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A FOR AND AGAINST ESSAY.

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A for and against essay

Sep 03, 2014

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A for and against essay. Advantages and disadvantages of being famous. Structure in paragraphs. Introduction : definition of fame and famous people . Advantages . Disadvantages . Examples . Conclusion . Would you like to be famous . Why ? / Why not ?

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A for and againstessay Advantages and disadvantages of beingfamous

Structure in paragraphs. • Introduction: definition of fame and famouspeople. • Advantages. • Disadvantages. • Examples. • Conclusion. Wouldyouliketo be famous. Why? / Whynot? 150 words. Deadline 19th October.

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Purdue Online Writing Lab Purdue OWL® College of Liberal Arts

Organizing Your Argument Presentation

Welcome to the Purdue OWL

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This presentation is designed to introduce your students to the elements of an organized essay, including the introduction, the thesis, body paragraphs, topic sentences, counterarguments, and the conclusion.

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For and Against Discussion Essays (FADEs)

Learners working in English for Academic Purposes are not alone in needing the skills to write FADEs.  They are also important in business, education, government and other fields where the ability logically and dispassionately to set out arguments for and against a proposal or situation is valued. The social sciences, in particular, value written, balanced arguments. For this reason, this guide is linked from both the EAP sections and the general skills and discourse indexes.

It is important to be clear about what FADEs are not.  They are not:

• Expositions which require the writer to set out one side of an argument and attempt to persuade the reader of a point of view.
• Reports which require the writer to set out facts in logical stages with some discussion of each.
• Problem-Solution texts which require the writer to set out the problems and suggest solutions for each which are evaluated in terms of effectiveness, advantages and drawbacks.

Confusing the text types will bewilder learners.

All texts have purposes.  One definition of genre is that it contains texts which share the same cultural purposes.  Discussion is no exception so we need to identify what exactly the purpose of a FADE is.  We will start with this definition of purpose:

to look at more than one side of an issue: to explore various perspectives before coming to an informed decision Butt et al , 2001:9

and unpack it a little:

• more than one side ... various perspectives : A common error in students' writing (and in some teaching) is to see dichotomies where none exists or even to invent them.  Few important issues have only two sides and there are shades of opinion and many perspectives which need to be considered.
• to explore : This requires the writer to identify, discuss and exemplify a point of view, not simply state it.
• an informed decision : so not a simple statement of a point of view uninfluenced by facts and research.  The coda (at the end of the essay) needs to refer to the facts that have been set out.

The result of bearing these three issues in mind is that an essay will impress the reader with the depth of thought that lies behind it and gets away from some people think X, some people think Y but I agree with Z .

This guide is ordered as follows according to the key skills that are required.  They cannot be taught in a single lesson.

• Organisation This involves the knowledge, some of it cultural, of the conventional staging of information in a FADE.
• using appropriate verbal processes
• selecting appropriate tense structures
• using lexis concerning the register
• syntax and punctuation
• knowing who will read the text
• selecting an appropriate style (tenor)
• content knowledge (field)

We'll take the sections one at a time.

The staging of a discussion in English (not necessarily in the languages of other cultures) is, on the face of it, quite simple.  It comes in two basic options:

The first and last stages are common to both forms and, in fact, the last, the Coda, is often optional.  The other stages are not.

A classic error is to mix the structures and, for example, start with structure 1 and give a bunch of arguments for and then confuse the reader by transitioning to structure 2 and mix the points up.  That disconcerts, disorientates and displeases.

We can break all this down and exemplify what is meant.  As an example, we will take a topic in a field in which there are few technical terms and special registers to be considered.

Only at very low levels should this be a one-sentence section.  It involves two parts and each should be properly refined and defined:

• The particular topic of the essay needs, of course, to be stated clearly both in the title and the introductory paragraph but then the issue has to be set in its wider context and properly defined.
• The importance of the issue has to be stated in general terms and then has to be further refined to set out what is meant by importance: to whom, in what circumstances, says who?

