Chapter 9
John: While students’ forming of opinions is something I like to encourage, I’ve sometimes felt that my students feel opinions should remain inviolate, that they are themselves the marks of a democratic society, perhaps even signs that individuals have transcended formulas to become free thinkers. While there’s much to agree with here, an impermeable opinion, however, would work counter to the aims of this book, which stresses ways writers negotiate truth claims through consensus building and collaboration. Following the processes laid out in this book, people indeed form opinions, but those opinions result from dialogic interaction; they do not originate within the writer alone: and the contexts of college writing frequently demand that these processes be explicit. A lot of student writers have told me they like to get right to the point in their writing; I often respond that I want to see the whole needle.
Bill: Like John, I believe what I am teaching has implications for the students’ lives outside of school. Telling students that academic arguments have different rules than their everyday lives undermines so much of what I want to do. Why am I teaching a method of argument that has no relevance except for assorted classes on campus? Yet, for the most part, I believe in the highest conception of argument in the academic world—what should transpire when in the search for truth rather than the self-interested manipulations of the process. I want students to find uses for the high conception of argument. To help find a bridge for this perceived gap between real life and the academy, I ask students to relate a particularly heated quarrel they had with a friend or family member and to analyze what the students found fair and unfair in the methods of persuasion, tactics, or other parts of the exchange. Writing this out really helps student to remember the particulars of the situation and leads to wonderful classroom discussions. A more complex look at opinions emerges, for what happens when someone’s opinion interferes or harms someone else? What happens when others label a student as unreasonable or selfish because an opinion seems to spring simply from that student’s self-interest?
Copyright © Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.