The Making of Arguments

by J. H. Gardiner

SOME SUGGESTIONS TO INSTRUCTORS

What is the purpose of a course in the writing of arguments? The arguments which it turns out cannot convince any one, since there is no one for them to convince; so that the immediate and tangible product of the course must be looked on as a by-product, and a by-product from which there can be no salvage.

What products, then, can teachers aim to produce? First, a vital respect for facts and for sound reasoning therefrom; second, the power so to analyze and marshal the facts in an obscure and complicated case as to bring order and light out of confusion; and third, the appreciation of other men's point of view and training in the tact which will influence them. Incidentally a good course in argumentation should leave with its students an acquaintance with certain effective and economical devices for going to work that should serve them well in later life.

I will take up each of these points in order, and speak of a few methods which I have found useful in practice.

In the first place, how can a teacher establish and strengthen the veneration for fact and the suspicion of all unsupported assertion and a priori reasoning? Partly by judicious exercises, partly by quiet guidance in the choice of subjects. Let a class cross-examine each other on their exact knowledge of the ultimate facts on some familiar subject. On the question of the value of Latin, for example, just how many of the class know no Latin? In a piece of their own writing, how many of the words are derived from the Latin? and what kind of words are they? Of the leaders in scholarship in the class how many know Latin? Of the best writers? Of the authors whose works they are studying in English literature, how many were trained in Latin? Of the authors of the textbooks in science how many? A few such questions as these will suggest others; and the members of the class should keep a record of how many such questions they can answer with precision. Very few people have any exact command of facts on subjects about which they talk freely and with authority; and a young man who has had this truth borne in on him by personal examination will come to writing an argument with more modesty and scrupulousness.

Then a class can be guided away from the large subjects where of necessity their knowledge of facts is second-hand, and in which their arguments, being of necessity short, can touch only the surface of the subject. Here, I think, is where much of the ineffectiveness of courses in argument is to be found. "Judges should be elected by direct vote of the people," "The right of suffrage should be limited by an educational test," "Corporations engaged in interstate commerce should be required to take out a federal license," are samples of propositions recommended as subjects for arguments of two thousand words or less. No undergraduate has the practical knowledge of affairs to judge the value of facts adduced in support of such propositions, and except for the members of debating teams, who spend time on their contests comparable to that given by athletes to their sports, no undergraduate can make himself acquainted with the vast fields of economics and governmental theory covered by such subjects. To write an argument of twelve hundred words on such a subject will weaken rather than strengthen the respect for facts.

What sort of subjects, then, can be used? This is, I confess, a question not altogether easy to answer; but I have had a try at an answer in the list of Subjects which is given in Chapter I, which can be adapted to special conditions of time or place. In general a question which a student would discuss of his own accord and with some warmth is the best subject for him. There are many such subjects in athletics: at this date the rules of football seem not yet settled beyond amendment, and the material for hunting facts in the records of past games is large; Dean Briggs of Harvard is making an appeal to players to raise the level of manners and of ethics in baseball; do all your students agree with him? Should the universities be allowed to use men in their graduate schools as members of their teams? And what are the facts about the playing of such men in the universities in which your students would be interested?

Then there are various educational questions, on which the views of students have real value, especially if they are based on some examination of facts in the course of writing an argument. President Lowell of Harvard told a body of students whom he was consulting that it did not make much difference what they wanted, but that their views when set forth for the purpose of helping the authorities of the college were of great value. The views of your class on examinations for entrance would be based on knowledge which a member of the faculty cannot have at first-hand. What is the estimate of the relative difficulty of getting into various colleges, and on what figures from schools is the estimate based? For how many boys are languages easier or harder than history or mathematics or science? Does admission by certificate provide sufficient safeguard for the standards of the college? Does a rigid prescription of subjects for examination distort the course for the high school? How many boys, who can be named, had their education injured by such prescription? Should the standard for entrance or for graduation be raised, or lowered, at your college? Should honor students be excused from final examinations? Should they have special privileges? Should freshmen be required to be within college bounds at a fixed hour every night? Should class rushes be abolished? Here are only a few suggestions of subjects which can be adapted to the needs and the knowledge of special classes. They are of no value, however, unless the students are driven to gather facts, and to reason from these facts, not from general impressions. School catalogues, college catalogues, informal censuses, reports of presidents and of committees, and other printed or oral sources will help in the gathering of facts.

Then there are the innumerable local and state questions that touch the fathers of at least half of any class, and that the sons may be in the way of hearing discussed at home, or may be sent to hear discussed in legislatures and city councils. Every instructor who takes a daily newspaper will be provided with more of these subjects than his class can use. For their facts the students can go to the newspapers, to printed reports, to the persons who are concerned with the questions which they are going to argue. In some cases the students will get valuable interest and advice from the older men who have the active charge of the questions under discussion; and it is not inconceivable, that if some of the latter happen to be graduates of the college or school, they will even read the arguments and make helpful criticisms on them. The grateful interest of graduates is a source which has not been overdrawn for aid in the processes of instruction.