Here's an example of the introduction to a FADE of the pros and cons of allowing smoking in public spaces:

This essay concerns whether smoking should be allowed in public spaces and attempts to set out the arguments that have been proposed for and against permitting it.  This is a social, legal and public health issue and in what follows these aspects of the subject will be taken in turn. For the purposes of this essay, public spaces are defined as any areas outside private homes which are open to the public either free of charge or on payment of an entrance fee.  It includes, therefore, open spaces, shops, bars, public houses, services and utilities such as airports and train stations as well as public roads and streets.  Excluded from consideration are private spaces although consideration will be given to borderline cases such as hotel rooms, hostels, prisons and private vehicles. Smoking is defined as the use of tobacco in pipes, cigarettes and cigars but excludes other, non-smoking ways of ingesting tobacco.  Consideration will also be given to the recent development of e-cigarettes. The issue is important for three reasons. Firstly, there are public health concerns regarding the use of tobacco and its effects both on individuals and those around them.  This includes the resources devoted to the care of those whose illnesses may have been caused or exacerbated by smoking. Secondly, it is a social issue in which the rights of individuals need to be balanced against the rights of others and society as a whole. Thirdly, it is a legal and ethical issue insofar as it concerns the extent to which the law should be used as a social engineering tool to encourage, enforce or prohibit the activities of individuals.

This is a rather sophisticated introduction written by a competent user of English and learners are unlikely to be able to produce writing of this sort without a good deal of help and teaching.  However, such a text may serve as a model for learners to encourage them to say more than just what the essay is about and to define their terms from the outset.  A check-list is helpful for this:

• State the topic
• organisational
• public health
• industrial etc.
• What terms do you need to define?
• Give two reasons why the issue is important.

Given such a list, even learners at lower levels can begin to develop an introduction that is more than a title.

These lie at the core of the essay and should be carefully constructed.  If the introduction has successfully previewed the areas into which the arguments fall, organisation becomes significantly easier. The most important issue here is to avoid what has been termed spaghetti writing characterised by rambling sentences, short unconnected points or a stream-of-consciousness approach.  Good advice is to confine each argument to four paragraphs:

• the issue and examples
• the argument
• the evaluation of the strength of the argument
• the evaluation of any weaknesses in the argument

The damage to health that smoking causes is no longer seriously debated by health professionals and other experts.  It has been shown in numerous well-conducted studies that smoking tobacco has a range of detrimental effects including but not limited to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, reduced fertility and damage to unborn babies. For this reason, there are many who argue that an absolute ban on smoking in public spaces is required to protect individuals from the effects of smoking.  Banning smoking, it is argued, will reduce the amount people smoke, encourage abstinence and reduce the costs to the health care services as well as improving the population's overall fitness. This is a strong point because the costs to individuals and society can be readily estimated and the potential health benefits of a non-smoking society are also quantifiable in terms of health service, insurance and other costs. However, this argument relies on the assumption that it is society's right and duty to protect individuals from their own actions.  Extended logically, the argument might just as well apply to banning dangerous sports, such as mountaineering or solo yachting, boxing and even horse riding, rugby, judo and other contact sports, all of which cause thousands of deaths and injuries worldwide every year and all of which people take part in voluntarily despite the risks.  These activities, too, involve costs for health services and the emergency services whose members own safety may be put at risk rescuing others from the results of their own choices of recreational activities.

Again, only advanced learners are likely to be able to produce such a sophisticated text but, as before, such texts can be used as models to develop their own writing.

• State the field in which the argument lies (financial, health, social, legal etc.)
• State the argument clearly
• State the argument's strength
• State the argument's weakness

A coda may be defined as a concluding remark .  The word conclude , of course, also implies arriving at an opinion by deduction (not just stating a view) so the section needs attention.

Here, the job of the writer is to draw the reader' attention to the points which need to be emphasised and convince them that a just and fair conclusion has been arrived at by weighing the facts and arguments that have been identified. It comes in four parts:

• Identification of the main issue
• Identification of difficulties
• Reiteration of the strongest points
• Statement of view

Here's an example to treat in the same way as the previous ones.  It's more than can be expected of all but the strongest students but would serve as a model.

