Researched Argument Assignment Sheet 1500+ words
Sources: Given the length of the document, you should integrate approximately 6 sources into
your argument as evidence to support your claims or in order to contextualize them. This doesn’t
necessarily mean that you should only use 6 sources or that you must use 6 sources. Instead, you
should use a number of sources necessary both to support and to set up your argument.
Formatting: There are no formatting requirements. I ask that you compose your documents as
public-facing arguments. That means you’ll need to think about how to design your document in
ways to make it as readable as possible and to make it, potentially, more intriguing and/or
arresting. In other words, think about your document’s design like you’d think about writing
your argument—what does your audience expect, what might your audience like, how best to
communicate with them, etc.
Guidelines: With this assignment, the broad culmination of your semester’s work, I want you to
first and foremost write a well-reasoned (reasonable), convincing, and purposeful argument.
Secondly, I want you to be creative, capitalizing on your argument’s rhetorical situation, writing
for a real audience beyond the classroom. In short, you should do what’s necessary in order to
effectively make your argument, considering your argument’s purpose, audience, and exigence.
With that being said, there are a few things that I expect all of your arguments to do (not because
they are arbitrary expectations, but because the genre demands them): 1) you should set up the
conversation, or in other words, you should be able to situate your argument among others—this
should primarily happen in your essay’s introduction, but it can happen elsewhere; 2) you should
have a clear, purposeful claim; 3) you should have reasons to back up your claim; 4) you should
integrate evidence as necessary to support those reasons, as we talked about the different types of
evidence you can use in class, and you should expose and support any warrants (connections
between claim and reasons, or connections between reasons and evidence, or connections between
claim and evidence, etc.) as necessary; 5) you should have some form of rebuttal in which you
address at least one meaningful alternate position; and 6) you should have some kind of a forward-
thinking and/or purposeful conclusion that avoids empty (but not empty) space.
But how all these parts look and function is largely up to you. Imagine your audience, work that
audience, and validate your ideas. That’s what makes the best arguments.
This needs to pull of my justification essay linked below, I also provided a version of the essay that I wrote on this topic for research so you can get an idea of some of the sources I used
