Everything's an Argument

This chapter explores the following questions:

• What is an academic argument?
• How does a speaker develop an academic argument?

This chapter serves as a guide to writing academic arguments. Most collegiate and professional writing consists of academic arguments. These arguments base ideas on research and documented evidence, target a knowledgeable audience, use formal style, and follow standard formatting and grammar conventions. Though they rely on building logos, academic arguments also build ethos through credible evidence and extensive works cited lists. As an example, Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz present a Pew Research Center article that argues for the internet’s positive societal impact using statistics, polls, and surveys that add credence to the argument. Academic arguments also address a specific audience, not anticipating general readership. The authors illustrate this inclination with an abstract from a scholarly journal that uses highly scientific terminology. In contrast, an article on the same topic from a scientific magazine uses terms more understandable to a wider, but still knowledgeable, audience.

Even less technical academic arguments maintain formality, focusing on the topic rather than the speaker and using straightforward language.