Writing the Rebuttal Paragraph

Writing a Persuasive Argument Essay

Argument Essay - Candy Bar Battle

We are doing a version of this activity - Twix v. Snickers 

6 paragraph essay:

Introduction
Argument #1
Argument #2
Argument #2
Counter-argument & rebuttal
Conclusion

 

 

Battle Bars -- The Edible Argument

An Educator's Reference Desk Lesson Plan

http://www.eduref.org/cgi-bin/printlessons.cgi/Virtual/Lessons/Language_Arts/Debate/DEB0201.html

Submitted by: Mark A. Schneberger
Email: markusschneberger@hotmail.com
School/University/Affiliation: Oklahoma City Community College

Date: November 20, 2001

Grade Level: 9, 10, 11, 12, Higher Education, Adult/Continuing Education

Subject(s):

• Language Arts/Debate
• Language Arts/Writing

Duration: 50 minutes

Description: This lesson can be used to teach the beginning stages of argument to high school or college level English composition classes. Students use their writing skills to describe how their group's Snickers are a better buy than another group's Kit Kats, while the other group describes how its Kit Kats are a better buy than Snickers. Students use examples of price, advertising appeal, ease of consumption, appearance, dangers, nutrition facts, feel, smell, and taste to support their topic.

Goals: Students will be able to develop a thesis statement and write paragraphs using appropriate forms, conventions, and styles to communicate ideas and information to an audience (for the purposes of persuasion and argumentation).

Objectives:

1. Students will be able to develop a thesis statement and two paragraphs which support that thesis statement.
2. Students will be able to write a paragraph identifying one opposing viewpoint and write another paragraph that attempts to challenge that viewpoint.

Materials:

• a 20-piece bag (approx.) of Snickers Fun Size candy bars
• a 20-piece bag (approx.) of Kit Kat Fun Size candy bars
• chalkboard or dry erase board and chalk/marker
• writing utensils and paper

[If your college disapproves of bringing in outside food items (those not sold at the often overpriced commissary), substitute homemade nut-filled cookies and chocolate chip cookies for the candy bars. If using cookies, modify the thesis statement to fit.]

Procedure:
Inform students that they are to begin a unit about argumentation. Find out how many students like to argue and how many do not. Tell them that they are going to argue about something very important today -- candy bars! Inform students that the class is going to be split down the middle, and students on one side will receive Kit Kats while students on the other side will receive Snickers. [ Author's Note: You may allow students to choose sides, but you must have (closely) equal representation on each side. Also, tell students not to eat the candy bars.]

Lay a candy bar on each student's desk, or pass the bags around and allow the students to choose their own. Tell the students that they need to imagine that there are only two brands of candy bars in the world -- the ones being discussed. Tell them that their candy bar is the best value, and it is their job to come up with as many "logical" reasons why their candy bars are the best value. Tell them not to consider that the other group is working on doing the same project for another brand. Rather, have them just focus on the question, "Why is my candy bar the best value?" Encourage them to work together to make a list of the top 10 points for why their candy bars are the best.

After they have come up with their lists, have each group elect a representative to write their 10 reasons on the board. The result will be a split board with Kit Kat best-buy points on one side and Snickers best-buy points on the other side. Next, have students vote on which of their side's three reasons best represent why their respective candy bars are the better value. Erase all the others. This will result in a split board with three strong points for each side. Then, tell the groups that they are to individually, or in teams of two or three, write a thesis statement which expresses the idea that their candy bar is the best value. Then they are to craft two short paragraphs of three or more sentences (the paragraphs must be linked with transitional expressions) for each point they've chosen for their side. While students are working, assist each group and view their progress. The result will be a thesis statement and two paragraphs which support it. Allow students to eat their candy bars if they choose at this time. (Sugar may help them write faster!)

After the paragraphing is complete, tell the students how important it is when arguing to be fair and to demonstrate that others may have differing opinions. Then, direct them to individually, or in teams of two or three, assume the position of the other side and identify what they consider to be that side's strongest point about why they have the best value bar. Kit Kat groups will write a paragraph supporting Snickers and vice versa. Encourage students to spend a few minutes in discussion with members of the opposing groups, so they can adequately explain and support their points. Kit Kat members will solicit information from Snickers members and vice versa. While they are working, assist each group and view their progress. The result will be one paragraph, linked to the first two, which demonstrates the opposing position. If students request an opposing side's candy bar, allow them to have one (if there are ones left) to eat.

