Writing the Argument Beginning

The beginning first needs to grab the reader's attention. Then it should introduce your topic and provide background leading up to your position statement. To get started with your beginning paragraph, you can experiment with different lead-writing strategies.

1. Ask a provocative question.

   Why is gender such a taboo subject in high school?

2. Provide a fascinating quotation.

   "True equality means holding everyone accountable in the same way, regardless of race, gender, faith, ethnicity, or political ideology."
   ― Monica Crowley

3. Provide a surprising fact.

   Did you know more than half of female students in grades 7-12 report experiencing some form of sexual harassment?

4. Directly address the issue.

   Recently a wave of women's empowerment has swept across the country, but it hasn't seemed to reach high schools.

Writing the Middle Paragraphs

Develop a middle paragraph for each reason that supports your position statement. Organize these paragraphs using your outline (for a receptive audience) or follow a pattern for a resistant audience.

The prewriting activities in this lesson will help you plan your argument essay—identifying a controversial topic, researching the issue, developing a position about it, and gathering reasons, evidence, and responses to objections.

Prewriting to Consider Controversies

Effective argument essays focus on controversial issues. A controversy is a subject about which people disagree. Facts don't leave much room for disagreement because they can be directly proven. Controversial topics involve the following:

• Opinions are personal preferences such as the best U.S. president or the most important qualities of a video game. One person states an opinion and provides reasons to support it, but someone else can have an opposing opinion.
• Proposals are suggestions about what should be done in the future. Since no one knows for certain the future outcome of any action taken now, proposals cannot be directly proven until after they have consequences.
• Hypotheses are explanations for how something might be working. They are "educated guesses" about what is going on. Arguments and experiments can provide reasonable support for them, but hypotheses only become scientific theories or laws after extensive experimentation.

You can think about controversies locally, at your school and in your community, or more broadly, in your country and around the world. What do people feel about the controversies? What opinions, proposals, or hypotheses are most commonly linked to them? One student jotted down the following controversial positions that he encountered at school, read about in local and national newspapers, and discovered on Google News.

Reading a Narrative Argument

Before you write your own narrative argument, you should read and respond to an example from another student. The student begins the sample piece with a compelling narrative about a youth activist before arguing logically for a position about today's youngest generation.

Reading a Student Model

Read the following narrative argument and respond to the reading afterward. Click on the side notes to see key features in the text.

Sample Narrative Argument

Warm-Up for Narrative Arguments

In 2014, actress Emma Watson spoke to the United Nations in support of gender equality. Her speech touched on a number of contentious issues—patriarchy, feminism, gender roles—but to illustrate her points, she also got personal, weaving in stories about her own experiences. Here's a portion of her speech:

Editing Comparatives and Superlatives

Modifiers have special forms that help you compare topics. A comparative adjective can show which of two topics is bigger, faster, less messy, or more cost-effective. A superlative adjective can show which of three or more topics is biggest, fastest, least messy, or most cost-effective. Add er to most one-syllable words to make the comparative form, and add est to make the superlative form.

Most One-Syllable Adjectives

For most adjectives of two syllables or more, add more or less for comparative forms and most or least for superlative forms. (Note that some two-syllable adjectives can still take er and est.)

Writing the Beginning Paragraph

The first sentence or two of your comparison-contrast essay needs to grab your reader's interest. You can experiment with a number of different strategies to write an effective lead.

1. Start with a fascinating question.

   Would you rather be completely normal, with all the typical abilities and disabilities, or exceptional in one or two areas but impaired in others?

2. Start with a thoughtful quotation.

   "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."

   —Albert Camus

3. Provide an anecdote.

   We've all been stuck on a slow bus, starting and stopping in heavy traffic, crammed with others just waiting to get to a destination. When the patent clerk Albert Einstein was stuck on such a bus, he imagined instead riding on a photon at the speed of light . . . and came up with the Special Theory of Relativity.

4. Make a shocking statement.

   People with synesthesia process sound with the part of their brains meant to see pictures. As a result, they see music. When the rest of us hear a D major chord, they might see a bright blue mountain or a vibrantly orange rabbit.

Prewriting to Select Two Topics

If your topics truly interest you, analyzing them will be easy. You might also want to select two interesting topics from a current area of study so that your comparison-contrast essay can help you in more than one class. If you don't know what you want to write about, you can start by selecting an interesting general category from the Basics of Life list and thinking of two topics within that category.

For example, if you choose "Personality," you can compare two types of personality (introvert vs. extrovert) or two tests that measure intelligence (Stanford-Binet vs. Wechsler Intelligence Scale) or two psychological conditions (Asperger's syndrome vs. savant syndrome). If you choose "Food," you can compare and contrast two types of cuisine (French vs. German), or two processes for preserving meat (smoking vs. salt curing), or the history of two different drinks (coffee vs. tea).

Reading a Comparison-Contrast Essay

Before you write your own comparison-contrast essay, you should read and respond to an essay written by another student. This student was studying the civil rights movement in Advanced Placement U.S. History and decided to compare and contrast two key documents from the leaders in 1963: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Reading a Student Model

Read the following comparison-contrast essay, in which Lamar analyzes King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and Malcolm X's "Message to the Grassroots." Lamar introduces both documents, reviews each separately (topic-by-topic organization), looks at the similarities and differences of each, and then evaluates both using argumentation and analogy. Click on the side notes to see the features of this comparison-contrast essay.

Warm-Up for Comparison-Contrast Essays

People often say, "You can't compare apples and oranges." Of course you can. Apples and oranges are both fist-sized fruits with an outer protective covering, sweet inner flesh, and seeds. Both grow on trees and appear in supermarkets. Both come in delicious varieties. These fruits are different in many ways as well: color, texture, taste, vitamins, acidity, availability, seasons, and so on. By comparing and contrasting apples and oranges, you learn more about each.

This kind of analytical thinking can help you understand just about any two topics, whether protagonists in novels or types of respiratory systems in animals or generals in the Civil War. In this unit, you'll select two topics from your own areas of study or from personal interest and compare and contrast them.

What Are Comparing and Contrasting?

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When you compare two topics, you find the similarities between them. When you contrast them, you focus on differences. Yes, you can compare and contrast apples and oranges, but your thinking needs to use parallel structure. In other words, you compare and contrast the appearance of both, and then the taste, and then the color. You shouldn't say, "While an orange has a tangy, slightly acidic taste, an apple comes in different colors." You shouldn't compare the taste of the orange to the color of the apple.

As you can see, a comparison-contrast essay needs to keep ideas neatly sorted. You have two separate topics, the similarities and differences between them, and the many points of comparison and contrast. This unit will help you manage all of this complexity, thinking effectively about your topics and developing a clear, thorough, and compelling essay.

You can warm up your thinking by comparing and contrasting yourself and one of your friends or family members.

Thinking About People

You may have a lot in common with a friend or family member, or very little in common, or some combination. You can analyze the similarities and differences between yourself and a person you like by writing about each of you, point by point. One student compared and contrasted himself to his best friend by completing the following chart.