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French
(Also: argumentation, argumenté)
Current French definitions of argument for students focus more on what it is not than on what it is: it is not a polemic, not an argument between experts, etc. Nor is it a personal perspective, an “opinion”: “…French academic essays are less subject to an “I think that…” than to a formula like ‘what might one think…,’ as much as we seem to require students to produce responses dominated by sincerity, good will, frankness…” (Delforce cited in Delcambre 1997, p. 24).
The most widespread definition is founded on the traditional definition of “argument”: argumentation as the presentation of two opposed theses or points, what N. Cordoray calls a “discursive confrontation.” The “good argument” is: the writer’s ability to manage this confrontation between two theses; the will to convince readers demonstrated by the progression the writer chooses (from a questionable thesis to a defended thesis); the structure organized by two distinct theses; the arguments founded on and grounded in examples; the disqualification of one thesis in light of the other, etc. (Boissinot, 1994, p. 36–37). These large-scale movements are supported by micro-developments: connectors (transition words), formatting, modifiers that indicate the writer’s degree of adherence to a given point, are analyzed in order to study the features of argumentative discourse and are taught as argumentative strategies.
C. Garcia-Debanc (1994) links the ability to argue to the development, in young students, of the ability to justify a response. Among the components of younger students’ arguments, she cites opinions, representations of scientific phenomena, and justification. But she is not talking about “justification” in its extrascholastic sense. Justifying can appear to be an act carried out by someone inferior iin position to the person listening to the justification—justifying taken as “justifying oneself,” with the possibility that the justification will be contested. When a student writes (in general or in order to show that he or she knows how to write, or reason, or argue…), this posture seems reasonable. Garcia-Debanc suggests that this justification is not specific to L1 French class: “in most or all of their school subjects, students are asked to justify their answers…” (1994, p. 5). B. Delforce, cited in Delcambre (1997), develops a similar distinction between arguing (putting a thesis out there and supporting it) and deliberating (discovering one’s thesis as one writes), in order to suggest that what is proposed to students in France is in fact a form of deliberation, although the students are supposed to know their conclusion before they begin writing (they write an outline, for example) but to not uncover the conclusion to the reader until the end of an essay’s written conclusion.
In addition, this response is generally already dictated by the assignment, which announces a thesis that the student is to support or to refute: the student does not have free reign to choose a perspective, a motivated point of view to “argue.”
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English
United States writing teachers (except those whose scholarship and field are rhetoric) tend to use the term “persuasive” more often than “argumentative” when discussing this particular form of writing. There has not been a recent renewal of interest in classical argumentation for the writing classroom (although there have been some great collections like “Teaching Argument in the Composition Classroom”). There has not been, of course, in the United States the change in national curricular standards to foster such a renewed interest, as seen in France.
Teaching persuasion strategies is part of the high school curriculum in many states and part of some college first-year writing programs as well. The persuasion essay, for example, has kept its status as a central form of school writing over the years. “Expository writing” class, often essentialized into a course in persuasion, remains key for college-bound students in many situations, although the way it is taught is far from uniform. A division between persuasion and narration is well established in secondary school: each form has its own rules and values, its own development, with the underlying belief that it is easier to write-narrate than to write-argue/persuade (we see this belief in France as well).
The key to United States school versions of argumentative or persuasive writing is that students are taught systematically to put their thesis statements up front (see, in this glossary, “thesis”). The very nature of a persuasive essay is thus deductive and not deliberative, although students are encouraged in earlier drafts to be deliberative, to “discover” their stance.
The idea of “audience” took a central role in US composition instruction early on. If in France the role of the audience is mentioned but rarely fully developed, in the United States any teaching of persuasive writing (and often even of writing in general) focuses on detailed analysis of the recipient of the text the student is writing. These analyses highlight the needs, the knowledge and the beliefs of the recipient as imagined (or researched) by the student writer, who is then to construct his or her text in response to these perceptions. The argumentative structure of the enthymeme is at the heart of this strategy, but the reductive (even caricatural) version taught is more like marketing than global awareness of the eventual reception of an essay. In this model, the student writer is supposed to be demonstrating a superior degree of maturity because he is able to take into account his audience. Certain composition theorists have wondered, however, whether the student who moves from writer-focused to reader-focused prose is actually making progress.
The phenomenon of rhetoric reduced to simple manipulation is, of course, not unique to the United States. But in France, the influence of new rhetoric helped to balance the discussion, while in the United States the new rhetoricians had little influence on composition instruction, other than with S. Toulmin’s work. In both cases, however, we are not seeing student essays constructed for Perelman’s universal reader, nor for an entirely individual reader. Pedagogical perspectives on teaching argument are often pedagogies of situational or expressive issues related to the student subject’s relationship with the theme in question. This means that these perspectives often connect to an explicit use of “I” or to the introduction of a student’s experience or point of view into the text.
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