Many of the subjects which I have here offered as suggestions can be discussed in part, at any rate, within the space of an editorial article; and that I conceive to be about the length which most arguments written by students, except those in special courses, will run to. In so short a space, it is hardly necessary to point out, evidence cannot be presented and discussed with the detail, say, of Webster's "Speech in the White Murder Case." It would be a good separate exercise to call for such detailed presentation of evidence on some single point in the argument. With most classes, however, the instructor cannot do much more than rule out wholly unsupported assertion, and insist that the distinction between fact and inference from fact shall be kept in sight.

The second of the results which an instructor in a course in argumentation should aim for is the power to analyze complicated masses of facts and so arrange them and present them as to bring order out of confusion. President Taft has said that Justice Hughes "won his reputation at the bar by his gift of boring to the innermost core of a subject"; and that is what the drill on the introduction to the brief should to some degree impart to students. The orderly analysis of the question, step by step, according to the admirable scheme devised by Professor Baker, cannot help implanting some understanding of what it means to go to the heart of a question. Every man sooner or later, must face complicated and puzzling questions; and the ordinary man will give himself a long start if he will thus put down on paper the points that can be urged on the two sides of a question, and then study them until the real points at issue emerge. Then the drill in laying out the logical skeleton of an argument, so plainly that no false or broken connection can escape detection, will strengthen the conscience for clearness and coherence of thought; and the necessity for getting back to ultimate facts for every assertion, and putting down the source from which the facts are derived, will help to implant a wholesome respect for facts as something different from assertion.

Since the argument written out is the final test of the thinking, some care must be taken that students do not obscure by careless paragraphing and slovenly sentences such clearness of thought as they have attained in their brief. I have found it useful to prescribe marginal titles to the paragraphs: a student who has struggled to find a single phrase that will cover all of a sprawling paragraph will have learned some respect for firmness of paragraphing. In general, an instructor has a right to insist that his class shall apply in practice all that they have learned about the ordinary devices for getting clearness and emphasis.

In the third place, this practice in writing arguments ought to leave with students a more developed idea of how to make readers look favorably on a proposition which they are urging. I have insisted, at the risk of seeming repetitious, on the need of considering the audience whose minds are to be won over; for what persuasiveness can mean apart from specific persons to persuade I cannot conceive. Much of the perfunctory emptiness of the textbooks when they get to this part of the subject comes from neglecting this very practical and obvious side of making an argument. The difficulty it raises for arguments written in class work is just as obvious; more than most kinds of composition written for practice, arguments run the risk of having no touch with reality. Something may be done, however, if an instructor guides his class toward the kind of questions I have suggested above: an argument on the rules of football would be addressed to the Rules Committee, and most youths would know something of the prepossessions of so famous a man as Mr. Camp; an argument on a college question would be addressed to the faculty or the president, and it may be assumed that students have some idea of their general attitude on such matters. I have followed the practice in my own sections of freshmen of requiring them to put at the head of their brief and of their argument the audience which they had in mind. Then when one comes to criticism and conference one can by a little cross-examination bring home to them the very practical nature of this matter of persuasion.

One must be careful not to insist too strictly on the model and the scheme of work laid down here, and in practically the same form in other books. It is the best that has yet been devised, but any student who is set to making a brief of one of the examples of argument at the end of this book will see for himself that there is no one infallible way of making an argument. Each argument must adapt itself to its occasion and its audience; and an instructor will be wise to keep himself awake to this truth by noting divergencies from the model. The rules which are here set forth and the model which is built on them are serviceable just so long as they are serviceable, and no longer. Their chief service is done when they have set up in the minds of students a standard of effectiveness in singling out and emphasizing the critical issues of a question.

As to the exercises which should accompany the work in argument my experience with classes of five to six hundred freshmen leads me to think that their value to the student can hardly be overestimated. I will speak here of a few of them.

The exercises in the use of reference books is something that every student ought to be put through. I found it simple and not too extravagant of time to take my sections to the library in squads of ten or a dozen, and show them and let them handle the principal books on the list. Then on the spot I gave each of them a sheet of theme paper on which I had written some sort of fact drawn from one of these books, and told them to look up that fact and report on it. My object was to convince them that most ordinary facts can be looked up in less than five minutes. The material for this exercise I got by turning over the reference books and jotting down almost anything that caught my eye. One can in this way get a great variety of facts in a very short time. In some libraries it might be possible to get members of the library staff to share in this instruction; in all libraries one will find active cooperation.

