Molding Your Argument

Dr. Bruce McMenomy
for Scholars Online

June 9-August 15, 2025
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

For the summer, you will be arguing the cases both for and against a given position. It’s a bit like debating, though we do everything in writing. Accordingly, I’d like you to pick a topic that you find interesting, on the one hand, but that would not cause you any crisis of conscience in arguing both for and against. If you feel very passionately about something, or it’s central to your faith or sense of right and wrong, pick something else: it won’t work well for you here. We won’t accept topics like abortion or any of the other hot political and cultural issues of the day. That’s not because they’re not important, but because the fact that they are important makes them harder to deal with dispassionately.

Here are a few topics you might select (but you’re not limited to them). None of them is phrased to be specifically tendentious, since you’ll have to argue both sides before you’re through. Obviously almost anything you pick will require you to know something about the nature of the problem. Don’t take one for which you have only the vaguest impressions, or if you do, be prepared to do a bit of research:

The Macintosh OS is better than Windows.
Reading from paper books is better than reading from a tablet.
Homeschooling is better than public schooling.
Shakespeare is better than Shaw.
Star Wars is better than Star Trek.
Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) should be allowed to continue.
Greek is more entertaining than Latin.
Vergil is better than Homer.
Country-western is better than rock.
Classical music is better than popular music.
Organically grown produce is almost always better for you.

Here’s the order in which we’ll take them, by week:

Laying down the ground rules, terms of composition and discussion.
The five-sentence paragraph, pro and con.
The five-paragraph essay. You’ve probably run into this before now. Now’s the time to make it really formalized and under control. It’s still a fairly reliable standby for exam questions in a variety of contexts. pro this week.
The five-paragraph essay: same format, but from the other side. con.
The scholastic model patterned after Thomas Aquinas. Unless you’ve taken Western Literature to Dante here or some other course that exposes you to Aquinas, you probably haven’t run into this one. It’s meticulous, but a lot of fun. Mostly you spend time taking apart the opposition’s arguments. pro this week.
The scholastic model: same format, but from the other side. con.
The Roman juridical oration. Likelihood is small that you’ve encountered this either, unless you've read some Cicero, but it’s still a useful form to control. We will be adapting it heavily, since I’m not at all expecting you to produce something that would take an hour or more to deliver. It’s the structure we’re after. pro this time.
The Roman juridical oration: same format, but from the other side. con

All your work should go into the forum on the Moodle page for the week by Sunday night, so that the student designated to comment on it will have a chance to prepare the comment by Wednesday morning.