Practical Argument

by Laurie G. Kirszner

Practical Argument makes argument accessible by avoiding technical jargon and emphasizing how arguments are constructed and written in terms of contemporary issues students recognize and care about.

1061 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 6, 2015

Reviews

[Meltha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The problem I have with this book is one I have with a large number of composition texts: the structure is faulty. Students are asked to write a research paper early on in the book, yet aren't taught how to research, document, or even structure an essay until later. The process of writing a research paper is not something that anyone just naturally knows, particularly when it comes to avoiding plagiarism or knowing what to document and how. The entire book needs to be read before a single paper could be attempted, at least in a perfect world, but there is no way to do that in a typical semester. It has to be done simultaneously. Consequently, I was pulling the text to pieces, adding information, creating my own guidelines and giving them to students, and generally treating the book like a deck of playing cards to shuffle at will, which honestly did not work very well because there was no distinct, logical skeleton to follow and build on. Added to this, there seemed to be a conservative bent to the majority of the essays, which felt off to me. Finally, the section on MLA documentation practically sent me into a heart attack. Since when have rules changed for capitalizing the titles of newspaper articles? When did MLA drop the city of publication from book citations? When did they start using the abbreviation pp. for multiple pages like APA on the Works Cited page and keep the original format for parenthetical citations? What happened to using print or web after physical or electronic sources? Actually, what happened to web-based citations in general as they've changed the rules so many times that trying to figure out what to put in a citation is almost ridiculous. At least the price isn't horrible, but this book requires a tremendous mental workout and a lot of time to become usable.