Academic Argument

When students arrive in the UWRT first year composition course, they know how to write a five paragraph essay about as well as they can do anything. This means that they are experienced in making a claim and supporting it with reasons and evidence. Yet many of these students create thesis statements about what they already believe, using obvious examples form their personal experience. In a writing and inquiry course, students need to enter a conversation, consider alternate ideas and opinions, and read credible sources before writing a thesis statement. This semester, we accomplished this by investigating college movies. Students viewed college movies of their choosing and made arguments about the representations of stereotypes and issues of gender and race.

I presented the genre of academic argument by using the textbook From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader by Greene and Lidinsky. This text gives a straightforward steps for the inquiry project, and there is a chapter on academic argument. The course's common readings about college education and media came from this text. We also used Writer/Designer to better strategize and design academic argument in multimodal texts. Unfortunately, download problems with the e-texts of the latter book stunted our use of this excellent resource.

To help students gain practice in making academic arguments, we began by analyzing the claims made by the author's we read in From Inquiry. These readings presented arguments about such college issues as national curriculum, grade inflation, gender bias in the classroom, self-segregation on campus, and more. Students learned about claims of fact, value, and policy, and tried to identify these types of claims in the authors' texts. Next, students began their own claims about a college movie as working thesis statements, using the steps presented in From Inquiry to guide the process. Each individual student published 2 blog posts that present academic arguments about the college movie and specific issues such as gender and race on campus. Before this publication, students posted rough drafts in an online forum where they received feedback from team members. After publication, students participated in a blog symposium in which they responded to the blogs as an informed audience, developing conversations about these important issues.