Book Review: Teaching Argument Writing

Book Review: 
Teaching Argument Writing: Grades 6-12
George Hillocks, Jr. 

In reading Teaching Argument Writing I have decided to separate the main points of the book into most prominent quotes and most effective strategies/activities. As a brief overview, I found this book an incredibly useful instructional tool that takes one through the stages of teaching argument writing as well as adopting an inquiry-based approach to teaching argument. I find that this book would be especially effective for middle school students because it introduces argument writing in a rather basic, approachable format and moves progressively to more complex, subjective material. While some of the activities are not quite my style, the approach taken and the strategies used in many of them are quite profitable to anyone wishing to educate students on becoming competent argument writers.



Top Quotes: 

• "Aristotle divides substantive arguments into three kinds: forensic, epideictic, and deliberative. I have found it useful to designate these as arguments of fact, judgment, and policy and approach them in that order, moving students from the simpler to the more complex" (xvi).
• Kinneavy and Warriner tell us that 'In a persuasive essay, you can select the most favorable evidence, appeal to emotions, and use style to persuade your readers. Your single purpose is to be convincing'. The same might be said of propaganda and advertising. Argument, on the other hand, is mainly about logical appeals and involves claims, evidence, warrants, backing, and rebuttals" (xvii). 
• The authors conclude that 'schools are essentially machines for providing negative feedback. They are supposed to reduce deviance, to constrain the behavior and the minds of adolescents withing straight and narrow channels'. For the most part schools, especially in academic areas, do not provide flow experience, the kind that results in high levels of pleasure, confidence, and absorption in the tasks at hand. These results are confirmed by the many other studies that show schools to be places in which students are surrounded by deserts of ennui" (4).
• More seriously, people take to heart and act on judgments based on prejudice and intolerance. Socrates and the Stoic philosophers believed that all people have the capacity for practical reason but tend to lead somnolent lives, accepting traditions, norms, and beliefs learned from infancy without question, without taking charge of their own thinking. This is as true today as it was in the time of Socrates" (103).
• "Words cannot have whatever meanings our whims propose, as Humpty Dumpty suggests in Through the Looking Glass. Further, when the reasons for calling someone a hero are challenged, they must be defended...If one sets out to demonstrate that a character is heroic, that an act is courageous, that a story is mythic, that an act is one of terrorism, that a play is tragic, or that a poem is satiric, a warrant is almost mandatory, and a warrant nearly always must be defined and defended" (109).
• "These extended definitions amount to the backing that may be used to argue whether or not a character's actions are courageous. In other words, the thinking strategies involved in developing argument are very much the same as those in drawing and defending inferences about literature" (149).
• "The interpretation of literature is all about the reader making judgments. The writer of any literature provides images, detail, narration, portraits of characters, but we, the readers, must construct the meanings for ourselves, making inferences and judgments in order to comprehend the work and determine its import" (178).
• "The key question, therefore, becomes how will a work interpreted today make students more astute interpreters of works to be read tomorrow? (180)
• "If schools were to adopt a policy of teaching through inquiry, making arguments would be taking place every day in every subject matter from language arts to mathematics. This would make learning more exciting - and much more meaningful" (200).

Top Strategies:

• A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: This activity is based on making judgments of visuals in order to infer characteristics of the person depicted. The activity goes as follows:
  (1) Distribute copies of "The Voluptuary" and ask students what they think of the man.
  (2) Ask students to define voluptuary and write why the man in this picture might be labeled one.
  (3) Ask students, "What makes a good king?" and encourage them to justify their responses. Record their thinking. At the end of your class's discussion, you should have a list of criteria in response to this question.
  (4) Work with the class to apply one of the criteria to the prince pictured in "The Voluptuary". Record their thinking on a chard under the headings Claim, Evidence, and Warrant.
  (5) Put students into groups and have them work with the remaining criteria.
  (6) Students write an argument of judgment.    
• Warrants and Backing Through Invention: The author notes that providing extended definitions are a primary way that students can provide backing for their warrants in the sense that the definitions often offer a number of criteria to determine if something fits that definition. For example, the text uses a number of criteria to further clarify the definition of terrorism:
  1. The targets of terrorism are governments and civilian populations. Terrorism involves and official, deliberate policy of hurting civilians.
  2. Terrorism involves the deliberate attempt to create intense fear in order to coerce the wider target (including the public at large) into giving in to what the terrorist wants.
  3. The goal of terrorism is ideological (or political) rather than personal.
  4. Terrorism involves an audience. Common crime usually involves only two parties (the criminal and the victim), whereas terrorism, which seeks to amplify and spread fear, has three: the victim, the criminal, and the audience, reached through the news media. 
• The Giraffe Award Activity: "When students are first learning to use a number of criteria to make judgments, they often focus on a single criterion and ignore the others that are perhaps more important. I begin criteria work by giving students a definition and several criteria, along with cases to which to apply them" (113). Hillocks goes on to explain the Giraffe Award Activity, wherein he applies several criteria to an award given annually in Washington State to individuals or groups of individuals who "stick their necks out for the common good". He provides students with the criteria and several candidates for the award, tasking the students with judging whether or not each candidate fulfills the criteria. 
• Teaching Students to Make Inferences: "Making inferences requires knowledge not presented in the text - knowledge about constructs or ideas the can be brought to bear on the text...In short, if we want to help students become strong inferential readers, we must provide the knowledge, experience, and practice that will allow them to do so. And that knowledge and experience must be developed incrementally, one unit at a time, concentrating on onr or perhaps two or three related concepts" (179). Teaching thematic units as opposed to standard units is a main way that Hillocks advocates for providing students adequate knowledge and experience necessary to be inferential readers. 
• Steps in Planning Instructional Units:
  (1) Select a concept to Examine - use the following questions to determine if a concept is appropriate to do an instructional unit on:
  - Does it have generative power?
  - Can youngsters apply the concept to many reading and life experiences?
  - Will students find the concept interesting?
  (2) Define the concept in such a way that it can be differentiated from Noninstances and Seeming Instances 
  (3) Select works that involve the concept or quality - this step is ongoing and should involve a wide range of works
  (4) Build a unit that moves from simple to more complex texts and that provides for a gradual release of teacher responsibility - the work should initially be guided largely by the teacher and whole-class discussions, progressing to small groups and finally to independent work.

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