Choosing & Using Sources: Instructor Resources

Pre-Class Preparation

• Review the handouts and answer keys for this activity.
• Read Choosing & Using Sources Chapter 9, Making an Argument.
• Review In-Class Procedure below.
• Decide whether you want students to complete Handout 9B-1 on paper or electronically.
• If you decided on electronic handouts, put Handout 9B-1 in your learning management system.
• If you decided on paper copies, print Handouts 9B-1 (1 copy per student and 1 for yourself) and Answer Key 9B-1 (1 copy for yourself).
• Assign students to read before class Choosing & Using Sources Chapter 9, Making an Argument.
• Prepare for introducing the session, using your own remarks or In-Class Procedure below, if it seems helpful.
• Using Answer Sheet 9B-1, plan your discussion of the answers on the handout.
• Download and perhaps print In-Class Procedure and Answer Key 9B-1 so you can take them with you to class.

In-Class Procedure

1. If you’re having students use printed copies of Handout 9B-1, pass them out or set them where students can pick them up as they come in.
2. If you’re having students use an electronic Handout 9B-1, tell them how to find and open it.
3. Introduce the activity by saying that most academic writing makes an argument and that students will be making arguments via their final products for assignments (term papers, essays, etc.). So knowing the components that make up an argument will be helpful to them.
4. Ask students to complete Handout 9B-1 in 5 minutes.
5. After 5 minutes, consider projecting the answers from Answer Sheet 9B-1 to help students focus.
6. Go over the answers to the handout with students. If students say that in a “real” argument, nobody would do things so formally and friendly as the components seem here, suggest that they might be thinking less of an argument over what is correct or what people should do and instead might be thinking more of a dispute. In disputes, people are more likely to use power that reason to get their way. Examples of arguments that (usually) depend on reason are the conversation carried out in journal articles, letters to the editor in newspapers, op ed pieces, and in term papers and essays. Ask them if they can think of an argument they may have had with a friend that didn’t come close to blows but instead was one during which they tried to convince each other of the right course of action.
7. Conclude this activity by telling students that some academics have suggested that the one thing that all disciplines at the university share is their use of argument.

Relevant Choosing & Using Sources Chapters:

Chapter 9, Making an Argument.

Credit: This activity was developed with the help of “Making Good Arguments” in The Craft of Research, by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams, University of Chicago Press, 2003.