Whether smoking should be banned in all public spaces is by no means an easy issue to determine. Firstly, there is a tension between the public and private spheres regarding the extent to which the rights of smokers may be subordinated to the rights of others to breath clean air. Secondly, there is the issue of social costs and how far only one type of potentially dangerous voluntary activity should be controlled because of the costs that may be involved to society as a whole. Thirdly, there is the ethical issue of how far the law should be involved in the private decisions and choices of individuals. Arguments on both sides have merits and there are many intermediate points of view that lie between no control at all and an outright, universal ban. On balance, it seems that the costs to society and to the health of its members are more important than the respect we owe to allowing individuals to make informed choices concerning their own lives.  Smoking is not an activity which only affects the smoker.  Others are affected by the degradation of their surroundings, damage to their own health and costs to society as a whole to which all taxpayers contribute. A reasonable position to take, advocated here, is to limit smoking in circumstances which most affect non-smokers but to allow individuals to make choices in other settings. This will mean banning smoking in enclosed public spaces such as shops, bars, cafés, cinemas, theatres and so on but permitting it in private spaces and in the open air where the risk of damage caused to others is either voluntarily run or negligible.

In what follows, we will draw on the examples already given to see what linguistic issues underlie the ability to construct a FADE. As it is unlikely that the ability to write a discussion is something you would teach to lower-level learners, we shall assume from the outset that the learners can competently produce acceptable syntax, control most of the tense structures of English, can make passive and active voice sentences and use a range of conjunction. We shall not assume that they are familiar with complex pre- and post-modification or the large range of discoursal features that are needed in a FADE.

Here's one short paragraph from the example used above:

The damage to health that smoking causes is no longer seriously debated by health professionals and other experts.  It has been shown in numerous well-conducted studies that smoking tobacco has a range of detrimental effects including but not limited to cancer, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory illnesses, reduced fertility and damage to unborn babies. 

The first sentence in this section is, structurally, about as simple as we get in English and akin to, for example:     The book is published because it consists of a subject, a copular verb and an attribute.  The fact that the attribute is a participle so the sentence is also analysable as a passive is actually not very important.  It breaks down like this:

and we can do exactly the same to the longer, apparently more complex sentence, like this:

A feature of many academic texts and of FADEs in particular is that noun, verb and adjective phrases often contain a good deal of pre- and post-modification to make the expression of the data more concise and accessible.  We can of course, avoid most of this with shorter, less informative sentences and could produce a paragraph such as:

Smoking causes damage to health.  The damage used to be debated.  The damage is not debated now.  Health professionals do not debate this.  Other experts do not debate this.

but the outcome is clumsy and inefficient.

A primary teaching aim is to focus, therefore, on how pre- and post-modification of items is achieved in English.  There are guides to modification elsewhere on this site so the point will not be discussed at length here.  See the links to related guides at the end.

However, to teach this kind of structure is not as hard as it may seem.  We can start with something easy, like this and proceed as suggested:

• Homework is useful Add a relative clause to say what sort of homework:
• Homework which is set by the teacher is useful Add an adverb and another verb to make a phrase:
• Homework which is usually set and marked by the teacher is useful Add an adjective phrase for the subject:
• Subject-related homework which is usually set and marked by the teacher is useful Add a prepositional phrase to say who benefits:
• Subject-related homework which is usually set and marked by the teacher is useful for school children
• Now add a conjunction and another clause to say why this is true: Subject-related homework which is usually set and marked by the teacher is useful for school children because it helps them to learn

Once learners get the hang of doing this to simple and undemanding sentences, they can revisit their own writing to see how to compress more data into each clause and make the writing more sophisticated and interesting as well as densely informative.

Once complexity is built into clauses, we can move on to how clauses are connected to make complex and compound sentences. Here is another example taken from the texts we have already used:

Firstly, there is a tension between the public and private spheres regarding the extent to which the rights of smokers may be subordinated to the rights of others to breath clean air. Secondly, there is the issue of social costs and how far only one type of potentially dangerous voluntary activity should be controlled because of the costs that may be involved to society as a whole.

There are three systems at work here: prepositional links, conjunctions and conjuncts and they need to be handled separately.

• Conjuncts Confusing conjuncts with conjunctions is a major source of error for learners trying to write formally.  They are superficially attractive because their use is often a sign of sophisticated writing but they need to be handled with some care.  Errors such as:     *The problem is severe moreover it is difficult to solve     *The problem is severe.  Although it is not difficult to solve. are common outcomes of confusing conjunct with conjunction. Examples of conjunct use from above are:     Secondly, there is the issue of social costs     On balance, it seems that     For this reason, there are many     However, this argument relies on Conjuncts expressing the following concepts are frequently needed in FADEs:

It should be emphasised that teaching this kind of idea linking should precede the demand for learners to produce fully finished essays.

