If your friend says, “I’m so upset, I had an argument,” you probably wouldn’t
respond with,
“Why? Was the connection between your claims and grounds unwarranted?”
That’s because you know your friend meant something closer to “shouting match” rather
than “reasoned explanation of a belief or thought.”
Also, it’s not a super nice thing to say to someone who’s upset.
In general, we can find arguments frustrating because others don’t understand our points,
because they bring up perspectives we didn’t think of, and for a million other reasons.
However, we can also be confused about what an argument is, and how to make one effectively--
especially in our writing.
Today, we’ll be talking about critical thinking and argumentation in writing, no shouting
needed, here in Study Hall: Composition,
presented by Arizona State University and Crash Course.
I’m Yumna Samie, let’s get started.
Most of us have some opinion that we are willing to stake a claim over, passionately defending
it from people who disagree.
Mine’s that tomato basil soup is the best soup in the world.
Seeing the components of critical thinking and argumentation can help us think, learn,
and interact more effectively.
These skills are especially helpful in writing, though, because it’s hard to backpedal and
add nuance to a piece after the fact.
Practicing critical thinking and thoughtful argumentation can help get your point across
the first time.
Now, we all do some critical thinking and argumentation already:
we debate casually over lunch and use reasoning when we send requests to co-workers.
Improving doesn’t require a bunch of super-technical knowledge.
Instead, a few terms can help us examine our current critical thinking and push ourselves
to communicate more powerfully.
Critical thinking isn’t just being critical of others’ ideas.
The word “critical” is used to express a negative judgment sometimes.
As in, “Why are you so critical of me, Karen?” Basil is a natural partner to tomatoes!
However, the critical in “critical thinking” isn’t negative.
It’s like a critique, which is any kind of analysis or judgement, not just negative.
We can also think of critical in terms of some synonyms: indispensable, vital, or crucial.
It’s a kind of thinking that’s very important, even necessary, to do!
One way to prompt critical thinking is to use a journalism tool, the Five Ws and the H.
These allow us to “set the scene” and see if our analyses or judgments are true.
We could be missing information, giving too much weight to one factor, or not noticing
a pattern or trend.
The 5 W’s and the H for a situation or event go like this:
What happened? Where did it happen? When did it happen?
Who is involved? Why did it happen? And How did it happen?
These questions seem obvious at the outset, but they sometimes help us dig deeper into
our circumstances.
To see how, let’s go to a Writer in Action.
Phil loves his course on Latin American Literature.
He thinks Isabel Allende’s novels about women with green hair
and ghosts are *chef’s kiss*.
So he’s dismayed to discover a disappointing grade when he gets his paper back from his professor.
She mentioned in the final comment that his ideas weren’t developed with sufficient detail.
He’s a little stumped at first;
his usual thinking mode would have him file away that this professor really likes detailed,
developed ideas, but that’s not really an action plan for Phil.
He knows that thinking critically is key to getting a better grade next time.
He thinks back on the circumstances in which he wrote this paper.
He has a rewarding job feeding the lizards at a local gecko breeder,
but the night the paper was due, he was there till 10 p.m. cleaning cages.
He had left a lot of the paper to do that night after work, when he knows his writing
tends to be less thorough.
So the “what happened?” is not just about the lack of detail,
but also about the lack of time to get that detail into the paper.
This gets at the “How it happened,” as well as “Why it happened.”
He now sees some more active options to improve:
asking for the day off before a big assignment deadline or making sure that he buckles down
and writes a few days earlier might improve his grade next time.
He hopes what he’s learned will really stick.
His usual thinking would have Phil passively hoping his work improves next time,
but instead he critically thought of some ways to create change.
Phil is a writer in action!
Phil’s critical thinking is the kind of work that can be applied to the Writing Process,
but he can also use critical thinking when he creates arguments in his writing.
Argumentation is the process of engaging with, evaluating, and creating ideas and knowledge.
Imagine that critical thinking is what you do to develop an idea for yourself, and arguments
are how you express these insights to the wider world.
Contrary to popular belief, argumentation doesn’t have to be a battle-style argument,
with a power struggle and a winner and loser.
And there are some compelling reasons to avoid this style of argument.
For one thing, if you want to get things done in your school or workplace, you want to invite
people to be on a team with you,
not set yourself up as the only one who’s right.
An argument’s structure involves a position and reasons.
So if I say that my position is that “The best soup is tomato basil,”
I might build my argument by offering reasons like “it has a pleasing smooth texture,”
and “it goes perfectly with garlic bread.”
That being said, just two reasons aren’t enough to mean that we should halt production
on all other soups.
Arguments, even when they have reasons, can be good and bad; our critical thinking
is what helps us determine whether the reasons are enough to justify the position we’re taking.
