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- In professional writing there is more than just your opinion or thoughts. Sometimes we in our head explain something that makes perfect sense to us, but to others it may not. This is why we use other peoples views. When writing academically you have to play both sides or you risk missing an important point. As Graff and Birkenstein say, ” –in the real world we don’t make arguments without being provoked.” We do not just start arguing without seeing another view first that we do not agree with.
- An argument always starts with opposing ideas. From a writing standpoint if you are writing an argumentative paper then you need to state the argument first. You need to set the reader up with both sides in order to give them perspective on why you choice your point. In high school, although I never formally wrote argumentative essays, we were taught to state our thesis at the end of the intro. Throughout the intro it was assumed that you would write all of the information you need to understand the argument in the first place.
- Throughout my own high school writing experience we were taught that quotes need to be in the middle of a sentence, with almost an intro and conclusion for each quote. Graff and Birkenstein perfectly describe this by saying, “To adequately frame a quotation, you need to insert it into what we call a ‘quotation sandwich,’ with a statement introducing it as the top slice of bread and the explanation following it serving as the bottom slice.” For a high school level writing class this is a perfect way to describe it as it gets you in the mind set to explain a quote that might otherwise make no sense in context. For quotation you need the intro to set the reader up to study the quote, and the conclusion to help explain parts of the quote that may not have been as clear as the writer may have wanted.
