CRITERION 3: RIGOR (typical feedback: does not follow, not true, faulty logic, no proof, hasty conclusions, logical fallacies)
To download my handout on Rigor in pdf, click here.
A successful argumentative essay will genuinely convince its reader of something that the reader did not previously believe. In order to achieve that goal, the essay writer must use logic: a mode of argumentation that appeals to reason by presenting a series of proofs. Every statement in an argumentative essay must be provably, clearly, necessarily true; one unproven, irrational, conjectural, or false statement will rightly compromise the believability of the entire written work. There are multiple ways that you might use evidence to argue something true:
1. Present, or analyze, a quotation from (or description of) the subject on which you are writing. Provide a clear citation of the source of your material so that your reader can verify it to be true.
2. Quote, or analyze, something that a professional scholar has written in a peer-reviewed publication, making the source and extent of the quotation absolutely clear. (Note: You must evaluate the truth value of your sources with a rigorous critical eye. Professional peer-review is not a perfect system; if the source you cite is false or faulty, you are responsible for it!)
3. Using the evidence that you have previously provided as a premise, draw a conclusion that is necessarily true.
4. Using the conclusions that you have previously drawn as a premise, possibly combined with new evidence, draw a conclusion that is necessarily true.
5. Restate or reframe evidence or conclusions you have previously presented in a way that helps set up a premise for a subsequent conclusion. (Note: that reframing cannot change the evidence — only repeat it in a new context!)
6. Identify a logical inconsistency in the evidence or conclusions that you have previously presented — that is, a necessary conclusion that cannot be true unless some other necessary conclusion is false. Treat the logical consistency as a fact in itself, from which further conclusions may be drawn.
7. Identify an ambiguity in the evidence or conclusions that you have previously presented. Using a possible truth contained in that ambiguity as a premise, establish a conditional (“if... then”) statement that would necessarily be true. Then establish a conditional statement that would necessarily be true if the premise were false.
It is by combining those seven kinds of statement together that you can formulate a thesis about the humanities. As you formulate a complex argument, every sentence of your essay should fit — and fit tightly, without straining — into one of those seven categories. (Thus, any outlining you do during the drafting process must involve logical connections, not just coverage.) Professors usually expect that a thesis will determine the organizing logic of your paper. The word thesissimply means (via OED): “A proposition laid down or stated, esp. as a theme to be discussed and proved, or to be maintained against attack.” In short, your whole essay IS AND ONLY IS the thesis: it lays down an argument, proves it, defends it, maintains it, and that’s it (see Focus)!
People often conflate the thesis with the thesis statement, which is a succinct summary of the main points of your thesis (i.e. of your whole essay) — it’s like a map for your fully-formed argument, covering the main structures without yet filling in all the logic of how you’ll get there. The thesis statement usually comes at the beginning of a paper; a good one takes up most of the introductory paragraph. But it should be the last thing you write. You may guess, ahead of time, about what your statement might turn out to be – but you really can’t know what thesis you’re summarizing until you’ve worked through the fullness of your argument (i.e. your whole essay), so any guess must be flexible. I prefer to call that early guess a hypothesis – that is, a complex but flexible idea for where your thesis might go, articulated during close reading (see Specificity) and then allowed to grow and change. While the thesis statement is a summary for your reader, the hypothesis is for your own use in drafting. It might resemble the thesis statement you end up with, but if your hypothesis doesn’t change significantly in drafting, you’re probably not being rigorous. Read suspiciously: search more energetically for evidence that proves your hypothesis wrong than evidence that proves it right; let that evidence add complexity to your hypothesis.
UNTANGLE LOGICAL FALLACIES. There are other ways to convince a reader of an idea, ethical and unethical, but none that should be in an undergraduate humanities essay. We use the term fallacy to describe the manifold ways that an argument might twist, blur, sidestep, or simulate real logic in order to convince a reader of something illogical. Undergraduate writers often deploy fallacies without realizing it—most oftenthe straw man fallacy, which invents a specious opposing argument (often one that no reasonable reader would get behind) so that the arguer can knock it down, or cherry picking, which tries to prove an argument by ignoring evidence to the contrary. Simply reading through a list of fallacies, and pausing to make sure you understand why each one is fallacious, is an instructive experience: I like Wikipedia’s list, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.