Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types.

The climax of many composition courses is the argumentative essay, the last, longest, and most difficult assignment. An effective written argument requires all the expository skills the students have learned, and, even more, asks for a voice of authority and certainty that is often quite new to them. Aware of the difficulty and importance of argument, many composition programs are devoting more time to it, even an entire second course. At Penn State, for example, the second of our required composition courses is devoted entirely to written argument, out of our conviction that written argument brings together all other writing skills and prepares students for the kinds of writing tasks demanded in college courses and careers. We know what we want our students to do by the end of our second course: write clear, orderly, convincing arguments which show respect for evidence, build in refutation, and accommodate their audience. The question is, how do we get them to do it? What is the wisest sequence of assignments? What and how much ancillary material should be brought in? The composition teacher setting up a course in argument has three basic approaches to choose from: the logical/analytic, the content/problem-solving, and the rhetorical/generative. All of these approaches teach the student something about argument, but each has problems. Our purpose here is to defend the rhetorical/generative approach as the one which reaches its goal most directly and most reliably. The teacher who uses the logical/analytic approach in effect takes the logic book and its terminology into the classroom and introduces students to the square of opposition, the syllogisms categorical and hypothetical, the enthymeme, the fallacies, induction and deduction. It has not been demonstrated, however, that formal logic carries over into written argument. Formal logic, as Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin have pointed out, is simply