Teaching Argument Writing with Frankenstories

"What do you want the audience to do, believe, accept, support?"

In a nutshell

• The claim is essentially the conclusion to your argument.
• It's the solution to the problem, the answer to the question—it's what you want the audience to accept by the end.
• Everything else in the argument is designed to support or challenge the claim.

Claim types

Different issues produce different types of claims (each with distinctive keywords):

• Causal claims: "X caused Y!"
• Proposal claims: "We should do X about Y!"
• Valuational claims: "X is a bad example of Y!"
• Definitional claims: "X is Y!"
• Ethical claims: "It is wrong to do X to Y!"

Going deeper

• While the claim is the logical conclusion to an argument, it can be presented anywhere—beginning, middle, or end.
• Any supporting statement, if attacked, can functionally become the claim for a smaller sub-argument.
• Even though any statement is on some level a claim, an argument usually only has one conclusion—therefore one main claim at the argument level.
• However, complex issues might involve multiple claims and arguments.
• A claim without a reason or argument is unsupported.

In Frankenstories

• The standard 5-round argument format has players make the claim in R1 and then back-fill the argument as they play. Part of the fun is going out on a limb.
• An alternative would be to frame the argument as an exploration of evidence and save the claim for the end.