9/11/08 minutes

Here are the minutes from Thurs. September 11, 2008.

In the first few minutes of class, a question was asked about the upcoming writing assignment and whether or not Mr. Lazarow can check our rough drafts before they are due. He said he will take the rough drafts and that he usually can check them over within a school day, depending on his workload. We were also shown more proof that this course will help us in college with a recent email from a student in college.

After that, we started the major lesson for the next few days, a 60 slide power point titled "The Toulmin Model of Argument: The Path to Writing Better Essays". The overall idea of the powerpoint is to teach us the "Toulmin Model of Argument" for when we write essays, instead of the old, basic 5 paragraph essay formula. A few key points in the presentation made about essay writing was that the thesis was the foundation to a good essay and that an essay could not be plugged into a simple formula. Instead it is necessary to understand the mechanics of an essay and how they work. Another point made was that all speech is essentially persuasive, therefore the Toulmin model is constructed for the reality of argumentation.

In the next part of the powerpoint we got into the details of the Toulmin model, specifically the 6 parts of the model: Claim, Grounds, Warrants, Backing, Qualifiers, and Rebuttals. Then we began to talk more specifically about the first triad-Claims, Grounds, and Warrants. Then we got into detail about The Claim part of the Toulmin model. The Claim answers the question "What is the author trying to prove? What is the bottom line?" and is, to put it simply, the statement being argued. Next the three types of Claims were discussed: Claims of Fact, Claims of Judgement/Value, and Claims of Policy. Nearing the end of class we began to talk about The Grounds part of the Toulmin model. We defined The Grounds as the basis of real persuasion- the evidence, reasons, and opinions. I think I covered basically everything that we talked about today.

Andrew Burke