A Summary of Written Communication Journal

    This journal entitled ‘The Uses and Complexity of Argument Structures in Expert and Students Persuasive writing’ was published by SAGE in 1998.  Joanna G. Crammond as the author aimed to identify the developmental features and characteristic weaknesses of students’ persuasive writing by analyzing their written text samples. In this observation, the participants are from the students from two elementary schools and one high school, and also seven experts well experienced in writing persuasive texts from 3 to 18 years.

     In doing this research, she sets up Toulmin’s Schematic as the general model of informal argument. This schematic is composed by Claim, data, a warrant, backing for warrant, a qualifier, and one reservation. The entire argument model is briefly represented as semantic network or conceptual graph structures. Taking a step to develop the argument model, formalism as The Argument Grammar is applied to represent the identified structures. As a result, all experts and students use at least one argument structure in their persuasive texts. They use one minimal claim, and most writers in all groups included at least one Subclaim, Constraint, and instance of data.

    Identification of argument substructures was based on the presence of specific semantics structures and linguistics devices. All texts, then, are described in terms of general semantic categories and use of conjunctive ties. Then the result of the detailed semantics and linguistic analyses facilitated the identification of substructures, other source are used to guide decisions as to the categorization of text as a particular element in an argument. Data presented in this study indicates that argument structure is the predominant organizational framework in both student and expert persuasive writing; it functions as a type of a rhetorical superstructure. From this rhetorical view, the overall frequency of embedded arguments in a persuasive text is seen as important since it reflects the use of argument chains, complex structure that can serve to strengthen a major claim.