Argumentative Synthesis

Argumentative Synthesis
6 sources minimum, 6 full pages minimum, not including the works-cited page 200 points
Final draft due by 10 PM on: Friday, March 12th

Assignment
This assignment is your chance to take a position on a question at issue and argue for your perspective. This work is, of course, an academic argument, and as such, it relies heavily on research and logic. Your job in this assignment is to participate in a conversation in which other scholars are already engaged and to inject your own thoughts. You should not be simply repeating what another person has said, nor should you be making your argument without taking into account what other people have said about your topic. You must synthesize other perspectives as you work to develop your own claim and argument; you are not arguing in a vacuum. Remember, you are participating in a conversation, and so you must understand the debate that has gone on before and connect your argument to that debate. You have already chosen a question at issue and developed a tentative claim in your research proposal; you must now develop your argument using all the writing skills in your repertoire—summary, response, synthesis, analysis, evaluation, etc.
You will be graded on your ability to participate in academic discourse, your mastery of conventions and style, and your critical thinking skills as demonstrated in your argumentation. You must meaningfully cite and synthesize at least six academic sources in your paper.

Organization
Exactly how you organize this paper is up to you and will depend on your topic and claim, but the backbone of your paper should follow the Toulmin structure for making arguments. That is, you should start with a qualified claim and reasons/evidence, uncover and examine your warrants, provide backing for those warrants, consider and critique conditions of rebuttal, and conclude your argument. How you organize your reasons/evidence, for example, is entirely up to you, but make sure the organization you use is logical and coherent.
Works Cited
Include a works-cited entry, on a separate page, for all sources you use.