By Matthew Rossi
I think many of the writers who come to our writing center have a difficult time working a counterargument into their work. If the purpose of an essay, as many have been taught, is to prove a thesis about a given subject is correct, then working a counterargument into a draft seems like a weird diversion. “Why am I suddenly arguing against myself?” is the natural question I get from many writers. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise to us, then, that the counterargument often shows up at the end of the essay, buried down in a half-hearted paragraph that the writer seems to be begging us to only skim over.
“You can go ahead and skip me,” the counterargument seems to say to the reader, “I’m just resting here for a bit.”
I see this problem expressed most often in research essays, where the writer has spent their whole process researching and interpreting sources that help support their main point, and then have the problem of finding a source they can easily introduce without screwing up their argument too much. This poor source lives in the essay only as someone to be bullied into submission by the weight of the writer’s argument.
The problem, it seems to me, lies in how writing teachers frame the purpose of research and in how they frame the role of a counterargument in that process. Research is often framed for writers in the earliest stages of their development as something that helps a writer prove an idea. This model of source use, where we are instructed to use sources to effectively back us up, doesn’t leave much space for any voices not offering their raucous support to the writer’s ideas.
An approach that is perhaps more useful to helping our students think about how to effectively use counterarguments came to me during a workshop on creative thinking in the writing center. Tasked with finding ways to disrupt production-oriented models of thinking toward process-oriented models, it occurred to me that writing centers might direct students away from these sorts of soft counterarguments by reframing the counterargument as the purpose of the research. That is to say, we teach our students to research as a way of testing those ideas they feel are in opposition to their own.
I have begun doing this in sessions with writers who are worried about the status of their counterarguments. When asked, “Is my counterargument enough?” or the more directive, “My teacher says my counterargument wasn’t enough,” I try to reframe their counterargument as the most important aspect of the essay. What would your counterargument source (or ideally, sources) have to say about the rest of your essay? How would they address your argument? How would your ideas stand up to their questions?
The counterargument source stops being a timid wallflower at this party, hanging back in the corner and only barely speaking before being tossed to the bullies. Instead it is a bombast, fully invited to the party and loudly bursting in on the comfort of the conversations around it. In this radical revision, the counterargument and the argument become inextricable from one another, because the argument exists entirely in response to and threaded through the counterargument. The argument in this case is actually an argument, an act of oppositional discussion between two equally viable ideas, and it isn’t done in this case until the counterargument agrees to come to terms.
I can foresee a future in which we set up workshops for research that teach our writers to start their research in those directions that seem counterintuitive or counterargumentative to their ideas. Instead of starting with wondering what they want to say, or what they want to discover, the researcher would look into what they absolutely do not want to say or discover, pursuing arguments that they can only formulate when they know who is on the other side.
Published November 2, 2015