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15.10: Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs)

  • Page ID
    109153
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    The chapters of How Arguments Work aim to empower students to integrate and apply chapter concepts in the ways described below.

    Chapter 1: Introduction

    • Recognize ourselves as participants in a larger academic conversation.
    • Explain how learning to write will help us academically, professionally, and personally.
    • See reading and writing as tools for careful critical thinking.
    • Identify the main claims of a text as well as the reasons that support those claims.
    • Identify any limits, counterarguments, or rebuttals mentioned in an argument.
    • Draw a visual map of the claims, reasons, limits, counterarguments, and rebuttals.

    Chapter 3: Writing a Summary of Another Writer's Argument

    • Write a thorough summary of an author’s text that includes that text’s main claim, reasons, counterarguments, and limits.
    • Choose phrases precisely to show the role of each point summarized within the larger argument.
    • Identify key similarities and differences between two arguments.
    • Write an essay summarizing and comparing two arguments that highlights what we can learn from their key similarities and differences.

    Chapter 4: Assessing the Strength of an Argument

    • Check arguments for common problems such as exceptions, faulty evidence, invalid assumptions, and inadequate treatment of counterarguments.
    • Identify insights in an argument that can contribute to future discussions on the topic.
    • Write a complete assessment of an argument’s strengths and weaknesses with a thesis that points to the most crucial ones.
    • Use precise and varied phrases to highlight the argument’s flaws and insights.
    • Distinguish between assessing the strength of an argument and offering an original idea
    • Generate relevant and original responses to others’ arguments
    • Demonstrate the ability to suggest an exception to an argument
    • Demonstrate the ability to extend an argument with an original point
    • Demonstrate the ability to suggest an alternative argument.
    • Understand a research paper assignment prompt
    • Choose, evaluate, and integrate sources from a wide variety of publications including academic journals
    • Narrow a research topic.
    • Use correct MLA format for essays and in-text citations.
    • Determine the purpose of an argument
    • Distinguish between definition, evaluation, causal, and proposal arguments
    • Explain what common questions will need to be answered for each of the above argument types. 
    • Describe the value of emotional appeals in written academic argument
    • Identify the ways in which a given argument appeals to emotion through word choice, tone, or powerful examples
    • Assess the likely effectiveness of an emotional appeal for a particular audience
    • Distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate emotional appeals
    • Use legitimate emotional appeals to support their own written arguments. 
    • Describe the value of building trust and connection in a written academic argument
    • Evaluate the effectiveness and legitimacy of an argument’s appeals to trust and connection
    • Use effective, legitimate strategies for building trust and connection in written arguments.
    • Write an analysis of an argument's appeal to emotion
    • Write an analysis of an argument's appeal to trust
    • Connect an assessment of an argument's logical structure to an assessment of the effectiveness of its rhetorical appeals
    • Give constructive feedback on an argument analysis essay
    • Describe how the visual features of an image can reinforce the message of a visual argument.
    • Describe the stages of the writing process
    • Identify strategies for annotation, brainstorming, outlining, and drafting
    • Choose what to focus on in revision
    • Give constructive feedback on a peer's draft
    • Evaluate and incorporate peer feedback.

    Chapter 12: Essay Organization

    • Write a thesis that summarizes the main point of an essay
    • Write a topic sentence that summarizes the main point of a paragraph
    • Introduce relevant specific evidence to support a topic sentence
    • Integrate quotations and paraphrases from other texts as support
    • Connect a new idea to a previous point or to the thesis
    • Introduce essays in ways that engage the reader in the specific topic
    • Conclude essays in ways that sum up as needed and point toward further questions or implications.

    Chapter 13: Correcting Grammar and Punctuation

    • Understand the value of being able to write Standard English in professional and academic settings.
    • Acknowledge the value of other English dialects.
    • Describe multiple proofreading techniques.
    • Feel empowered to look up, learn about, and fix a variety of common errors.

    Chapter 14: Style: Shaping Our Sentences

    • Recognize clarity as the first priority in academic writing.
    • Edit out repetition and wordiness.
    • Revise sentences to feature characters as subjects and actions as main verbs.
    • Use parallelism to create balanced sentences.
    • Employ varied sentence structures to make prose more engaging.
    • Feel empowered to decipher convoluted academic prose.

    15.10: Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.