Does the article begin with a “review of literature,” summarizing recent research on its topic?

● Does the piece describe its methods of research?

● How does the article report its results and findings?

● Does the article use charts and graphs or other visuals to report data?

● Does the piece use headings and subheadings?

● How does the work summarize its findings or how does it make recommendations?

● Does the essay offer a list of works cited or references?

Anticipate some variance in the way materials are presented from one academic field to another.

As you organize your own project, check with your instructor to see if there is a recommended pattern for you to follow. If not, create a scratch outline or storyboard to describe how your essay will proceed. In review- ing your evidence, decide which pieces support specific points in the argument. Then try to position your strongest pieces of evidence in key places — near the beginning of paragraphs, at the end of the introduc- tion, or toward a powerful conclusion. In addition, strive to achieve a balance between, on the one hand, your own words and argument and, on the other hand, the sources that you use or quote in support of the argument. The sources of evidence are important supports, but they

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shouldn’t overpower the structure of your argument itself. Finally, remember that your organization needs to take into account the place- ment of visuals — charts, tables, photographs, and so on. (For specific advice on structuring arguments, review the “Thinking about Organiza- tion” sections in the “Guides to Writing” for Chapters 8–12.)

Consider style and tone. Most academic argument adopts the voice of a reasonable, fair-minded, and careful thinker who is interested in coming as close to the truth about a topic as possible. A style that achieves that tone may have some of the following features:

● It strives for clarity and directness, though it may use jargon appro- priate to a particular field.

● It favors denotative rather than connotative language.

● It is usually impersonal, using first person (I) sparingly.

● In some fields, it may use the passive voice routinely.

● It uses technical language, symbols, and abbreviations for efficiency.

● It avoids colloquialisms, slang, and sometimes even contractions.

The examples at the end of this chapter demonstrate traditional aca- demic style, though there is, as always, a range of possibilities in its manner of expression.

Consider genre, design, and visuals. Most college academic arguments look more like articles in professional journals than like those one might find in a glossier periodical like Scientific American — that is, they are still usually black on white, use a traditional font size and type (like 11-point Times New Roman), and lack any conscious design other than inserted tables or figures. But such conventions are changing.

Indeed, student writers today can go well beyond print, creating digi- tal documents that integrate a variety of media and array data in strik- ingly original ways. But always consider what genres best suit your topic, purpose, and audience and then act accordingly. As you think about the design possibilities for your academic argument, you may want to con- sult your instructor — and to test your ideas and innovations on friends or classmates.

In choosing visuals to include in your argument, be sure each one makes a strong contribution to your message and is appropriate and fair to your topic and your audience. Treat visuals as you would any other sources and integrate them into your text. Like quotations, paraphrases, and summaries, visuals need to be introduced and commented on in

The Trouble with Diversity: How

We Learned to Love Identity and

Ignore Inequality by Walter Benn

Michaels exemplifies a clear and

direct academic style. Even though

the author makes a complex

argument, addressing a broad and

difficult issue, his writing remains

straightforward and readable.

LINK TO P. 725

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some way. In addition, label and number (“Figure 1,” “Table 2,” and so on) each visual, provide a caption that includes source information and describes the visual, and cite the source in your references page or works cited list. Even if you create a visual (such as a bar graph) by using infor- mation from a source (the results, say, of a Gallup poll), you must cite the source. If you use a photograph you took yourself, cite it as a personal photograph.

Reflect on your draft and get responses. As with any important piece of writing, an academic argument calls for careful reflection on your draft. You may want to do a “reverse outline” to test whether a reader can pull a logical and consistent pattern out of the paragraphs or sections you have written. In addition, you can also judge the effectiveness of your overall argument, assessing what each paragraph contributes and what may be missing. Turning a critical eye to your own work at the draft stage

This bar chart, based on data from a Sandler Training survey of 1,053 adults, would be listed in your works cited or references under the authors’ names. Data from Sandler Training survey of 1,053 adults.

0

10

20

30

40

50

Boss Clients/ Customers

Significant other

Colleagues Parents

25

20

15 13

8

Who’s the most difficult to “sell yourself” to?

Pe rc

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ge

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can save much grief in the long run. Be sure to get some response from classmates and friends too: come up with a set of questions to ask them about your draft and push them for honest responses. Find out what in your draft is confusing or unclear to others, what needs further evidence, and so on.

