Writing - Pt. 1: Writing an Argumentative Paper
You’ve got an argumentative essay and you have no idea how to start. You don’t even have a topic picked out. The first thing you should think about is what you are passionate about. Is it pro or con? Is it something that has a lot of credible evidence to back it up? These are important things to consider. You could pick a topic from current news, politics, prevalent topics in medical history, etc. When searching for a good topic for an argumentative essay you should pick something that has a clear positive and a clear negative for your refutation at the end of your essay. It is not always smart to pick a topic you really aggressively believe should be one way or another, you should understand both sides but pick one that leans more to one side for you personally. That is where the personal ends because after that it is only knowledge with clever wording.
When beginning the essay your introduction paragraph should open up for the rest of your essay. It should be presented clearly and with interest. The easiest way to start with that first sentence is to put an interesting fact to hook the reader. After that you use facts from broad to specific. A blanket fact about the topic will start your second sentence and then you get more specific with your facts until you get to your thesis. Your final sentence will be your thesis sentence which presents the stance you are trying to prove to the reader. This is an example of a thesis statement I wrote for a college English class:
Teenagers in the United States of America (US) are more likely to commit suicide due to the phone epidemic causing amplified dismal feelings, access to pro suicide content, cyberbullying, and the addiction to a feeling of interconnectivity.
There is no question of what side I am arguing or confusion about the topics I will be covering in the essay. You should put your topics down in the order you will be writing them in so they will flow.
Understand that you need to explain everything. Write as if the reader knows absolutely nothing about your topic except for a decent grasp on the English language. Now you move on to your body paragraphs. You should make sure all of your sources are already cited and correct at the bottom of your paper so you can refer back to it when needed. At this point you should have all of your information handy so you can piece it together into paragraphs. If you have not then you need to go to google scholar and put in your topic to find reputable sources to use. You should have at least 5-7 sites that you will be using so your reader knows it has been well researched. It is best if you find peer reviewed journals to cite but other information found under .gov or .edu will work as well. If you find the information to be difficult or hard to grasp then you can put pieces of text into an AI simplifier to help with understanding the content.
For each topic you should have at least 3 paragraphs of good information. So if you were to have 3 topics to cover you would need to write 9 total paragraphs that are each 5-7 sentences, possibly more. Add on the introduction, the refutation (1-2 paragraphs), and the conclusion then you’ll have 12-13 depending on how you want to structure your refutation.
The refutation should include your counter argument and your rebuttal. It is best to have at least two sources that negate your stance and then an explanation that negates those sources and turns the reader back to your stance. This can all be broken up into two or more paragraphs, one or two paragraphs for the counter argument and the same for the rebuttal. You should find information that you know can be taken apart by your own topic’s information. This makes for a strong argument.
Finally, your conclusion should restate your information. You should pick your strongest point in each topic to restate and then put in the refutation counterargument and rebuttal. At the end you can restate your thesis statement and then you should be done! It is always smart to have someone read your paper because more often than not they will find something you missed in your reread. To take it one step further you can put it into grammarly and see if any of the suggestions strike your fancy, it can be very helpful with restructuring which is hard to do once the whole thing is written.
A piece of advice when writing a paper is to not look back and reread or overthink what you are writing. If you have all of your information picked out then you should write everything you know one topic at a time, forming the argument as you go. Once you get into the groove and find a good path to follow it makes it so much easier to just crank out those pages one after another. You can cite your information after you are done with writing the topic so you don’t lose your train of thought by stopping and putting in the citation. If you don’t know how to cite something there are multiple websites that will do it for you, you just plug in the information and it writes it out for you so you can paste it in your work cited. There are also multiple examples of citing in paragraph for any format depending on what your teacher/professor wants.
Now I am not a professional and I am also not your teacher so don’t take this word for word if it is not what they are asking for. This is just a guide to get you started and hopefully make it easier for you to work through the pain of starting a paper which I have found is the hardest part. I hope this helps and if you have any questions then don’t hesitate to message me through the form under the contact tab!
Sincerely,
TH
