Chapter 7: Making Your Own Argument
Choosing and Analyzing Your Central Document
By now, you’ve probably noticed this chapter’s repetition of the phrase “your own argument.” The word argument is key. A professor never wants your opinion. Opinions are feelings and thoughts that cannot be proven and cannot be disagreed with. Evidence is the key difference between opinion and argument. While you may begin your essay writing process by examining our opinions, you should be ready to move them aside quickly and replace them with an argument grounded in evidence.
The first storey of your own argument should:
- Choose a central document and explain its significance to your argument
- Analyze that central document to focus on two key pieces of evidence
Based on your work in Chapters 1 through 6, you should be familiar with other authors’ use of central documents or examples to make their arguments. For example:
Example
- In “Kids Around the World Just Want to Hang Out,” Michael Welsh uses the responses given by two separate groups of high school students from Stockholm, Sweden, and Keene, New Hampshire, who were surveyed about their preferences and visions for their cities as his focused central document. Welsh argues that the students of Keene displayed considerably less vision than their Stockholm counterparts, “limited expectations” of their government’s ability or interested to help them attain their goals, and a worrying reliance on commercial companies to provide them the accessible, common, and entertaining spaces they desire.
- In “The Plot to Privatize Common Knowledge,” David Bollier uses the focused central document of the book Adios, Barbie: Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, which outlines Mattel’s aggressive litigation to protect its intellectual property. He uses this Barbie example to support his larger argument that “over-patenting,” if continued unchecked, will result in much of what has been previously considered the shared and accumulated wisdom of humanity becoming “off limits” to the average citizen.
When choosing a central document, you want a specific document that will provide at least two focused pieces of evidence you can analyze meaningfully. Look again at the example assignment prompt from earlier in this chapter and note how that prompt explicitly identifies the central document you need when it asks for “ONE protest movement and ONE social media.” Not every assignment prompt will be that overt, but, at the undergraduate level, you are expected to focus on a small number of examples–your one or two central documents–that support your focused and complex argument within the context of the assignment’s guidelines. For this textbook you are only going to focus on ONE central document to create your argument.
Therefore, this central document should be short and manageable. As we do our example essay prompt about social media and protests, you will need to identify a precise central document that will provide your ar