ARGUMENT ESSAY
Arguing a
Position
ARGUMENT REQUIRES A POSITION AND
AN IDEA
Format:
Take a position
Evidence (proper noun-Name, Date)
ATO- Address to opposition (refutation)(one sentence ATO) need to address opposition or you don’t have an argument
 Evidence
 Tie it to large idea
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 *Remember what good writers do -you have analyzed this in
the RA essays. What can you use to make your writing and
purpose ef fective? How can you use stylistic (rhetorical)
devices to make your argument?
READING THE ARGUMENT QUESTION
 2005-”Training for Statesmanship” by George F. Kennan
 Directions: The passage below is from “Training for
Statesmanship” (1953), an article written by George F.
Kennan, one of the principal architects of Unites States
foreign policy during the period following the end of the
Second World War. Read the passage carefully and select
what you believe is Kennan’s most compelling observation.
Then write an essay in which you consider the extent to which
that observation holds true for the United States or for any
other country. Support your argument with appropriate
evidence.
 What is the questions asking? (2 parts) + big idea why is this
important
KENNAN’S OBSERVATIONS
 Pick one and write an argument in which you address
the extent to which it holds true for the United States
or for any other country (convince us/why)
 Observations:
 Power diffused-power
 community
 Americans place extraordinary obligations of
conformity
 Americans need for conformity breeds oppression
 Police power-authority
PICK ONE COMPELLING OBSERVATION
Find evidence
Evidence from:
Current Events
History
Science
Film
One body paragraph is telescopic in nature (detailed) focus on
one evidence and expand
 One body paragraph is worldview -less detailed and more
dependent on dif ferent evidence and tying it together
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EVIDENCE THAT CORRESPOND TO
KENNAN’S OBSERVATION
 Position Statement: Kennan’s assertion that Americans
need for conformity breeds oppression clearly articulates
how we place unrealistic constraints on individual
members of our society, suggesting how these spill over
to our unfair treatment of others and other nations.
List six examples of evidence:
 Puritan Society
 The Salem Witch Trials
 The Study of Eugenics
 Japanese Interment Camps
 McCarthy Era
 The Mortgage and Housing Crisis of 2006
RESPONSE
 Americans historically have valued individualism, we are mythologized
as rugged individualists, but in reality as George F. Kennan, a principal
architect of U.S. foreign policy, notes in “ Training for Statesmanship,”
we place extraordinar y obligations of conformity on one another.
Unfor tunately, that need for conformity only ser ves to oppress .
 Some may argue that conformity has been one of our greatest
strengths. It has made a nation of disparate people -one. Our
pluralistic, public educational system guarantees that all members in
our society will have an equal and fair chance to an education.
 However, during segregation, blacks were of fered a “separate but
equal” access to education. Historically disfranchised minorities,
immigrants-the poor, weak , and downtrodden have been promised
equality through that great “equalizer” that is education. The great
equalizer has been more like a great enforcer demanding that Native
Americans sacrifice their religion and culture, that blacks submit to an
inferior standard, and that Hispanics acquiesce to standardized testing.
 Under the guise of this equality, of this promise to access, conformity
has been used by the status -quo to oppress. This practice still
continues today and we, the struggling working and middle class are
too easily swayed into Gatsbian dream of belonging, of ten with dire
consequences.
RESPONSE
 The pressure to conform, the force of community, has
historically led every immigrant to believe that to achieve to
succeed in the U.S. is to reach the American dream. This
unrealistic measure of economic success has led to the
demise of the middle-class. In the early 2000s, real -estate
sells soared, practically every American had achieved the
American dream of owning a house. Interests rates were low,
lenders were lenient, and hopes were high. But in 2006,
2007, the real-estate market crashed and sub -prime
mortgages imploded. What soon followed was a series of
economic corrections in order to save the banking system -and
that it did. The U.S. government gave bankers an excess of 25
billion dollars to clean up the mess they made. Meanwhile,
the average American defaulted on their mortgage loans,
banks refused to refinance -and again Americans defaulted on
their mortgages and lost their homes. The banking system
lost nothing.
RESPONSE
 The status-quo, our government, decided that who needed saving
was the banking system, not Americans. The working class man,
the middle-class single mother in an attempt to fit, to conform,
to achieve an equal measure as her neighbor, defaulted on their
loans and lost everything. This is the common plight of working
and middle class America. In an attempt to measure up to the
status quo, to the Joneses, to the wealthy, we have lost any
measure of equality that guaranteed our voice in society.
Instead, we have heard our Calvinistic ancestry lash out against
us and let us know that above all; it values wealth.
 Why aren’t we outraged about this? Why haven’t we like our
disfranchised forefathers called for economic revolution? The
answer lies in our need to conform. To a nation of immigrants,
finding common ground is important. There is comfort in
belonging. It is our ever growing need to belong, to be part of
the American dream. But like Jay Gatsby, we the downtrodden,
disfranchised, may find ourselves miles away from that other
half that lives across the bay.