Edit and proofread your text. Proofread an academic argument at least three times. First review it for ideas, making sure that all your main points and supporting evidence make sense and fit nicely together. Give special attention to transitions and paragraph structure and the way you have arranged information, positioned headings, and captioned graphic items. Make sure the big picture is in focus.

Then read the text word by word to check spelling, punctuation, quo- tation marks, apostrophes, abbreviations — in short, all the details that can go wrong simply because of a slip in attention. To keep their focus at this level, some readers will even read an entire text backwards. Notice too where your computer’s spelling and grammar checkers may be underlining particular words and phrases. Don’t ignore these clear signals.

Finally, check that every source mentioned in the academic argument appears in the works cited or references list and that every citation is correct. This is also the time to make any final touchups to your overall design. Remember that how the document looks is part of what estab- lishes its credibility.

R E S P O N D. 1. Look closely at the following five passages, each of which is from an

opening of a published work, and decide which ones provide examples of academic argument. How would you describe each one, and what are its key features? Which is the most formal and academic? Which is the least? How might you revise them to make them more — or less — academic?

During the Old Stone Age, between thirty-seven thousand and eleven thousand years ago, some of the most remarkable art ever conceived was etched or painted on the walls of caves in southern France and northern Spain. After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not redis- covered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge

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from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magic-lantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation). They also thought up the grease lamp — a lump of fat, with a plant wick, placed in a hollow stone — to light their workplace; scaffolds to reach high places; the prin- ciples of stenciling and Pointillism; powdered colors, brushes, and stumping cloths; and, more to the point of Picasso’s insight, the very con- cept of an image. A true artist reimagines that concept with every blank canvas — but not from a void.

— Judith Thurman, “First Impressions,” The New Yorker

I stepped over the curb and into the street to hitchhike. At the age of ten I’d put some pretty serious mileage on my thumb. And I knew how it was done. Hold your thumb up, not down by your hip as though you didn’t much give a damn whether you got a ride or not. Always hitch at a place where a driver could pull out of traffic and give you time to get in without risking somebody tailgating him.

— Harry Crews, “On Hitchhiking,” Harper’s

Coral reef ecosystems are essential marine environments around the world. Host to thousands (and perhaps millions) of diverse organisms, they are also vital to the economic well-being of an estimated 0.5 billion people, or 8% of the world’s population who live on tropical coasts (Hoegh-Guldberg 1999). Income from tourism and fishing industries, for instance, is essential to the economic prosperity of many countries, and the various plant and animal species present in reef ecosystems are sources for different natural products and medicines. The degrada- tion of coral reefs can therefore have a devastating impact on coastal populations, and it is estimated that between 50% and 70% of all reefs around the world are currently threatened (Hoegh-Guldberg). Anthro- pogenic influences are cited as the major cause of this degradation, including sewage, sedimentation, direct trampling of reefs, over-fishing of herbivorous fish, and even global warming (Umezawa et al. 2002; Jones et al. 2001; Smith et al. 2001).

— Elizabeth Derse, “Identifying the Sources of Nitrogen to Hanalei Bay, Kauai, Utilizing the Nitrogen Isotope Signature

of Macroalgae,” Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal

While there’s a good deal known about invertebrate neurobiology, these facts alone haven’t settled questions of their sentience. On the one hand, invertebrates lack a cortex, amygdala, as well as many of the other major brain structures routinely implicated in human emotion. And unsurpris- ingly, their nervous systems are quite minimalist compared to ours: we have roughly a hundred thousand bee brains worth of neurons in our heads. On the other hand, some invertebrates, including insects, do pos- sess the rudiments of our stress response system. So the question is still on the table: do they experience emotion in a way that we would recog- nize, or just react to the world with a set of glorified reflexes?

— Jason Castro, “Do Bees Have Feelings?” Scientific American

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Bambi’s mother, shot. Nemo’s mother, eaten by a barracuda. Lilo’s mother, killed in a car crash. Koda’s mother in Brother Bear, speared. Po’s mother in Kung Fu Panda 2, done in by a power-crazed peacock. Ariel’s mother in the third Little Mermaid, crushed by a pirate ship. Human baby’s mother in Ice Age, chased by a saber-toothed tiger over a waterfall. . . . The mothers in these movies are either gone or useless. And the father figures? To die for!

