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CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Counterargument and Concession (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:

  1. To state the strongest objection to your own working thesis as fully and fairly as someone who holds it would
  2. To concede what an objection gets right before answering it
  3. To rebut or reframe with textual evidence rather than assertion
  4. To let a thesis be changed by the objections it survives

The Assignment

Purpose

Every weekly writing prompt in this course has asked you to consider a counterargument, and every essay will be stronger for having one. A counterargument only helps your essay, though, when it is the strongest objection to your claim. This pre-draft workshop asks you to state the best case against your own working thesis as fully and fairly as someone who holds it would, and then to answer it honestly. In the language of the Four A’s, this is the “Argue” question applied to your own argument. In Graff and Birkenstein’s language, it is “planting a naysayer” in your text (Graff, G. and Birkenstein, C., “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, W. W. Norton). This is a standalone mini-assignment, so it gets a counterargument ready for the upcoming essay without changing anything about the essay assignment itself.

Task

Write your response in three parts (roughly a 1-2 paragraph equivalent in total) and submit it through Canvas by the due date on the syllabus:

  1. The strongest objection. State the strongest objection to your working thesis, drawn from a course text. Find a passage that really does push back against your argument, and quote it with a page or line reference. Please give the objector their best line.

  2. The naysayer paragraph. Write a paragraph that responds to the objection in three steps:
    • Acknowledge the objection fairly, in language its author would recognize as accurate;
    • Concede what it gets right, meaning the part of your thesis it correctly limits or complicates;
    • Rebut or reframe with evidence, meaning a cited quotation that answers the objection, contains it, or shows why your thesis survives it.
  3. The closing sentence. One sentence on how your thesis changed once you took the objection seriously. It might be sharpened, narrowed, hedged, or legitimately reversed. If your thesis comes out of this exercise completely unchanged, you probably didn’t test it.

Criteria

A strong response quotes both required passages (the objector’s best line and your rebuttal’s evidence), concedes something real instead of something trivial, and closes with an actual revision of the thesis. The weekly prompts have been working toward this standard all semester, and this workshop focuses on it directly.

Formats (UDL)

You may render your response as prose, as a labeled outline (the objection; acknowledge, concede, and rebut; the closing sentence), or as annotated quotations (the two required quotes, each followed by labeled commentary), as long as all three parts and both quotations are present.

See also: Thesis Workshop and Evidence Workshop, this workshop’s pre-draft companions, and Four A’s Reading Response for the “Argue” question in its reading-response form.

Submission

Please submit a word processed or PDF document through Canvas by the due date on the syllabus.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.