Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Is Toulmin useful for freshmen?

While I think Toulmin does an excellent job breaking apart arguments, I have my doubts about how useful it would be to incorporate the jargon of 'data', 'warrant', 'qualifier', 'claim', and 'backing' into our English 1000 classes. I have the feeling that many of our students would be more confused than helped by this. Stygall's example of students learning to "see what data they were forced to reject when they selected one set of warrants over another" does seem like an effective use of Toulmin, but I wonder if it would not be possible to teach students the same skill without teaching them the technical jargon (386). Stygall also writes that "Comprehending and producing arguments in the real world has much to do with being able to envision underlying assumptions, the criterion Johnson calls 'supplying missing premises' [137], and little to do with mastering the given categorical syllogism" (379). I wonder if it is possible to teach students to look for the unspoken premises of an argument in a less complicated way.

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