Using Warrants

This is a direct quote of a page at:
http:/writing.colostate.edu/guides/index.cfm?guides_active=argument&category1=31m

Presenting Your Evidence

In your paper you must demonstrate why a given piece of evidence supports your thesis, claim or position. You must explain the reasoning process by which they are logically connected. (This is called the Toulmin method where the explanations are referred to as warrants.)

If I walk up to you and scream “Immigrants deserve rights” in your face. I am not arguing, I am fighting. However, when we stop to define the reasoning behind our statements, and attach those reasons to evidence, we are now in a position where someone might agree with us.

The Colo. State Univ. writing lab website, a leader in web references for writers, states, “First, for each claim that is debatable, or open to question, a reason is offered that supports the claim's validity. A warrant-consisting of a sentence or two-then follows, explaining the reason. Finally, evidence is supplied that supports connecting the reason to a given point or the overall claim of the paper.” Their organization is as follows:

Thesis, Claim or Position: Grading should be optional in non-major courses.

Reason/Point #1: Non-major courses are designed to help students become intelligent, well-rounded citizens. If the goal of such courses is the exploration and acquisition of knowledge, grades only get in the way.

Warrant #1: Rather than learning for the sake of becoming a better person, grades encourage performance for the sake of a better GPA. The focus grading puts on performance undercuts learning opportunities when students choose courses according to what might be easiest rather than what they'd like to know more about. [Introduces why proof is relevant to point]

Evidence: For example, students polled at CSU in a College of Liberal Arts study cite the following reasons for choosing non-major courses:

1. Easy grading (80%)
2. Low quantity of work (60%)
3. What was available (40%)
4. Personality of teacher (30%)
5. Something they were interested in knowing more about (10%)

Similarly, in an interview I conducted with graduating seniors, only two of the 20 people I spoke with found their non-major courses valuable. The other 18 reported that non-major courses were a waste of time for a variety of reasons:

1. I'm never going to do anything with them.
2. I just took whatever wouldn't distract me from my major so I didn't work very hard in them, just studying enough to get an A on the test.
3. Non-major courses are a joke. Everyone I know took the simplest, stupidest, 100-level courses needed to fulfill the requirements. I can't even remember the ones I took now.

Warrant #2: Although not everyone in the interviews or the CLA poll cited grades explicitly as the reason for choosing easy, irrelevant, non-major courses, we can read such reasoning into many of the less explicit references as well. Clearly, students are not choosing courses based on what they can learn from them. Yet they are fairly consistent in their choices: 100-level courses with little work. Although laziness might be seen as the cause of such choices, it is just as likely that choosing according to the amount of work, selecting simple courses, or only studying for the exam are a result of the GPA system. Higher workloads and more complex topics obviously could mean receiving a lower grade; thus, they should be avoided. [Demonstrates how proof leads to point as necessary conclusion.]