For the preliminary work on the argument we found that it was often practicable and advisable to let the students pair off on the two sides of the question, and work together through all the preliminaries. Two men thus working together often discuss themselves into the liveliest kind of interest in their question; and almost always they come closer to the important issues involved by sharpening their wits against each other. Their arguments, too, are better, especially in the refutation, from their knowing just what points can be made on the other side.

It is excellent practice, not only for the brief and the argument, but also for all other college work, to set the students to making briefs of parts or wholes of the arguments printed here as examples, or of other arguments found outside. Not only lawyers, but other men of affairs, constantly have to digest and summarize papers; and skill in picking out essential facts and the thread of thought from a document is a highly valuable asset for practical life. The exercise is sometimes irksome to students, for it is hard work at first and calls for concentration of mind: but it can be sweetened and made livelier by the competition of classroom discussion.

All through the work on the argument students may well be set to watching the daily papers and the magazines for examples of arguments, and of good and bad reasoning. Very often an instructor can get, at the cost of a cent or two apiece, a set of arguments printed in a newspaper for his class to analyze. Senators and representatives in Congress are notably willing to send copies of speeches, and these sometimes furnish good examples of both sound and unsound reasoning.

If time serves, instructors will do well to give a grounding in logic. I have inserted a brief discussion of the subject with the hope that it will furnish a basis for a short study; it can be reenforced by a few weeks on such a manual as Jevons's "Primer of Logic," or Bode's "Outline of Logic" if there is time. Whatever be one's view of the positive value of deductive logic, there can be no doubt that every student should have some knowledge of the canons of inductive logic, and that a study of propositions and syllogisms is a mighty sharpener of the discrimination for the real meaning of words and sentences.

The short chapter on debating I have added for the use of classes where a moderate amount of training in this most useful of exercises is practicable. Debating may be looked at in two ways, either as training in alertness and effectiveness in discussion, or as a form of intercollegiate or interscholastic sport. On the latter aspect a recognized authority has said: "Formal debate is a kind of game. In the time limit, the order of speakers, the alternation of sides, the give and take of rebuttal, the fixed rules of conduct, the ethics of the contest, the qualifications for success, and the final awarding of victory, debate has much in common with tennis";[⁷⁹] [!--Note--] and he develops the likeness through a page of rather fine print. From this point of view debating has keenly interested a small body of students; in some colleges it has been recognized by hatbands or other emblems of distinction for the successful "teams"; and it has developed an elaborate apparatus of rules and of "coaches." With the game in this full bloom I have not space to deal in this small book; for such elaborate work of analysis and preparation one must go to special manuals which deal with it at length. I have confined myself to an application of the general principles of the subject to the spoken argument, and to a few suggestions for preparing for and carrying on the not very formal discussions which the average man gets into in the ordinary run of life.

Even where there is not time for systematic practice in debating, much may be done by extemporaneous five-minute speeches. There is unquestionably an active movement among the best teachers of English for more stress on oral composition; they recognize that the power to stand quietly and at one's ease on one's feet and explain one's views clearly and cogently will help any man in his life work.

In some cases there may be local or academic subjects under discussion at the time the class is working on argument on which they can prepare themselves to speak. It may be possible to interest graduates of the school and college, so that they will give help in getting material, and perhaps in judging and criticizing. Occasionally, perhaps, a man who has the actual settlement of a local question or a share in the settlement may be willing to hear the discussion. Any aid of this sort that will bring the debate within the bounds of reality will add zest to it.

For the use of this book when a comparatively short time, perhaps six weeks, is at the disposal of the instructor, my advice, based on the practice worked out with my colleagues in the freshman course at Harvard, would be to begin with Chapter I, and at the same time ask the class to hand in subjects for approval. This should be done a fortnight ahead of the main work, in order to allow changes of subject, after consultation if necessary. In connection with Chapter II would come exercises in making briefs of one or more of the arguments in the back of the book or of others provided for the purpose. Then would come the preliminary work on the brief, the introduction to the brief. This it is profitable to treat as a separate piece of work, with a grade of its own. At this stage would be the place for the exercises in the use of reference books, which will lead naturally to looking up the material for the brief. If possible a conference should be given on the introduction to the brief. Then comes the next main step in the work, the brief. The work for this would naturally be accompanied by study of Chapter III, and by such exercises in the correction of bad briefing and in correction of fallacies as the instructor finds time for. There should be another conference on the brief, and it should be rewritten if necessary. Instructors who have been through the subject will know from sad experience that one rewriting and one conference may be only starters. Then comes the argument itself: this should be the climax, and not merely a perfunctory filling out of the brief. If it be at all possible, the argument should be rewritten after a conference, and the conference can hardly be too long. If the argument is fifteen hundred or two thousand words long, a half an hour will be found a short time to go over the whole with any thoroughness. No instructor in English needs to have it pointed out that conferences are his most efficient means of education.