There is a quote that has been passed down many years and is most recently accounted to P.T. Barnum, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Are you that sucker? If you were, would you like to be “reborn?” The goal of this book is to help you through that “birthing” process. Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas and making decisions are important in both your personal and professional life. How good are we at making the decision to marry? According to the Centers for Disease Control, there is one divorce in America every 36 seconds. That is nearly 2,400 every day. And professionally, the Wall Street Journal predicts the average person will have 7 careers in their lifetime. Critical thinking skills are crucial.

This activity helps students learn to be open-minded and to participate in respectful discussion using evidence and reasoning. These are great life skills that any citizen of the world should have. They’re also scientific argumentation skills. The ability to change one’s mind based on evidence and reasoning, to see issues as complex, and to look at issues and claims from different perspectives are all scientific argumentation skills. Students also learn that absolute answers rarely exist. These skills and understandings are useful beyond science for anyone interested in figuring things out and in talking with others about issues, particularly with those who have different perspectives and opinions.

A rubric in student language used by high school students to create an argument that meets high standards of quality.

Arguments in Context is a comprehensive introduction to critical thinking that covers all the basics in student-friendly language. Intended for use in a semester-long course, the text features classroom-tested examples and exercises that have been chosen to emphasize the relevance and applicability of the subject to everyday life. Three themes are developed as the text proceeds from argument identification and analysis, to the standards and techniques of evaluation: (i) the importance of asking the right questions, (ii) the influence of biases, cognitive illusions, and other psychological factors, and (iii) the ways that social situations and structures can enhance and impoverish our thinking. On this last point, the text includes sustained discussion of disagreement, cooperative dialogue, testimony, trust, and social media. Overall, the text aims to equip readers with a set of tools for working through important decisions and disagreements, and to help them become more careful and active thinkers.

These guides can be used as part of an anticipatory set to introduce persuasive writing and transition into claim evidence reasoning paragraphs. "Claim, Support, Question," is a "Visible Thinking Routine" developed by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.  

These discussion guides may be used as part of an anticipatory set to introduce argumentation. "Claim, Support, Question," is a "Visible Thinking Routine" developed by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

This is a discussion designed in Canvas to help critical thinking students apply their knowledge of argumentation and syllogisms.

This video discusses how debaters can set up their constructive arguments when debating resolutions of value. While written with IPDA and Parliamentary debate in mind, this video should be suitable for a variety of debate styles that utilize resolutions of Fact and of Value.

See also:
Refutation and Rebuttal in Competitive Debate - https://youtu.be/3rggu7MhRuU

Works Cited and Remixed
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Edwards, R. E. (2008). Competitive debate: The official guide. Alpha Books.
Hannan, J., Berkman, B., & Meadows, C. (2012). Introduction to public forum and Congressional debate. International Debate Education Association. http://falcondebate.com/wp-content/up...
Hanson, J., & Thompson, D. (2008, February 8). The Basics of What Happens in a Parliamentary Debate. West Coast Publishing. http://www.wcdebate.com/1parli/29basi...
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McPeak, I. (2016, September 26). Weighing Mechanism Basics Every Debater Should Know. Ethos Communications. https://www.ethosdebate.com/weighing-...
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A required course emphasizing analysis, argumentation, and research. Texts and materials will vary from section to section and will be employed as the basis for a range of essays. Successful completion of a research essay is required to pass this course.

Students will go through a series of activities using primary and secondary sources in order to answer the following question. "Is immigration a good thing?"

Welcome to composition and rhetoric! While most of you are taking this course because it is required, we hope that all of you will leave with more confidence in your reading, writing, researching, and speaking abilities as these are all elements of freshman composition. Many times, these elements are presented in excellent textbooks written by top scholars. While the collaborators of this particular textbook respect and value those textbooks available from publishers, we have been concerned with disenfranchising students who do not have the resources to purchase textbooks. Therefore, we decided to put together this Open Educational Resource (OER) explicitly for use in freshman composition courses at Texas A&M University. Thanks to a generous grant from Dean David Carlson of the Texas A&M University Libraries, this project became a reality. It is a collaborative endeavor undertaken by faculty in the libraries and English Department as part of the Provost’s Student Success Initiatives at Texas A&M and continues to be a work in progress. Combined, Dr. Terri Pantuso, Dr. Kathy Anders, and Prof. Sarah LeMire have over 30 years of experience in writing and research instruction. Our goal is for students to leave this course as critical thinkers, polished writers, and informed citizens who can engage in civil public discourse. Gig ‘em, Ags!

Introduction to Philosophy: Logic provides students with the concepts and skills necessary to identify and evaluate arguments effectively. The chapters, all written by experts in the field, provide an overview of what arguments are, the different types of arguments one can expect to encounter in both philosophy and everyday life, and how to recognise common argumentative mistakes.

This resource walks French learners through how to write a "dissertation dialectique", one of the staples of argumentative French essays. It includes an original example by a freshly graduated high schooler about ecology, a controversial and current issue that lands itself well to the exercise. This resource is designed for Advanced learners.

Students summarize and reflect on the implications of climate change and argue their perspectives on the issue after reading and viewing multiple sources with varying perspectives

This Open Educational Resource is a collection of texts and materials that team together students’ familiarity with sports and critical inquiry skills. Sports has an undeniable fascination for cultural studies scholars, and the athletic competition and the social conversations it elicits can help students to see how ethical argumentation plays beyond the walls of the ivory tower. The Politics of Sports, as a broad field of study, is of interest to both scholars and pundits alike. Through inquiry into sports, students can see how debate functions in both academic and public spheres. We have found sports to inspire a wide range of independent research topics in our writing classrooms that challenge students to engage with complex research questions that delve into the social structures that shape what we value and how we act as citizens. Sports is often central to the college experience and ubiquitous in families and communities around the world. The wide variety of audiences interested in sports the personal, economic, and social values tied up in sports invites research writers to think carefully about audience, community, and stakes of argument. We believe that The Politics of Sports has the potential to capture the interest of college students in order to excite them to begin a research journey with a sense of authority and investment in a topic that is at once familiar and complex enough to yield a wide range of inquiry .

This video covers the theories of refutation and rebuttal in competitive debate. Methods of using refutation in response to an opponent are discussed.

The first in a two-volume set, A Rhetoric of Literate Action is written for "the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, [who] now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing." The reader is offered a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward; a consideration of how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer's motives; and advice on how to bring the text to completion and "how to manage the work and one's own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively."

The second in a two-volume set, A Theory of Literate Action draws on work from the social sciences—and in particular sociocultural psychology, phenomenological sociology, and the pragmatic tradition of social science—to "reconceive rhetoric fundamentally around the problems of written communication rather than around rhetoric's founding concerns of high stakes, agonistic, oral public persuasion" (p. 3). An expression of more than a quarter-century of reflection and scholarly inquiry, this volume represents a significant contribution to contemporary rhetorical theory.

What do we know about the world? Rhetorical and Argumentative Perspectives is a book trying to answer the title question by contributing to rhetorical and argumentative studies. It consists of papers presented at the “First International Conference on Rhetoric in Croatia: the Days of Ivo Škarić” in May, 2012, and subsequently revised for publication. Through a variety of different routs, the papers explore the role of rhetoric and argumentation in various types of public discourse and present interdisciplinary work connecting linguists, phoneticians, philosophers, law experts and communication scientists in the common ground of rhetoric and argumentation.. The Conference was organized with the intent of paying respect to the Croatian rhetorician and professor emeritus Ivo Škarić who was the first to introduce rhetoric at the Department of Phonetics at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb.