In our last lesson, we began defining the features of a high quality argument. This lesson will deepen this learning, enabling you to create a storyboard for your own argument.
Today’s mini-lesson focuses on a process that I call reverse-engineering. Watch how I unmake an argument written by a skilled author in the video above. You’ll find it here. Go ahead and read it, along with me.
Then, use this process to reverse-engineer an argument of your own, in order to create a storyboard that will support your next steps:
—Investigate a variety of different arguments in your own world, until you find one that you’d like to use as a model for your own writing.
—Read it, and ask yourself: What is author doing? Where? How? Document what you notice, as I did in the first photo below.
—Next, unmake the argument. Break it into bits. Cut it apart using scissors, if you’d like. Then, create a storyboard, much like the one you see in the second photo below.
–Finally, define what the author is doing in each bit of the argument, as I have on each index card situated immediately above the bits of the argument in my storyboard in the third photo. Ask yourself how the author is doing this, too. I added my observations about this to the remaining index cards–which are framed horizontally–around the margins of the storyboard in the third photo.
You’ve Finished This Lesson When:
- You’ve reverse-engineered an argument of your own choosing.
- You’ve created a storyboard that will support your next steps.
- You’re able to say you’ve defined the structure of an argument and the elements that support it.