Professional Development Podcasts

Teaching Argument by Erik Palmer

About Eric Palmer

Veteran teacher and education consultant based in Denver, Colorado. Author of Well
Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students and Digitally Speaking: How to Improve
Student Presentations. His areas of focus include improving oral communication,
promoting technology in classroom presentations, and updating instruction through
the use of digital tools. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a
master’s degree in curriculum and instruction from the University of Colorado.

Transcript of Podcast
Think about the teachers who are responsible for language arts and English. If you lined
a hundred of them up in a room and asked them why they became teachers, you’d find
someone who said, “Well in fourth grade I had a teacher that made me love poetry.”
Or, “In eighth grade, this teacher really encouraged my writing.” They come with a bias
toward fiction, poetry, writing, so that’s what they tend to teach. This isn’t to criticize
English teachers. It’s just a statement of what is. You won’t find one of the 100 who
would say, “I wanted to teach English because I had this teacher who focused on how
to make a strong argument or how to speak well, and that’s what I want to teach to my
students.” So the vast majority of our classes are fiction and narrative focused, and we
don’t spend a whole lot of time on argument.

But the vast amount of reading that we’re going to do outside of elementary school,
middle school, and high school is going to be nonfiction. In the work place, no one will
ever say, “Summarize a chapter of this novel.” Or, “Fire off a haiku to our affiliate in
Bangalore.” Those things will never happen. So if we want to get children ready for the
demands of college and the workplace, we have to make them think a little bit more
about nonfiction, a little bit more about building a reasonable argument, a little bit more
about how to persuade somebody. And this doesn’t just apply to demanding jobs like
attorney or something along those lines. Hairdressers and landscapers will spend more
time reading nonfiction than novels.

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I just used the word persuade. It’s important here to point out that we aren’t moving
away from persuasion, but rather getting to the essence of what persuasion ought to
be. For starters, we have to define what an argument is because if you ask a student
what an argument is, they’ll think of bickering or a shouting match. We have to offer a
new definition: a series of statements that lead to a conclusion. The classic example is,
“All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.” True statements
leading to a conclusion, or formally, premises leading to a conclusion. Theoretically any
persuasion would be based on some arguments. (Additional information on syllogisms
can be found at the end of this transcript)

If you want to persuade me to save the rain forest, I hope you can give me some logical
arguments. For example: Rain forests produce oxygen. If we cut down rain forests, we’re
diminishing oxygen. Animals need oxygen; therefore, we shouldn’t cut down the rain
forest. Then what you do with persuasion is take that core, cold, logical argument and
add something that makes an impact – a call to action, vivid language — some way to
heat that up to persuade us to do something. So I don’t see a clear distinction between
persuasion and argument. Certainly we want to focus more on the underlying argument
now as we ask kids to do a persuasive speech or persuasive writing. But we also want
their communication to have an impact and effect.

What we have to do is understand the structure of an argument. We tend to start a

discussion or a writing with a conclusion. “We should ban large soft drinks.” That’s the
conclusion of something. We have to spend time with kids backing up from there. What
would that be the conclusion of? What are the statements that would lead to that?
What we have to do is force kids to think backwards. What reasons might have lead to
that conclusion?

We also have to teach them what makes an argument wrong. There are two primarily
ways that an argument can be wrong, either A) the premises are not correct, or B) the
premises are correct but they don’t add up to the conclusion. An example would be to
say, “All men are mortal. Miranda is not a man. Therefore, Miranda is immortal.” The
premises are correct. Miranda is not a man, that’s true. All men are mortal, that’s true.
But it doesn’t add up. To say that all men are mortal doesn’t mean that ONLY men are
mortal. Or the flip situation, “All men are tall. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is
tall.” Well in this case, one of the premises isn’t true. It’s not the case that all men are
tall. So it’s really a matter of teaching some simple things so students can understand
that an argument is a series of statements that lead to a conclusion, and there are two
primary ways we should evaluate those. Are the statements correct or not? Do they add
up or not?

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But how do we get students to do this—to lay out a logical argument? I think it’s the
same thing that teachers struggle with in fiction writing. It’s so common for English
teachers to say, “Add some detail. Give me some examples.” We encourage kids to
elaborate in the stories that they’re telling. We say to them, “It is not clear to me as the
reader what really happened at that soccer game. I don’t know what penalty kicks are. I
don’t understand the tournament format and how you got from the round robin to the
playoffs. I need you to elaborate and explain it because not every reader knows what
you know.” The same thing is going to be true with argument. You’ve got a conclusion
here, but now add some premises to this. Add some reasons that would lead me to that
conclusion. Let’s add some evidence that would back up those reasons to prove that
it’s happening the way you’re saying. It’s just a matter of pushing for elaboration, and
evidence, so that we have a well-fleshed-out argument instead of a skeletal statement of
a conclusion.

But we also need to remember that arguments aren’t only written. The odds are
overwhelming that any argument will be delivered verbally. Seventy-five percent of
all communication, by some estimates, is listening and speaking, and only twenty-
five percent is reading and writing. The vast majority of what we will do in a life is talk
to people. So the vast majority of all arguments are going to be presented verbally,
whether you’re presenting to a jury or persuading your mom you should be given the
car keys on Saturday night. That’s just real world. Additionally, it’s much more engaging
to do them orally. Many kids love to speak but hate to write. And we encourage them to
write by giving them meaningful speaking opportunities. When you have a debate or a
discussion in class where they can share arguments with each other and truly discuss in
some reasonable way, that’s highly motivating. I think the idea of writing an argument
almost has to assume that you’re writing it in order to say it later.

