Introduction:
This Week’s Lecture:
In this week’s lecture, we looked at the importance of building your argument and getting your voice across via your writing, showing the reader what you’re thinking, what your views are, and how you’ve engaged critically with the topic being discussed. This can all be achieved by building an effective and persuasive argument for the reader. A strong argument allows us to express our viewpoint and answer the question we’ve set, using evidence. Furthermore, our argument can help us plan the structure of our work and guide us to find the evidence we need to back it up. Most importantly, we need our argument to run throughout our writing, making sure everything we inclusive is relevant to it. Our lecturer followed this by showing us an example of how to establish and structure our voice during an argument, explaining why we chose those authors and why they differ.
Key Elements of an Argument Include:
- Statement of problem
- Literature review
- Precise focus of your research stated as a hypothesis, question, aim, or objective
- Method and methodology
- Results/evidence
- Discussion and conclusion (including implications for future research)
Our lecturer then showed us an example of a framework with a contention saying “Mobile phones should be banned”, weighing up the multiple premises and objections to see what the evidence suggests. So we understood more, our lecturer provided us with two videos to watch and gave us a few multiple-choice questions where we had to identify the contention, reason/premise, objection, and conclusions. Towards the end of the lecture, our lecturer notified us that we would be having a one-to-one review with him to update him on our progress and for him to see what stage we were at. This would be a great opportunity to express all the topic ideas we have, seeing his thoughts about them. This would hopefully help me finalise my chosen topic.
This Week’s Task:
As we have a one-to-one review with our lecturer coming up, I would like to conduct more research into the shortlist of topics I currently have, hoping to narrow it down further to probably a maximum of three topics. If I can do this, I would be able to pitch all three topic ideas to my lecturer during our one-to-one review, taking into account his opinion on each topic which could potentially lead me to have a topic set in stone.