Month: October 2020

Today I will be addressing a topic that I find very interesting: making arguments. In high school, I would never have imagined myself saying a sentence like the former. However, after 5 weeks in a college-level writing class and with plenty of new information in my brain, I am actually starting to find certain things to be much more appealing than they previously were. In chapter 7 of The Craft of Research, the authors make crafting claims and supporting them seem far less intimidating by connecting it to regular conversation.

This chapter makes it evident that rather than thinking of research papers as big, scary essays that we just want to finish writing, these papers should be enjoyable and exciting to craft by treating them like you would a casual, friendly argument. In common arguments, whether between friends, family, or strangers, you make claims, give your reasons, then use evidence to support your claims. Acknowledging and responding to the claims of others is also a daily occurrence in regular conversation. In the chapter, the authors state that using these same steps to craft a paper is simple: “there’s nothing arcane in any of that, because you do it in every conversation that inquires thoughtfully into an unsettled issue”(108).

Most people make claims every single day, just in regular life. For example, times such as right now when an important election is near, conversation is centered largely around politics, and arguing is often part of this conversation. This happens on social media quite often too – people will post media that makes a claim, viewers will comment on the post with conflicting views, and more will join into the conversation with their own claims and reasoning to support their views. I think that recognizing this idea – and understanding that essays and research papers are just fancy types of conversation – makes approaching a new piece of writing far less stressful.

I like to say that I’m a good writer – but not great. And personally, I blame the teachers. After nearly 14 years of education, I am finally learning how to share my voice effectively because I’m not afraid anymore. In the very first blog post of my college career, entitled “Strength”, I analyzed the fact that students are told to silence their own voices or else they won’t sound professional, and that this is actually not the best approach to writing. This affected me personally, as I used to read essays of other students and feel like mine did not match their level of academic greatness because they used bigger words than me. That blog post was a mere three weeks ago, yet life has changed quite a lot since then. I’ve written countless things and I’ve learned a lot too.

First, I’m not as scared as I was 3 weeks ago. We had to peer edit essays in English class, and I was scared that they would be absolutely scholarly and mine would be trash, but I found that my fellow college students are equally as good, if not worse at writing than I am. I found repetitive sentences, incomplete clauses, and grammatical errors in their essays, the same errors that I was so worried about in my own writing. In the They Say/ I say Chapters that we read, Graff and Birkenstein touched on metacommentary and connecting sentences. When I thought about these chapters, I realized how much I wasn’t taught in high school. My teachers never emphasized the importance of connecting sentences; hence, my fellow students always filled their essays with sentences that didn’t relate to each other and didn’t relate to the thesis itself, of course causing them to lose points. I did it too. But even then, our teachers didn’t tell us how to fix it – they told us to make it relate to our thesis, but how?

Metacommentary is another subject that I don’t think I ever heard before today. Of course, its meaning can be inferred, but I am certain that my high school English teachers never uttered that word in my four years there. “Metacommentary is a way of commenting on your claims and telling others how – and how not – to think about them,” (Kraft and Birkenstein, 131). As I view this definition, I realize that I never thought that I, the author of my own writing, am supposed to actually give my opinions and clarify my claims with my readers. Much like we were forced to silence our own voices to write academically in high school, we also felt afraid to clarify with our own thoughts and opinions on the subject because we thought it was unprofessional when that would’ve made our writing so much better. We were always told to say “them” not “you” as if the audience is a stranger. I want to write knowing that my voice and my opinions are important. There is a living, breathing person behind this keyboard.