Teaching Argument Writing with Frankenstories

While this lesson is about the conceptual building blocks of argumentation, you can't actually write an argument without context.

Presenting to the city council.

Contextual questions for argument structure games

Here are some key questions you might like to encourage players to think about before or during a game:

• What's the situation? (Council meeting, crime scene, medical emergency)
• Who is the speaker? (Politician, detective, doctor)
• Who is the audience? (Voting public, jury, patient's family)
• What's the relationship between them? (Trusting, adversarial, authoritarian, familiar)

The answers to these questions should influence persuasive technique—which is a topic for another lesson.

Resolving a workplace conflict on ocean planet Ursula-5.

General advice

• It's fun to invent the context as you play.
• However, it's worth pointing out the possibilities.
• If you want students to practise particular genres or registers, then you can specify the context verbally or within the game prompt.

Rousing the royal court in 1588.

Always encourage students to act as if the issue contested or mysterious

Arguments are generally more interesting when they have the opportunity for rebuttal.

Encourage students to approach the game as if the issue is hotly contested or mysterious:

• "Why is the traffic so bad?"
• How reliable is that report?"
• "What really will happen when the roads are turned into hedge mazes?"

(That said, uncontested arguments do exist—from explanations to propaganda—so they are worth exploring from time to time.

The Frankenstories prompt browser contains a few uncontested argument games as warm-ups.)

Classifying a mysterious specimen for the National Geographic Society.