One of the laments I hear most from teachers in writing-intensive courses, particularly courses like the Bascom Course (which I’ve taught myself under the rubric of an English 236 entitled “Writing the Holocaust”) is that it’s hard to devote much time to writing when there’s so much content to cover. If you pay attention to the subject of the class – in my case, the subject of the Holocaust and how it has been represented in the six decades since the events themselves – you tend to give short shrift to writing; and if you pay much attention at all to writing, you can’t possibly squeeze all you need to know about the topic in a short fifteen-week term.

But this is a false conundrum. If you see writing as just a matter of talent or as a skill, then it naturally seems like something a teacher tacks on to the subject matter: if you learn enough about x – the Holocaust, the middle east peace process, global warming – then writing about it can’t be that hard (or so the old argument goes). But writing isn’t, or isn’t only, a matter of talent or skill. Writing is the stuff through which we come to understand any subject on which people can reasonably disagree – how best to represent the Holocaust, the most ethical way to resolve Palestine’s and Israel’s territorial claims, the implications of global warming – and you can’t learn about these subjects without seeing how the language in which we do so shapes both that subject and the disciplinary lenses we see them through.

For students, the fact that a course in argument seems to be at least as much about the subject of argument as the writing of argument itself is sometimes confusing. But look at it this way: in order to learn how to write, you have to know something about the subject on which you’re writing; and to know anything about the subject is to begin to learn how the subject is shaped by the arguments that surround it.

People have argued about how much you need to know about a subject in order to write well about it for 2,500 years: Plato had this same argument with the sophists in several of his dialogues, most notably the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. The sophists believed that a rhetor’s skill lay in his ability to speak on any topic – he didn’t necessarily need to know anything about them, he just needed a good rhetorical repertoire. Plato thought that in order to be convincing, you have to be able to convince those who know something about the subject as well as those who didn’t, and went so far as to suggest you had to know everything about everything.

Without going as far as Plato did, it’s fair to ask how you balance the form of an argument and its content in one’s teaching and in how one approach your students’ writing. How do you teach a class on argument, and grade students’ papers, without insisting they become experts on the one hand, and without grading nothing but organization, grammar, and their adherence to form on the other?

In the course I direct, English 100, part of the answer comes from how we approach argument itself. In order to make a claim about a question or controversy about which reasonable people may disagree, you have to know why someone would make such a claim. To argue that Israel’s security fence in the West Bank is a bad idea, for instance, you have to follow your statement of a claim with what I call a “because” statement: “It’s a bad idea for Israel to build a security fence because it will instigate Palestinian violence.”

But there’s more to it than this. In order to understand whether this argument is sustainable, you have to also figure out what broader claim has to be true in order for your smaller, more local one to be true. The teacher’s job is to ask the student what warrants her claim? The student has to link the parts of the statement that come before and after the “because.” What has to be true in order for the claim to be true? In this case, the warrant is a statement like “those acts that instigate violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians should be avoided,” and now the student’s job is not only to cite evidence that the building of the security fence instigates Palestinian violence, but also to figure out what grounds the entire argument, what assumptions have to be held by the person making the argument and the person with whom she’s arguing (in this case, something like “violence should always be avoided”). Now the teacher’s job is to help the student turn both the warrant and the assumptions into questions, in order to decide just how well and how soundly the case against the fence can be made: is it true that violence should be avoided? Are there cases in which violence is a good thing? What measures besides a fence might avoid Middle Eastern violence? Is it the fence that’s causing the violence or is it something else?

In this case, the teacher isn’t teaching “about” Israeli politics, or the security fence, or the nature of state violence. Instead, she’s teaching students how to make arguments about Israeli politics, the security fence, and the nature of state violence. Of course, students will have to investigate all of these issues, and others like them, in order to make their case – this is what research is for – and the teacher should be prepared to choose classroom material, and work with research librarians to find material in the library databases, that will help them respond to those issues.

It’s also important for teachers to be consistent in using the vocabulary of argument when evaluating their student’s writing. Rather than simply asking questions about content in the margins of a paper, it’s important – in addition – to contextualize those questions in terms of argument: not just “I’m not sure this claim makes sense” but, in an end comment, “how would you defend your claim about Israeli settlements beyond the Green Line? What comes after the ‘because’, and is it the same reason that follows your claim about the security fence? If so, you should see if you can fold the two claims together; if not, see if you can figure out which claim is more important, and whether they’re warranted by the same idea.” The first marginal note – “I’m not sure this claim makes sense” – leaves the student to try something else without knowing why; the second encourages the student to figure out the logic and the sense of the subject she’s arguing about.

Will what I’ve just said help students learn how to write grammatical, well-organized, and original essays (given that I’ve said absolutely nothing about grammar, organization, or voice)? In my experience, yes. As students learn to organize their thinking about a subject in more or less logical terms, and begin to understand why some questions and lines of argument are more important than others, they treat what they’re reading, and what they’re writing, with more care. It’s a care that spills over into their attention to how a thought is shaped and organized, and how their sentences follow one from the next. In the case of argument, form and content most often work – and are learned – together.