I might be better able to argue that “Tomato basil is a good soup for bread-dipping”
with the reasons I selected;
my reasons just don’t address enough soups to prove what is “best.” I didn’t even
mention potato leek soup, for instance.
Arguments are easier to understand when they are broken down a bit,
so we have a few additional ways to describe an arguments’ parts.
Today, we’ll use the language of the Toulminian Model of argumentation,
a model created by Stephen Toulmin, a British philosopher.
He breaks an argument down this way:
There’s the claim, which is the position or the idea that the argument is trying to
prove or establish.
I could claim “Tomato basil soup is a great soup,” as I’ve been doing for a while
now, or something else,
like “Potato leek soup is just okay.”
There’s the grounds, or the reasons, facts, and evidence that support the claim.
I might support my soup beliefs with statistics about how many people buy the soup,
or with expert opinions from chefs who share my views.
And there are also the warrants.
Warrants are the unstated but necessary connections between a claim and its grounds.
When someone calls something “unwarranted,” they are saying that there’s no clear connection
as to why it’s right.
For instance, you might say, “your dislike of potato leek soup is completely unwarranted,
given your evidence is just that tomatoes have the perfect balance between acidic and sweet
and didn’t mention potatoes or leeks at all.”
Warrants are key glue between our grounds and our claims;
our arguments work best when their warrants are strong.
There are many more complex features of argumentation,
so we are going to only scratch the surface.
But for today, here are some ways to make your arguments stronger,
especially in writing but also in your broader communication life:
restricting your claim’s scope and stating warrants explicitly.
First, we’ve talked about scope before; it refers to the extent and complexity of
something,
in this case the claim of an argument.
Restricting your claim’s scope involves avoiding categorical language,
which are words like all, none, always, and never.
For example, it’s easy to come up with one exception and refute the position
“All dogs are friendly.”
Dogs may be great a lot of the time, but one mean dog is all it takes.
By writing your claim in a way that isn’t so universal, you can avoid people throwing
your claim away with one small counterexample.
You can do this by looking at your claim and cutting out categorical language.
When I’m getting argumentative about pets, I might say, “Most dogs are friendly.”
It’s easier to offer grounds to support this claim:
If statistics or surveys say there are more friendly dogs than unfriendly ones, I have
a pretty good argument.
Since very few things in the world are true or false in every single case,
making your claims clear and restricted can help people find your arguments to be more
reasonable.
This is part of how we avoid stereotyping:
if you need to write about a group of people, you can restrict the scope to make sure that
you’re making claims that really fit.
For instance, saying “Everyone should know how to swim” can leave out people who physically
can’t learn this skill and maybe isolate them.
A claim with a more precise scope might be, “Many people who spend a lot of time in
or near bodies of water can benefit from learning how to swim.”
The second technique is key when you aren’t quite sure if you’ve proven your point in
an argument: this is where you can state your warrant explicitly.
You start by writing out your claims and grounds, your position and your evidence.
Then, write out what connects them, even if you won’t keep it in your paper later.
Consider the claim, “My neighbor’s house is on fire,” with the evidence, “I see
smoke coming out of the kitchen window.”
The warrant that I’d end up writing out to make that connection explicit would be
something like
“If smoke is coming out of the window in a house, then the house is on fire.”
Once I look at this warrant, I see it’s flawed:
kitchen smoke can come from cooking and burning food (believe me, I know) or from an essential
oil diffuser with vapor next to the window,
or something else.
In response, I could revise my claim to “My neighbor’s house may be on fire.”
This could be the difference between checking on my neighbor and calling the fire department
- arguments are serious stuff!
Critical thinking and argumentation are both complex, in that they offer us a lot to think
about, and intuitive, since we think critically and argue all the time.
When we’re writing, though, we want to be absolutely sure that we’re arguing well,
so let’s remember some of our key strategies.
Using the Five Ws and the H helps us activate our critical thinking,
but asking more questions in general also works.
It’s about active inquiry instead of accepting everything you read, see, and hear without
comment.
Also, remember that arguments are often complicated, since they are the main way we understand
things and create knowledge.
Breaking them down into a claim, grounds, and warrants can help us work with them and
improve our day-to-day critical thinking.
It’d be great if knowing these tools and techniques meant we’d never get into angry
shouting matches again,
but that might be overselling it a bit.
Having a clearer understanding of arguments though, might be enough to diffuse some situations
and lead both parties to greater insight.
(See how I reduced my scope there?)
Tune in next time when we’ll be digging deeper on arguments and ways to evaluate how
sturdy they are.
Often, evaluating arguments is a major part of our writing, making this an important extension
of our discussion of argumentation.
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Composition, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course
in the links in the description.
See you next time!