Here we are on simpler ground.

The following sorts of verbal processes are common to many differently focused FADEs.

• Existential: These are almost always introduced by it or there followed by a simple copular verb.  They are easy enough to deploy but learners often need help in noticing the need for them.  For example, from the texts above:     there are many who argue that an absolute ban on smoking in public spaces is required     it seems that the costs to society and to the health of its members are more important     It has been shown in numerous well-conducted studies that
• Relational: As the name suggests, these verbal processes link two items.  Examples from above include:     areas outside private homes which are open to the public     points of view that lie between no control at all and an outright, universal ban     costs to society and to the health of its members are more important than     Arguments on both sides have merits Setting up relationships between ideas is central to the role of writing a good FADE.
• Material and behavioural processes: These refer either to how people or things act.  Example from above include:     The damage to health that smoking causes     the law should be used as a social engineering tool     illnesses may have been caused or exacerbated by smoking      banning smoking in enclosed public spaces Which verbs learners will need will depend greatly on the topic under discussion, of course.  That they will need to deploy verbs relating to material and behavioural processes is not in doubt.
• Projecting: These refer to what people believe or say and are central.  Examples from above include:     no longer seriously debated     there are many who argue that     Smoking is defined as

Tense use is also predictably simple.

Almost all the verbs in the examples given above are in the present simple because the discussion involves a current situation.  Occasionally, the present perfect may be used to refer to a previous event that has significant present consequences, as in, for example:     It has been shown in numerous well-conducted studies that Otherwise, the simple present is conventionally used throughout.

Passive-voice clauses serve to distance the writer from the topic by implying that it is the action that is important, not who did it and that is conventionally how the tone of FADEs is achieved.  For example, from above:     public spaces are defined as not:     I am defining ...      voluntary activity should be controlled not:     The state should control etc. There are many more examples and if you use a model text as a teaching tool, it is worth taking the time to notice the frequency and effect of the structures.

Modal auxiliary verbs are used sparingly and generally confined to their function as hedging tactics or to express degrees of certainty.  For example:     Banning smoking, it is argued, will reduce a predictive use.     whose illnesses may have been caused a hedging use. Occasionally, usually hedged, modal auxiliary verbs of obligation are used but almost never ones which express absolute obligation (deontic modality, in the trade).  For example in

Whether smoking should be banned in all public spaces is by no means an easy issue to determine. Firstly, there is a tension between the public and private spheres regarding the extent to which the rights of smokers may be subordinated to the rights of others to breath clean air. Secondly, there is the issue of social costs and how far only one type of potentially dangerous voluntary activity should be controlled because of the costs that may be involved to society as a whole. Thirdly, there is the ethical issue of how far the law should be involved in the private decisions and choices of individuals.

all the uses are putative rather than expressing obligation per se . Modality in FADE writing is usually focused on the likelihood of a proposition being true.  That is epistemic modality and there is a link below which will take you to a guide.

Circumstances refer to concepts such as location in time or space, contingency, cause, matter, means and angle.  Many of these, including contingency, matter, angle and cause have been considered above under conjunction and prepositional links. However, the discussion would not be complete without some consideration of how adverbials and prepositional phrases in particular are used in a FADE.  Here are some key examples:

There is a guide, linked below, to how theme-rheme structures are achieved in writing.  Here it will be enough to consider two aspects only and we'll take this paragraph as the example:

On balance, it seems that the costs to society and to the health of its members are more important than the respect we owe to allowing individuals to make informed choices concerning their own lives.  Smoking is not an activity which only affects the smoker.  Others are affected by the degradation of their surroundings, damage to their own health and costs to society as a whole to which all taxpayers contribute.:

• The topic sentence It is not invariably the case that every paragraph in a well-written FADE will begin with a topic sentence to alert the reader to its contents but that is the way most texts work and, for novice writers in particular, a safe way to proceed. In our example, the first two word of the first sentence, the conjunct, to give it its proper name, tell the reader what this paragraph will do: sum up and conclude.
• The theme and the rheme The theme of the first sentence is the subject of the verb (excluding the hedging in it seems ).  That subject is:     the costs to society and to the health of its members and its rheme, which follows is     are more important than the respect we owe to allowing individuals to make informed choices concerning their own lives The reference to individuals is taken up as the theme of the next sentence with     Smoking is not an activity which only affects the smoker and that rheme, only affects the smoker , becomes the theme of the next sentence with:     Others are affected and so the coherence of the whole paragraph is maintained.

