What is the most important thing that you took away from this reading? How, specifically, will what you learned from this reading affect your approach to writing your final research paper? Your response should be at least two sentences long.
12 thoughts on “Blog Post #16: Takeaway from “Organizing an Argument” (Eickmeyer, pp. 214-223)”
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I think the advice on “Don’t forget to include your own analysis of each subargument” was a good reminder for my research paper. The argument section is meant to display the evidence that supports our overall thesis, but sometimes I find that it can be drowned direct quotations and findings indicated by citations almost in every sentence. It’s important to display what our research has found as well as incorporate our personal reasoning for how that specific finding actually supports what we’re trying to say.
One of the highlight in this reading is the author compares the writing style of a high school essay to the writing style of a college essay. It reminded me different things I should remember while I write my own research argumentative essay. First, there is one main argument of the essay, but I should make several other different smaller arguments to support this main thesis which itself is supported with evidence/reasoning. Secondly, it taught me to open up options while making these arguments and reasoning and see first if myself is persuaded by the evidences or not instead of putting down narrow, convoluted evidences directly.
The section, Organize Your Essay by Idea, Not by Example, is the most important to me. It shows how I can make a transition and write my essay at the college level. It is one thing to repeat the same point for each body paragraph and use different sources to support that idea, but a more effective method to convey your message would be to introduce smaller arguments or sub-arguments in the respective body paragraphs. This will make the essay much stronger and an enjoyable read.
The reference to politics and how you would be more willing to understand someone’s political view if you can understanding their reason sums up this idea well.
One thing that I need to work on with my essay is a balance. Erickmeyer talks about balancing the evidence with your argument. I believe that I need to go back and provide more evidence form outside in addition to the claims that I have made.
The author makes it clear that there is no right or wrong way to go about structuring an argumentative essay, but there are guidelines in place to help make the process easier to approach. Structure is all about organization. An unorganized paper can be confusing and hard to follow, so when writing my essay I will be sure to structure the content in a way that makes the information easy to digest for my readers. It is important to divide your argument into sub arguments, and include multiple supporting details for each of these sub arguments. Using details from multiple sources for each sub sect creates a more convincing argument.
This reading was a good reinforcement for how the research paper should be structured. I often have trouble while I am writing with spending too much time organizing ideas, because they aren’t organized enough on first drafts. The reading helped be start to visualize the structure of how I might write my paper and how to think about examples during research.
The most important thing I have learned from this reading is the difference in depth between high school level essays and college level ones. I never really thought of how college essays make smaller arguments to support the main argument, while the high school one does not. This encourages me to look deeper into how the examples can be explained more so that they create a mini argument. There are times when I subconsciously revert back to a high school essay structure so I need to double check that I am explaining my examples more and scratching more than just the surface.
One thing I took away from this reading is about structure and how its all about how you organize your paper and comparing writing styles from high school to college.
As well as helping myself guide throughout my essay and how to write it out correctly
One thing that stood out for me is the comparison between college level essay formats and high school essay formats. This in particular stood for me because throughout our academic careers we have been programmed to write an argue meant essay based on examples and outside sources instead of ideas.
My key takeaway was the use of compiling supporting examples and sorting them into subarguments. I think this will prove useful as I’ve been struggling to focus the direction of my paper. I gained the insight from this reading to scour my sources for information that resonates with me and my topic and work backwards from there to build the skeleton of my argumentative essay.
I found it really interesting how sometimes you can place your counter arguments first to make your sub argument convincing. I feel like this can be a useful way for my new research topic in a different way to approach the readers.