Generating and Structuring an Argument through Acknowledgment and Response

_{Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics.}

Students often believe that ideas and evidence that might contradict their claim will weaken their argument, so they either ignore such things or present them in a perfunctory way. This lesson models how acknowledging and responding to alternative views can help students generate, structure, and refine their arguments in a way that is both rhetorically effective and intellectually responsible.

Inclusion

The peer review activity in this lesson asks students to react as readers playing specific roles rather than as editors. This approach helps to ensure that students at different levels of writing experience and language mastery can participate fully and give useful feedback. Consider also training all students in peer review earlier in the semester.

Objective

Students will identify a range of different strategies for engaging sources in dialogue, structure their arguments around this engagement in both scholarly and non-scholarly rhetorical situations, and become more credible by considering the validity of viewpoints other than the one they’re advancing.

Key Terms

acknowledgment and response, current situation/common ground, problem/destabilizing moment, answer/solution

Timing

This lesson can be offered before or during the drafting process of the first or second academic essay in WR 120, as both papers ask students to engage at least one other source. This lesson can also be offered shortly after, or even alongside, a lesson on effective introductions because the terminology of effective argumentative introductions (current situation/common ground; problem/destabilizing moment; answer/solution) is also helpful in understanding acknowledgment and response.

Conceptual Framework

Students fresh from high school often organize their academic essays around a series of sub-claims that present firm and unrelenting support for their main claim. Some of them may worry that acknowledging potential objections or limits to their argument will make it less convincing. However, experienced writers regularly incorporate into their arguments acknowledgment, a treatment of differing viewpoints (cited or imagined), before offering their own ideas in response.

As Graff and Birkenstein discuss in They Say, I Say, acknowledgment and response can help writers to develop an argument by situating their ideas in relation to those of others. Imagining, exploring, and articulating the kinds of questions or objections others may have can help students refine their own understanding at the brainstorming stage of the writing process and to engage and persuade readers as they begin to draft and shape their arguments.

Kate Turabian encourages college writers to think of acknowledgment and response as another way to deepen their engagement with readers. She asserts that a written argument needs to be “a two-sided conversation in which you speak with and for your readers” (68). The body of an essay, just like its introduction, needs to take into account what an imagined reader believes, knows, and values. Encouraging students to view arguments as conversations can help them practice situating their viewpoints among those of others and therefore structure their essays in more complex ways.

Acknowledging and responding to differing viewpoints or interpretations is also key to developing a student’s ethos as a writer, perhaps particularly in academic contexts where questions about evidence and methods are so highly valued. Turabian acknowledges that anticipating the viewpoints of others in a particular field or discipline is difficult for novice academic writers. She responds with the suggestion to start by simply practicing the habit of imagining how a reader could see things differently. Building an argument through acknowledgment and response earns readers’ respect by convincing them that the writer has done the work needed to understand already available positions and takes alternative perspectives seriously.

Lesson

Genre Awareness

Acknowledgment and response occur in every mode of argumentation. Demonstrating an oral, creative, scientific, or graphic example of acknowledgment and response can emphasize the pervasiveness of this move.

Metacognition

The lesson asks students to reflect on strategies they have used in the past and to consider how responding to the views of others helped them form their arguments.

PART I: TAP PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Inquire about students’ previous experiences.
Initiate a class discussion about arguments students have found themselves persuaded by in the past, and why they think they were persuaded by them.
Ask about arguments they’ve made or have been required to make: what strategies did they use, and/or what strategies were they told would be effective? For example, students can suggest ways they would have acknowledged and responded to parental/caregiver concerns about having a later curfew or attending a party (by addressing potential dangers rather than ignoring them).
Explain (building on examples students offer) the concept of acknowledgment and response, and how it figures in to argumentation. Using Turabian or Graff & Birkenstein can help here.

PART II: ANALYZE MODELS TOGETHER

Present a model of acknowledgment and response in the genre that makes the most sense for your course wherein the author or authors clearly structure their argument as a response to the views of others.
Read the model as a class and discuss the argumentative structure in small groups.
Ask about arguments they’ve made or have been required to make: what strategies did they use, and/or what strategies were they told would be effective? For example, students can suggest ways they would have acknowledged and responded to parental/caregiver concerns about having a later curfew or attending a party (by addressing potential dangers rather than ignoring them).
Analyze together the specific language of an example (ideally chosen from the readings in your course) that displays different strategies for addressing others’ viewpoints in order to address the finer points of acknowledgment and response (such as dismissive and respectful acknowledgment). Examples of both from Mike Rose are included on this handout as a sample.

PART III: SEEK AND EMULATE MODELS INDEPENDENTLY

Ask students, for homework, to find an example of argumentation whose structure relies on acknowledgment and response (either from the course readings, or from any reading they do on their own) and write a brief analysis of it.
Discuss together, if applicable, how acknowledgment and response changes across genres (if one student finds an example in an op-ed, for example, and another student finds an example from a scholarly text).
Ask students to draft an outline of one of the sections of their paper using acknowledgment and response as the shaping mechanism. Instructors can select excerpts from these drafts to use in a future lesson.

PART IV: EXCHANGE FEEDBACK

Plan a peer review session, and group students accordingly.
Prompt students to respond to one another’s papers with different motivations (for example, as a skeptic or as a cheerleader) as a way to help the writer gauge the effect of the acknowledgment and response.

PART V: REFLECT

Ask students to identify “turning point” moments they had in forming their argument.
Discuss (as a class or in small groups) how the differing perspectives of others helped create these moments.

Variations and Follow-Ups

Alternative lesson ideas

If you would like to begin to introduce this concept before students have paper drafts, use whatever text students are going to be writing about and some of the templates in They Say/I Say for a brainstorming workshop. While this workshop can be conducted in pairs or groups, we recommend letting students begin it in class individually and complete it at home.
Another way of working with acknowledgment and response is by showing students some of the many, highly nuanced, ways of engaging with critics. This exercise can be completed individually or in pairs, at home or in class, and guides students through several possible strategies.
In some contexts, you may want to delay a focus on acknowledgment and response until students have already drafted their papers. Put the class into groups of 4-5 students and ask students to identify their most controversial statements in their papers, and also their least substantiated statements. Group members will write down (anonymously) responses to these statements, and students may collect them and begin to consider how to address them more effectively. Because students need a developed draft for this feedback, this workshop works most effectively between the first and second draft of an essay cycle.

Suggested follow-ups

It makes sense to revisit the idea of acknowledging the ideas of others in order to offer context and explore alternative viewpoints as assignments throughout the course change to new genres and to more complicated work. Doing this can be as simple as including a reminder in the draft process (“How will you acknowledge and respond to other viewpoints or alternative ways of understanding this topic?”).
Also, instructors can return to the idea of acknowledgment and response in the non-academic genre they assign. Instructors can ask students to identify how writers include or anticipate alternative or earlier ideas on the topic in a TED Talk, op-ed, artist’s statement, or movie review and determine how these forms of acknowledgment and response are similar to and different from those in academic arguments they’ve read and written.

Suggested flipped learning modules

Acknowledgment and Response