In the first example, the writer displays contempt and anger for those who wear fur. In the second example, however, the writer maintains a calm, respectful tone and offers those who do wear fur the benefit of the doubt.
Do not show off
Whatever your topic, it is important to show the reader that you know what you are talking about. Carefully research key concepts and make sure to point out relevant facts. But at the same time, avoid being overbearing. Beating people over the head with big words and unnecessary facts is rarely persuasive. The line between competence and arrogance is a fine one, but no distinction is more important to the construction of a persuasive ethos.
Make only claims that you can support
The best way to ruin a good case is to try to make it sound like a great case. If you have evidence to support the claim that affirmative action has had a minimal impact on minority graduate rates, then say so. Do not say "affirmative action has not helped a single person get through school" or "affirmative action has been completely useless over the last twenty years with regard to minority graduation rates." Sometimes, it can even be effective to understate your case a little bit in your introduction and let the evidence speak for itself, as in the following statement:
In the twenty years that affirmative action programs have been in effect at institutions of higher learning, their actual impact has been difficult to ascertain, but they do not appear to have been a decisive factor in minority graduation rates.
Proofread your writing carefully
When a piece of writing includes shifts in verb tense, sentence fragments, and careless errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, readers make certain assumptions about the writer. They might assume that he or she is ignorant, careless, and uneducated. These assumptions may not be true, but they are nonetheless part of the ethos that the writer projects. Careful proofreading can eliminate basic grammatical errors that could seriously injure your ability to be persuasive.
ANTICIPATING COUNTERARGUMENTS
As you build support for your claims, try to anticipate the arguments that might be made against them. This will help you eliminate weaknesses in your argument that might prevent people from being persuaded by your claims. It will also demonstrate to your readers that you are aware of and have considered other positions.
To identify a counterargument, imagine that you were given an assignment to rebut your own argument. What weaknesses do you see that could become the basis for a rebuttal essay? If you know somebody else who can read what you have written with an objective eye and rebut it, ask that person to do so. Conducting research can also help you identify the kinds of arguments that have been made or are currently being made against the position that you are taking.
Once you have identified a counterargument, acknowledge it in your essay and respond to it directly. For example, if you are writing an essay about the importance of liberal education, one counterargument might be that colleges should teach useful job skills instead of a broad range of subjects. You could incorporate this into your essay by saying something like this:
Some people may object to the argument that colleges and universities should focus on liberal education on the grounds that they would better serve students by providing them with the job skills they will need after college. However, there are plenty of ways that someone can learn how to weld or enter data into a spreadsheet—internships, part-time jobs, seminars, classes at a trade or vocational school. There is no other way to get the kind of liberal education that a university provides.
The best way to thwart a counterargument is to qualify your own claims—that is, to eliminate absolute claims from your essay, such as "every student can benefit from courses in philosophy" or "nobody learns everything that they need to know for a job in their undergraduate education." When you make claims such as these, they can be refuted with a single counterexample—for example, "the philosophy course I took never benefited me at all" or "as an undergraduate my sister learned everything she needed to know for her job." It is better to avoid such absolutes and say instead that "most students can benefit from courses in philosophy" or "as undergraduates the overwhelming majority of people do not learn everything they need to know for their jobs."
Finally, do not be afraid to cut out any claim that you cannot support. If you have several strong claims and one or two that are weaker or more difficult to support, cut the weakest claims so that they do not give people reasons to reject your entire argument.
SYNTHESIZING IDEAS
W hile an isolated idea can occur to someone, more-interesting ideas—and, usually, changes in society, science, and scholastic thought—come from connecting several ideas. One name for this kind of connection is "synthesis." As the word thesis means a proposition, an argument, or a point of view, synthesis means a combination of different propositions, arguments, or points of view. One hallmark of a strong writer is the ability to synthesize ideas from multiple sources to form his or her own opinions.
Synthesizing ideas requires you to use all of the skills discussed in other chapters of this guide. You must read and understand multiple sources and be able to summarize them quickly and efficiently; discover how to discuss different texts in ways that are meaningful without being cliched; construct a claim—and in many cases a thesis statement—that asserts an interesting, arguable relationship between different ideas; and locate the evidence necessary to support that claim. This chapter will discuss some of the most common ways to synthesize ideas: summarizing multiple sources, comparing and contrasting, finding themes and patterns, and synthesizing ideas to form your own argument.
SUMMARIZING MULTIPLE SOURCES
Writers often need to summarize, as quickly as possible, what others have said before they can present their own thoughts on an issue. Most often, this kind of writing forms part of a response essay or a research essay.
Writing a literature review, or any other summary of multiple texts, is somewhat different from writing a summary of a single text. It simultaneously requires you to tighten your focus and to make connections between different texts. As you summarize multiple texts in your own writing, keep these suggestions in mind:
Be succinct and selective
The more you have to summarize, the less space you can devote to any one source. While a three-page summary of a single text will include quite a bit of detail about the main and supporting arguments, a three-page summary of ten texts can devote only a few sentences to each text. Choose the points that you want to include carefully, and make sure your wording is as concise as possible. Include only those elements of the text that relate to your overall purpose.
Construct a framework that leads to your ideas
Rather than simply stating the main idea of each text, construct a framework in which you can relate the ideas from multiple texts to each other, so that they all lead directly into your main idea. For example, imagine that you have been given an assignment to write your own definition of "human nature" based on the selections in this book by Thomas Hobbes, Ruth Benedict, and Edward O. Wilson. While simply summarizing each of these texts would adequately convey their major points, framing them so that they relate to each other makes the summary much more focused and concise, and allows you to synthesize them to form your own argument.
Those who study human nature frequently focus on the interaction between human nature and culture, questioning how much our inherent nature forms our culture—and how much our culture can affect our basic nature. For Thomas Hobbes, human beings are inherently selfish and aggressive, but our own self-interest can compel us to form cooperative societies and develop cultures. Edward Wilson, working from a modern Darwinian framework unavailable to Hobbes, makes a very similar argument. According to Wilson, evolution-shaped attributes very similar to those that Hobbes perceived in human nature—such as the desire to mate and the urge to defend territory—determine the way that we interact with others in society, which forms the basis of culture.