Simple approaches to teaching in this area involve:

• Recognition, noticing and analysis using cut-up paragraphs for re-sorting, jumbled sentences for re-ordering and so on.  The aim is to get learners to notice how topic sentences are used in the first instance.
• Giving learners paragraphs without topic sentences and getting them to compose something suitable.
• Analysing theme-rheme structures by tracing connections, underlining links and so on.
• Getting learners to write short paragraphs of their own and analysing them to see how (and whether) the theme-rheme links are working.

Short-term, the goal of learners' writing is probably for some kind of assessment purpose, either of their language skills or their subject knowledge and ability to construct rational arguments. The target audience is often, therefore, a single teacher or tutor rather than the audience one imagines for most essays in non-educational settings which may be somewhat wider. However, a long-term objective is to apply the skills learned in real-world settings for true communicative purposes. Possible audiences include, therefore:

• a teacher or tutor
• higher management
• policy makers
• readers of newspaper or magazine articles
• readers of technical or trade journals
• readers of academic journals
• website visitors to serious sites
• website visitors to blog sites (although few of these contain argued discussion, normally being just unsupported bluster)

The nature of the audience will determine a number of issues and can affect the choice of lexis as well as the choice of grammatical structures.  For example:

Writing well in this genre is not achievable overnight or in a lesson or two. Teaching demands consistency in planning and delivery over a series of lessons with sensible and achievable tasks to be accomplished along the way. You may decide, based on your reading, the nature of the learners and your own propensities, to adopt a product, process or genre approach to teaching writing skills but whichever approach you take, you will almost certainly have to find or compose model texts which can be drawn on for examples of the language that needs to be used.  There are examples which you are welcome to use above. An outline syllabus might appear something like:

This is by no means a simple syllabus to design because, although the general structure of FADE writing can be explained and exemplified quickly and will lead naturally to some level of coherence, achieving cohesion involves weaving together the seven issues identified on the right into a series of lesson focusing on the elements on the left.

References: Butt, D, Fahey, R, Feez, S, Spinks, S and Yallop, C, 2001, Using Functional Grammar: an explorer's guide. Sydney: NCELTR Burns, A, 2001, Genre-based Approaches to Writing , in Candlin, C and Mercer, N (Eds.), English Language Teaching in its Social Context . Abingdon, UK: Routledge Halliday, M, 1994, An introduction to functional grammar: 2nd edition. London: Edward Arnold Tribble C, 1997, Writing . Oxford: Oxford University Press

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• How to write an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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Table of contents

When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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Where Tim Walz Stands on the Issues

As governor of Minnesota, he has enacted policies to secure abortion protections, provide free meals for schoolchildren, allow recreational marijuana and set renewable energy goals.

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By Maggie Astor

• Published Aug. 6, 2024 Updated Aug. 16, 2024

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Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the newly announced running mate to Vice President Kamala Harris, has worked with his state’s Democratic-controlled Legislature to enact an ambitious agenda of liberal policies: free college tuition for low-income students, free meals for schoolchildren, legal recreational marijuana and protections for transgender people.

“You don’t win elections to bank political capital,” Mr. Walz wrote last year about his approach to governing. “You win elections to burn political capital and improve lives.”

Republicans have slammed these policies as big-government liberalism and accused Mr. Walz of taking a hard left turn since he represented a politically divided district in Congress years ago.

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Mr. Walz signed a bill last year that guaranteed Minnesotans a “fundamental right to make autonomous decisions” about reproductive health care on issues such as abortion, contraception and fertility treatments.

Abortion was already protected by a Minnesota Supreme Court decision, but the new law guarded against a future court reversing that precedent as the U.S. Supreme Court did with Roe v. Wade, and Mr. Walz said this year that he was also open to an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would codify abortion rights.

Another bill he signed legally shields patients, and their medical providers, if they receive an abortion in Minnesota after traveling from a state where abortion is banned.

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