February 20th: Midterms, HSPAs, and the usual Toulmin

Hey guys, it's Jasmine.

Today in class we got our midterm essays back - good news for some, bad news for others. Mr. Lazarow went on to tell us about the HSPA's, stressing the importance of not blowing it off (unless a HSPA class seems fun to you). Of course, we continued talking about the Toulmin model. Today's big idea was...The Warrant.

The Warrant is not stated; it's inferential. It answers the question, "How does the grounds mean the claim is true?". The audience supplies the warrant, which then connects the audience with the author since common ground has been established. It makes the audience feel involved, so they're more likely to agree or buy into the argument. Warrants are: chains of reasoning, unstated assumptions, presuppostions, general principles, widely held values, commonly accepted beliefs, and appeals to human motives.

Then we talked about GASCAP, an acronym which stands for 6 strategies used to connect the evidence and the claim. A generalization infers something of the whole group from a well-chosen sample (think polling). An analogy compares two contexts (but they have to be relevant and accurately similar if you want to convince your audience). A sign indicates a certain outcome ("When there's smoke, there's fire). We stopped at causality (not casuality!).

See everyone tomorrow (except the Model Congress goers)!