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

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To steelman the strongest objection to your own working thesis
  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 one — but a counterargument only earns its keep if it is the strongest objection, stated at full strength. This pre-draft workshop asks you to steelman the best case against your own working thesis and then answer it honestly. In the vocabulary of the Four A’s, this is the “Argue” move turned around and aimed at yourself; in Graff and Birkenstein’s vocabulary, 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: it prepares a counterargument 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 before the start of class:

  1. The objection, steelmanned. State the strongest objection to your working thesis, drawn from a course text — a passage that pushes back against your argument, quoted with page or line reference. The objector deserves their best line, not their most convenient one.

  2. The naysayer paragraph, in three moves:
    • Acknowledge the objection fairly, in language its author would recognize as accurate;
    • Concede what is genuinely right in it — the part of your thesis it correctly limits or complicates;
    • Rebut or reframe with evidence: a quotation (cited) that answers the objection, contains it, or shows why your thesis survives it.
  3. The closing sentence. One sentence on how your thesis changed after taking the objection seriously — sharpened, narrowed, hedged, or (legitimately) reversed. A thesis that emerges from this exercise unmarked probably was not tested.

Criteria

A strong response quotes both required passages (the objector’s best line and your rebuttal’s evidence), concedes something real rather than something trivial, and closes with a genuine revision of the thesis rather than a victory lap. Steelmanning is the standard the counterargument requirement in the weekly prompts has been building toward; here it gets your full attention.

Formats (UDL)

You may render your response as prose, as a labeled three-move structure (acknowledge / concede / rebut, plus the objection and 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 (/Participation/ThesisWorkshop) and Evidence Workshop (/Participation/EvidenceWorkshop), this workshop’s pre-draft companions, and Four A’s Reading Response (/Participation/FourAs) for the “Argue” move in its reading form.

Submission

Submit a word processed or PDF document through Canvas before the start of class.

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