Finally, explain to students that their job after identifying a strong differing opinion is to directly and convincingly challenge it. Using what they know about candy bars, nutrition, packaging, and logic, they must try to construct one short paragraph (including transitional element) to disprove the other side. Kit Kats will challenge Snickers' strongest point and vice versa. While students are working, assist each group and view their progress. The result will be one challenge paragraph linked to the previous three paragraphs. Encourage students to share their completed paragraphs.

Assessment: Collect students' paragraphs to assess completeness and students' ability to logically demonstrate argumentation in writing.

Special Comments: If you have further questions about this lesson plan, which uses food as a base for understanding, please do not hesitate to contact: Mark A. Schneberger, Adjunct Professor of English, Oklahoma City Community College.

Get Real: An Introduction to Realism in American Literature

Bildungsroman

Compare and Contrast Essay

 After finishing the novel, we watched "The Hunger Games"  movie in class, and then the students were assigned a 5-paragraph point-by-point compare/contrast essay showing 3 differences between the movie and book, giving their opinion about why they thought those 3 things were changed.

A comparison essay gives similarities between two things, or similarities and differences.
A contrast essay gives only differences.

A Venn diagram is the traditional starting point for comparing and contrasting two things.

There are two ways to approach a compare or contrast essay.  A point-by-point essay takes one point at a time, addressing it from both sides, before going to the next point.  The subject-by-subject method discusses all the points of one side (book)  in one paragraph, and then all the points of the other side (movie) in the next paragraph. If writing a compare AND contrast essay, all the comparisons (similarities) could be made first, followed by all the contrasts (differences).
This pdf document gives a simple template for both a point-by-point compare/ contrast essay and a subject-by-subject (or block method) essay.
https://www.sbcc.edu/clrc/files/wl/downloads/WritingaCompareContrastEssay.pdf

Some words to use in a compare/contrast essay:

• similarly
• likewise
• in addition to
• just as
• however
• in contrast to
• on the other hand
• unlike

Huckleberry Finn - Temporal and Physical Setting

 Temporal Setting :  "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" takes place in the mid-1800's, prior to the Civil War. The United States at that time was divided into slave states and free states, and there was great debate over whether territories and new states should allow slavery or not.

Physical Setting:   The story begins in St.Petersburg (Hannibal), Missouri, and then progresses to the Mississippi River and points along the way, down into Arkansas.  The River features prominently throughout the story.

Conflict in Literature

Mini BIO - Mark Twain

Introduction to Satire

The Great Conversation: "Why Literature? The Case for Huckleberry Finn"

The article below is copied from Crosswalk.com, and originally published in the February 2012 issue of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine.
http://www.crosswalk.com/family/homeschool/encouragement/why-literature-the-case-for-huckleberry-finn.html


Parents often ask my wife Missy and me why we give classic literature such a prominent place in our curriculum. We live in a math/science world, after all. I think it’s fitting that my answer usually takes the form of a story...

When I was a boy, I loved Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I read it a dozen times. In my imagination, I camped on Jackson’s Island a thousand nights, glided down the Mississippi on a thousand log rafts, and outwitted crooks in a thousand daring escapes. The atmosphere of the book was intoxicating to me—it seemed that Huck lived the ultimate summer vacation, and I wanted to live it with him. One summer I even convinced my friends to help me build a raft and float it down the little river that ran past our house. Supplied with sack lunches, straw hats, and fishing poles, we spent a glorious vacation reenacting Huck’s adventures.

 It would not be an overstatement to say that I entered Huck’s world in my mind’s eye and lived his story in my heart. I recreated all its details as faithfully as I could. This was no English assignment; this was an adventure. I was not doing the work of a literary critic or even the work of a student; I wasn’t working at all. Absorbing Twain’s book wholeheartedly, without preconceptions, without designs of judgment or evaluation, I was reading to experience, the way a hungry man eats. I wanted to see through Huck’s eyes, to be in his world—and I did, and I was.

In his wonderful book An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis says that this is one of the great powers of literature, a power that it shares with only a handful of art forms: the ability to multiply our experience, to draw us into foreign worlds and allow us to experience them from the safety of our own. “My own eyes are not enough for me,” Lewis says. “I will see through those of others.” I would not have put it in those words as a boy, but I remember feeling that hunger for a broader experience.

