Your paper will have two main sections: (1) a summary of the author’s argument for their
conclusion and (2) your defense of this argument or your rejection of this argument. Your paper
should also have a very short introduction and a conclusion.
*As a general policy, you may quote the readings or the slides, but quotations cannot be more
than 2 lines of text at any given point in your paper.
III. What Each Section Should Look Like:
i. The Introduction:
Your introduction should be pretty minimal. Same with the conclusion. The intro should look
very much like the following:
“In this paper, I will summarize and critique William Rowe’s argument that God exists.
First, I will summarize Rowe’s argument for this conclusion. Second, I will consider
objections to Rowe’s argument.”
ii. The Summary Section (about 1,000 words):
In your summary section, you should explain the author’s argument for his or her conclusion.
There’s no need to summarize the parts of the article that are not essential to the argument. You
are welcome to quote from the Power Point slides or the author’s article so long as you cite them
properly. You should explain, in your own words, how the author defends each premise or their
argument and how the premises lead to the conclusion.
iii. The Critique/Defense Section (about 1,000 words):
Depending on your goals, you will either use this section to argue against the author’s view, or
you will use it to defend the author’s view.
If you are arguing against the author’s view, you should consider one objection to the author’s
view. You should say how the author would respond to this objection, and you should say why
this response is not satisfactory.
If you are defending the author’s conclusion, you should do roughly the same thing. You should
pose an objection to the author’s view, defend his/her view from this objection, and so on.
The best papers will consider a strong objection to the author’s view. We want to object to the
strongest possible version of the argument, and we want to use the strongest possible responses
from the author. Otherwise, we’re only defeating or defending a straw-person version of the
argument.
If you think that an objection from a different author is applicable to the author that you are
writing about, then you are welcome to use it. But, you are not required to use objections from
the other authors in our class. You are welcome to use your own objections.