— Sarah Boxer, “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?” The Atlantic

2. Working with another student in your class, find examples from two or three different fields of academic arguments that strike you as being well written and effective. Spend some time looking closely at them. Do they exemplify the key features of academic arguments dis- cussed in this chapter? What other features do they use? How are they organized? What kind of tone do the writers use? What use do they make of visuals? Draw up a brief report on your findings (a list will do), and bring it to class for discussion.

3. Read the following three paragraphs, and then list changes that the writer might make to convert them into an academic argument:

The book — the physical paper book — is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating — but then, a few years ago, he “became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read.” He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.”

I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everyone is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need men- tal silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.

— Johann Hari, “How to Survive the Age of Distraction”

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C H A P T E R 1 7 ACADEMIC ARGUMENTS 395

4. Choose two pieces of your college writing, and examine them closely. Are they examples of strong academic writing? How do they use the key features that this chapter identifies as characteristic of academic arguments? How do they use and document sources? What kind of tone do you establish in each? After studying the examples in this chapter, what might you change about these pieces of writing, and why?

5. Go to a blog that you follow, or check out one on the Huffington Post or Ricochet. Spend some time reading the articles or postings on the blog, and look for ones that you think are the best written and the most interesting. What features or characteristics of academic argument do they use, and which ones do they avoid?

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Where the Wild Things Should Be: Healing Nature Deficit Disorder through the Schoolyard

CHARLOTTE GEAGHAN-BREINER

The developed world deprives children of a basic and inalienable right: unstructured outdoor play. Children today have substantially less access to nature, less free range, and less time for independent play than previous generations had. Experts in a wide variety of fields cite the rise of technology, urbanization, parental over- scheduling, fears of stranger-danger, and increased traf- fic as culprits. In 2005 journalist Richard Louv articulated the causes and consequences of children’s alienation from nature, dubbing it “nature deficit disorder.” Louv is not alone in claiming that the widening divide between children and nature has distressing health repercus- sions, from obesity and attention disorders to depression and decreased cognitive functioning. The dialogue sur- rounding nature deficit disorder deserves the attention and action of educators, health professionals, parents, developers, environmentalists, and conservationists alike.

The most practical solution to this staggering rift between children and nature involves the schoolyard. The schoolyard habitat movement, which promotes the “greening” of school grounds, is quickly gaining interna- tional recognition and legitimacy. A host of organiza- tions, including the National Wildlife Federation, the American Forest Foundation, and the Council for Envi- ronmental Education, as well as their international counterparts, have committed themselves to this cause. However, while many recognize the need for “greened

Title begins with a reference many readers will recognize (Sendak) and then points to the direction the argument will take.

Background information introduces a claim that states an effect and traces it back to its various causes.

Considerable evidence supports the claim.

Presents a solu- tion to the problem and foreshadows full thesis

Two Sample Academic Arguments

396

Charlotte Geaghan-Breiner wrote this academic argument for her first-year writing class at Stanford University.

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school grounds,” not many describe such landscapes beyond using adjectives such as “lush,” “green,” and “nat- ural.” The literature thus lacks a coherent research-based proposal that both asserts the power of “natural” school grounds and delineates what such grounds might look like.

My research strives to fill in this gap. I advocate for the schoolyard as the perfect place to address nature deficit disorder, demonstrate the benefits of greened schoolyards, and establish the tenets of natural school- yard design in order to further the movement and inspire future action.

Asphalt Deserts: The State of the Schoolyard Today

As a formative geography of childhood, the schoolyard serves as the perfect place to address nature deficit dis- order. Historian Peter Stearns argues that modern child- hood was transformed when schooling replaced work as the child’s main social function (1041). In this contempo- rary context, the schoolyard emerges as a critical setting for children’s learning and play. Furthermore, as parental traffic and safety concerns increasingly constrain chil- dren’s free range outside of school, the schoolyard remains a safe haven, a protected outdoor space just for children.

Despite the schoolyard’s major significance in chil- dren’s lives, the vast majority of schoolyards fail to meet children’s needs. An outdated theoretical framework is partially to blame. In his 1890 Principles of Psychology, psy- chologist Herbert Spencer championed the “surplus energy theory”: play’s primary function, according to Spencer, was to burn off extra energy (White). Play, how- ever, contributes to the social, cognitive, emotional, and physical growth of the child (Hart 136); “[l]etting off steam” is only one of play’s myriad functions. Spencer’s theory thus constitutes a serious oversimplification, but it still continues to inform the design of children’s play areas.

The author identifies a weakness in the proposed solution.