As I grew up, I never stopped reading Twain’s novel. Every few years I went back and relived my old pleasures—and as I did, I noticed that the story had more to say to me each time. Huck’s world seemed to grow with me, to mature as I matured. I began to understand that Twain’s boyhood adventure story was merely the setting for a deeper, darker tale. Huck’s relationship with the slave Jim and the terrible choices it involved fell on me as powerfully now as the sunny atmosphere of the Mississippi valley had before. I moved gradually from a sensory experience of the story to a mental grasp of Twain’s theme and purpose. Twain had hooked me by the heart as a boy—as I grew up, he began to engage my mind and make a claim on my opinions.

 This is not to say that the sensory, setting-related pleasures passed away. On the contrary, they matured right along with me. I began to notice Twain’s wry, ironic wit in lines that had gone right over my head as a boy. I laughed out loud now, instead of just reading in wide-eyed wonder. I discovered that Twain was not only a master at weaving an atmospheric spell; he was also hilarious.

But I began to notice as well that behind the humor was a bitterness that had been invisible to me before, an argumentative stance toward his characters and their foibles. As I grasped Twain’s theme, I heard his voice more clearly and realized that he had written Huck Finn to grapple with a problem—to identify something deeply wrong with American society and to assign blame for it. He was making a case and asking me to take his side. As I learned my own mind, I found that I could not agree wholeheartedly with every point he made, much as I loved his characters and their story. But perhaps because of that love, the grown-up in me spent as much time and energy thinking about Twain’s argument as the child in me had spent reveling in his story. I was drawn irresistibly into a kind of discussion with Mark Twain in my own mind and heart, and found myself contributing to that discussion, drawing on my own ideas and experience.

 Mortimer Adler once described Western civilization as a “Great Conversation” about ideas, carried on between thoughtful people down through the ages. The Great Conversation includes contributions from everyone who has ever puzzled over the good life, human nature, the existence of God, or any other transcendent question. I came to realize that Huck Finn was Mark Twain’s contribution to this Great Conversation, and that my own responses were mine. By embracing his story in my heart, mastering it in my mind, and interacting with its themes, I was participating in a culture-wide, history-long search for Truth.

 Lewis suggests that this search is what makes us fully human. “In reading great literature,” he says, “I become a thousand men and yet remain myself...I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see...I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

This is the glory of literature: it makes the Great Conversation possible across the ages, between men and women from different worlds. It allows us to see with the eyes of others.

 I put literature at the center of the curriculum for my own children because I want them to “see with myriad eyes.” I want books like Huck Finn to hook them by the heart and engage their minds. I want them to imbibe the classics as children so that as mature thinkers, they will be able to contribute to the Great Conversation.

 Besides, we have a river that runs past our house, and I haven’t built a raft in a long time...


 Adam Andrews is the Director of the Center for Literary Education and a homeschooling father of six. Adam earned his B.A. from Hillsdale College and is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. He and his wife Missy are the authors of Teaching the Classics, the popular reading and literature curriculum. They teach their children at home in Rice, Washington.
Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally appeared in the February 2012 issue of The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, the family education magazine. Read the magazine free at www.TOSMagazine.com or read it on the go and download the free TOS apps to read the magazine on your Kindle Fire or Apple or Android devices.

250 Ways to Say "Went"

Huckleberry Finn and the "n" word

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - audio book

Commas

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice
By Robert Frost

  

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

We talked a little bit about this poem, and the imagery and symbolism of fire and ice in relation to The Hunger Games, with Katniss, the girl who was on fire, versus President Snow.  Fire represents heat, passion, love, destruction, cleansing, rebirth (think of the Phoenix rising from the ashes), life (the sun).  Ice represents darkness, hate, ignorance, cold-heartedness, cruelty, sterility, death.
 

Symbolism in Literature

Symbolism in literature from debbiewomble

Hunger Games Survival Skills

Plants in The Hunger Games

From Garden Design magazine, here is an article describing several of the plants prominently mentioned in The Hunger Games.  Several of them have very symbolic meaning in the story, including katniss root, evening primrose, dandelion, and rue.
Botanical Notables: Plants of The Hunger Games

Conciseness

"The goal of concise writing is to use the most effective words. Concise writing does not always have the fewest words, but it always uses the strongest ones."

Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab):  Conciseness

Top 5 Tips to Cut the Clutter  from about Education

1. Reduce long clauses
2. Reduce phrases
3. Avoid empty openers
4. Don't overwork modifiers
5. Avoid redundancies

Writing Concise Sentences from jadaniels