It’s even more motivating for students to use digital tools to showcase their arguments.
I’ve done a lot of work with teachers, obviously on speaking skills, but also on
ways to publish speaking, and effectively integrating technology is the number one
problem. They say, “It’s just so hard for me to work with technology.” But new ways of
communicating have to replace what we’ve been doing. You know how students send
the parent to Walmart an hour before it closes the day before the project is due to buy
poster board? The student makes a poster, shows it to the class, and then it hangs on the
wall until the season changes. Yeah, that’s gotta stop.

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That kind of project is turning students into time travellers. They’re in the present once
they leave our schools; but when they walk in the door, they’re back in 1980. We can
pretend it’s not happening, but it is. Outside, they’re producing on their own using
today’s tools, and it would be much more engaging for them to use those in class rather
than do the kind of stuff we’ve been doing.

When I started opening the door to letting students produce in a form they were
comfortable with, what happened was absolutely astounding. I worked with a child
who might have written that five-paragraph persuasive essay in a half hour without
caring but who spent six, seven, eight hours producing an incredible podcast with sound
and visuals. I have no idea how she did it. I didn’t teach her how because I don’t know
how to work the tools she used. But she created something that was a thing of beauty
instead of an essay that she had no interest in. Time after time after time kids came in
with movies, podcasts, incredible visual displays. If you open the door, they’ll all come
charging through and astound you with what they can do.

To really understand argument and persuasion, students need to be media literate.

Years ago when I started teaching, I was obsessed with how much television kids
watched. I asked students to take a look at how many hours the average child watched.
It was shocking. We looked at the structure of a television program to see how much is
devoted to commercials. We looked at the commercials to understand how they were
trying to manipulate us. It was a lesson in television literacy, and it completely changed
the way students saw television. Instead of being passive consumers of television, they
became active consumers. Now, of course, students have many more media inputs. To
effectively evaluate them we have to look at persuasive techniques, rhetorical tricks,
how images and sound are used to manipulate. Then we become much more intelligent
consumers, and more intelligent creators when it is time to fashion our own arguments.
As a side note, if kids are intelligent media consumers and intelligent thinkers perhaps
we can have a little bit better public discourse than we’ve been treated to for the last
few years.   

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The Syllogism
A deductive argument can be stated in a three-part form called a syllogism. The
first part is the generalization with which the argument begins. It is called the major
premise. The second part states the particular situation to which the major premise is
to be applied. It is called the minor premise. The third part states the conclusion.

Syllogism:
All sweet apples are ripe. [major premise]
This apple is sweet. [minor premise]
(Therefore) This apple is ripe. [conclusion]

If the major and minor premises in this syllogism are true, the conclusion is sound. It is
possible for a conclusion to be valid but not sound. A conclusion is valid if it is correctly
reasoned regardless of its truth. For example, the reasoning in the following syllogism
is perfectly correct, making the conclusion valid. No one, however, would accept the
conclusion as sound because it is simply not true.

All two-legged animals are human beings.

A monkey is a two-legged animal.
A monkey is a human being.

If you grant the truth of the first premise and the minor premise, your conclusion
follows with unquestionable logic—it is a valid, correctly reasoned conclusion.
However, the first premise is not true: not all two-legged animals are human beings.
Hence the conclusion is unsound, or false.

Testing a Syllogism
There are many complicated ways of testing the soundness of a syllogism, but for
ordinary purposes, you may test a syllogism by asking three questions.

Test a syllogism by asking:

1. Are the premises true? That is, has the major premise been arrived at
inductively from enough instances? And is the fact stated in the minor
premise true?

2. Does the major premise ignore any significant fact?

3. Does the conclusion follow logically?

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False Syllogisms
When you apply the three-question test to the following false syllogisms, you will see
why they are false.

All sweet apples are ripe. [major premise]

This apple is sweet. [minor premise]
(Therefore) This apple is ripe. [conclusion]

This syllogism is false because it does not stand up under the test of the first question.
It is not true that all ripe apples are sweet.

Red apples are ripe. [major premise]

This apple is green. [minor premise]
(Therefore) This apple is not ripe. [conclusion]

This syllogism can be shown to be false when the second question is applied to it. The
generalization (major premise) ignores a very significant fact, which is that some green
apples are also ripe.

All sweet apples are ripe. [major premise]

This apple is ripe. [minor premise]
(Therefore) This apple is sweet. [conclusion]

The syllogism is false because it does not pass the test of the third question. The
conclusion does not follow logically. It is based on a misunderstanding of what the major
premise says. The major premise does not say that all ripe apples are sweet.

The falseness of these simple “apple” syllogisms is easy to understand. Yet deductive
reasoning of the kind they illustrate is all too common. Have you ever heard arguments
like this:

Communists believe in government ownership of natural resources.

Mrs. Doe believes in government ownership of the coal mines.
(Therefore) Mrs. Doe is a Communist.

Here the premises are true, but the major premise ignores the important fact that some
people who are not Communists also believe in government ownership of coal mines.

An unsound deductive conclusion reached in this way is like a hasty generalization in

inductive reasoning. It is too quickly arrived at. We call it “jumping to a conclusion,” for
the argument literally “jumps” over (ignores) an important fact.

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