User:Tylarsay/sandbox

Whereas theoretical arguments make inferences based on a set of principles to arrive at a claim, practical arguments first find a claim of interest, and then provide justification for it. Toulmin believed that for a good argument to succeed, it needs to provide good justification for a claim.

The Toulmin Method


 * Claim: The overall thesis the writer will argue for.
 * Ground: Evidence gathered to support the claim.
 * Warrant (also referred to as a bridge): Explanation of why or how the data supports the claim, the underlying assumption that connects your data to your claim.*
 * Backing (also referred to as the foundation): Additional logic or reasoning that may be necessary to support the warrant.
 * Rebuttal: Evidence that negates or disagrees with the counterclaim.
 * Qualifier: Words or phrases expressing the speaker's degree of force or certainty concerning the claim.

In Learning to Read, an excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X, referring to his experience of teaching himself how to read and write while imprisoned at the Norfolk Prison, states that he had become “increasingly frustrated at not being able to express” what he wanted to convey in letters that he wrote. He wanted to be capable of taking “charge of any conversation” he was involved in like Bimbi, a man of knowledge, Malcolm X admired and tried to imitate. With the phrase “...words that might as well have been in Chinese,” he, in advance, is supporting his claim (of value) “I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary – to study, to learn some words .” He then explains how he began copying the dictionary and reciting back to himself what he had written in order to retain many of the words definitions. He further supports his claim with the (Backing) statements “With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history,” and “I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying .” To express his degree of certainty (Qualifier), “Between Mr. Muhammad's teachings, my correspondence, my visitors and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life .” Supporting his claim that it was the best thing he could have done at that time.

His first claim (of value) is immediately followed by a claim (of policy) “I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship ,” with the supporting evidence (Grounds) of “It was sad. I couldn't even write in a straight line .” He uses the phrase “In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting,” to support his claim (Backing), along with (Qualifier) “It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed .”

It is not uncommon for any claim to be accompanied by a supporting sentence, or Grounds. Here are two examples of this from Malcolm X's Learning to Read: Grounds: “He had the money and the special interest to have a lot of books that you wouldn't have in general circulation.” Claim: “Any college library would have been lucky to get that collection .” And Claim: “Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me.” Grounds: “Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that .”

Claim of Fact: he sais that You can hardly show me a black adult in America - or a white one, for that matter - who knows from the history books anything like the truth about the black man's role. this is a fact most people at that time didn't know the trials and tribulation blacks had faced. he states he had heard about a glorious black history and he found no trace of it until a book by W.E.B. Du Bois called Souls of Black Folk that he could find anything about I time before the common one that was known.

Claim of value: “The world's most monstrous crime, the sin and the blood on the white man's hands, are almost impossible to believe.”

Backing: “Books like the one by Frederick Olmstead opened my eyes to the horrors suffered when the slave was landed in the United States.” Along with a book by Fannie Kimball, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and pamphlets of the Abolitionist Anti-Slavery Society of New England. “I read descriptions of atrocities, saw those illustrations of black slave women tied up and flogged with whips; of black mothers watching their babies being dragged off, never to be seen by their mothers again; of dogs after slaves, and of the fugitive slave catchers, evil white men with whips and clubs and chains and guns.” He read of the killings of 57 white people by Nat Turner and his 70 followers. “And i read the histories of various nations, which opened my eyes gradually, then wider and wider, to how the whole world's

white men had indeed acted like devils, pillaging and rapping and bleeding and draining the whole world's non-white people.” “I remember, for instance, books such as Will Durant's story of Oriental civilization, and Mahatma Gandhi's accounts of the struggle to drive the British out of India.” “Book after book showed me how the white man had brought upon the world's black, brown, red, and yellow peoples every variety of the sufferings of exploitation.” “I perceived, as I read, how the collective white man had been actually nothing but a piratical opportunist who used Faustian machinations to make his own Christianity his initial wedge in criminal conquests.” “I read how, entering India – half a billion deeply religious brown people – the British white man, by 1759, through promises, trickery, and manipulations, controlled much of India through Great Britain's East India Company.” “Over 115 million African blacks – close to the 1930s population of the United States – were murdered or enslaved during the slave trade.”

Qualifier: “In 1857, some of the desperate people of India finally mutinied – and, excepting the African slave trade, nowhere has history recorded any more unnecessary bestial and ruthless human carnage than the British suppression of the non-white Indian people.” “Not even Elijah Muhammad could have been more eloquent than those books were in providing indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every

contact he had with the world's collective non-white man.” “The American black man is the world's most shameful case of minority oppression.”