Rhetoricizing an argument

Due date: Monday, April 15

You’ll work in groups of 1 – 4 for this project. Despite the fact that it involves
argumentation and mapping, this assignment is really a chance for your group to get
creative. You’ll see why momentarily!

This assignment asks you to do two things.

First thing: Find – or simply create on your own – an argument of moderate

complexity. As a benchmark for what “moderate” means in this context, consider the
anti-abortion argument discussed in the Course Notes “Argument, persuasion, and
enlightenment”:

Late term abortion ought to be prohibited by law. This is because it consists in

killing an innocent person: for late term fetuses are persons, and moreover innocent,
since they have not caused harm to any other person. And killing an innocent person
is murder, which obviously ought to be prohibited by law.

Despite this compact presentation, the argument has a non-trivial (if not very
complicated) map:

Reclaiming Argument, spring 2024

What we would like you to do is to work together to produce a similarly clean, clear,
dispassionate, rhetoric-free prose presentation of your argument, accompanied by a
map. In fact, a good strategy here is to construct your map first, and then use it to
guide your prose presentation. Bear in mind that the topic can be anything at all! So
feel free to get creative.

Second thing: Here is where you should get even more creative. The second thing we
would like your group to do is to produce a prose presentation of the very same
argument – but this time adorned, nay, festooned, with rhetorical devices. Feel free to
make use of signallers, insinuations, distracters, emotion-grabbers, burden-shifters,
fuzzery, etc. Try not to aim for camp; aim, instead, to employ rhetorical adornments
in a way designed to hide weak points, distract attention from possible objections,
appeal to your audience’s emotions in ways that will compromise their ability to clear-
headedly assess your reasoning, and so on. But at the same time, the original argument
should still be detectable in your prose – so that a really skilled mapper could, in fact,
extract out the very map you yourselves produced. As an example – not nearly as good,
we suspect, as what you will be able to come up with! – consider the rhetoricized
version of the anti-abortion argument:

It is a sad fact of contemporary American life – a sad and sickening fact, if we’re being
honest with ourselves – that those of us who see so clearly the sacredness of every
human life must do battle, in the marketplace of ideas, with those who, utterly
bewitched as they are by the false idol of “choice”, would condone the murder of a
human being. For what else are we to call the killing of an unborn person, someone
who has done no one any harm? Of course I do not claim that all killing is murder.
But only the crassest of sophists could deny that the killing of an innocent person
deserves any other name. ‘Ah,’ comes the response, ‘but a fetus is not a person.’
Nonsense. However much we might quibble over the exact status of a child too
young to survive outside the womb, there can be no basis whatsoever for denying
the rest of the unborn the status of genuine personhood. So – as a concession which
we must, perhaps, regrettably make in order to have a chance of success in our battle
– let us simply point out that killing a late-term fetus is surely murder. And having
grasped this plain ethical truth, it only remains to recognize that, as with any form of
murder, we must bring the full weight of the law to bear in order to prohibit late-
term abortion.

Once we have all the submissions, we’ll share them with the whole class. Finally, don’t
stress about this. Do a good job (of course), but also try to have fun!

Reclaiming Argument, spring 2024