There’s an old Monty Python routine that sums up what happens at a certain point every time I teach writing to a new group of students. It goes something like this.
“Are you looking for an argument?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m NOT!”
“Yes you ARE!”
“But I don’t like Spam!”
“Spam spam spam spam….”

Argument as a Discipline

Sometimes it seems that convincing students that they are looking for an argument is itself a difficult argument to win. Here, I will attempt to convince you that teaching argument depends upon asking students to read, analyze, and talk about arguments on a regular basis in order to help them learn to make better arguments in their writing.

I think that argument has always been more important than meets the eye. In fact, values have always been constructed by a process of ongoing argument. In terms of today’s academic disciplines, when we teach our students to write within a discipline, we are teaching them how to present arguments that fit the conventions of that discipline.

When a student develops an argument for my class, it doesn’t matter so much whether she succeeds in convincing me that she’s right. What matters is that she convince me that her argument is well formulated according to disciplinary conventions. A crucial and often overlooked first step toward helping students write successfully for a discipline is helping them understand that academic writing involves arguing something.

Argument Within the Discipline

Before students can formulate their own arguments, they need to examine good models of argument, preferably from the discipline in which we ask them to write. So, I turn to the reading assignments and lectures from the course. From this material, I urge my students to:

Be argumentative readers! Scribble responses and objections in the margins of all books. Remember that authoritative books are the ones that most need to be defaced. Textbooks and works by prestigious authors are ideal targets.

Ask questions! When you finish reading and scribbling and doodling, write down answers to questions you think you might be asked on an exam. For example: What is this author trying to persuade you to do or think? Did she succeed? Why or why not? What was most convincing about the author’s argument? What’s the best counter-argument you can offer?

If it’s worth reading, it’s worth debating in writing. An electronic discussion list allows students to post their argumentative responses publicly, testing them out on the rest of the class. This often works best when the material is stimulating or controversial. The best set of posts I ever got were responses to folklorist Alan Dundes’s “Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytic Consideration of American Football.” Faced with Dundes’s interpretation of “tight end” and “wide receiver,” every student had an opinion.

Make it personal. When it’s time to study for exams, memorize authors’ names, along with the authors’ core persuasive points. Remembering that “so-and-so was trying to convince me of such-and-which” makes it personal, and personal encounters tend to be more memorable than impersonal ones. Students will perform well on exams if they can remember three things: the names of the authors they’ve read, the authors’ argumentative points, and how to win an argument with each author.

Lectures, too. On the bus or the bike ride home after lecture, think about what the instructor was trying to get you to do or think. Take a few minutes to scribble an argumentative response to lecture or discussion before rushing home to crawl back in bed.

I believe that nudging students toward a more argumentative relationship with their course material is at least a partial solution to some of the most widespread writing concerns that we encounter.

Thesis Over Theme

Obviously not all students are going to follow such counsel assiduously. I’ve noticed that even after I make these suggestions, most of the students immediately file out of the room when the bell rings, rather than remaining seated and arguing in writing with their instructors. I guess I can’t win ‘em all. But nudging students toward a more argumentative relationship with their course material is at least a partial solution to some of the most widespread problems we encounter when trying to teach them to make arguments of their own.

However, it isn’t just students’ attitudes that sometimes need adjustment, but also their critical skills. One point I always hammer away at in class is “thesis over theme.” By the time students get to UW they can usually recognize a theme, but many of them wouldn’t recognize a thesis if it ran up and bit them on the butt. For instance, if I asked my Folklore students something like, “So what did you get out of that article by Schmoo?” They might reply, “Well, it was about Norwegian reindeer yodelers from the Pine Barrens of Central Wisconsin.” I explain that yes, that was the topic or theme. But what was the point? What was the thesis? Most students find it much harder to recognize just what that thesis was, much less state it with any precision. I think it’s important to offer them a solid example of what I’m looking for. In this case: “Schmoo argues that Norwegian immigrants continue to imitate the mating call of the rutting reindeer bull, despite no longer having reindeer that need to be called in for milking, as a ritual enactment of virility and a statement of ethnic identity.”

Every field has its own rhetorical rules that govern what makes an argument or hypothesis or interpretation, and the data it purports to explain, sufficiently valuable to be worth the attention of those in the field. When we teach writing within a discipline, we’re basically trying to get students to internalize these rules, or as many of them as possible.

To sum up, then, teaching students to look for and write argumentatively doesn’t involve only teaching students to write thesis statements. It involves helping them look for and recognize and debate arguments they’re already reading and witnessing daily. And, if we can teach them to look to arguments in the disciplines they’re studying, they will quickly realize that the models of what you’re asking them to write are right in front of them. They can then start to work through the process of critical thinking and argumentative response, resulting in more than just “Spam spam spam spam spam.”