You’ve decided what you’re interested in writing about, but how can you build an argument? Well, it all starts in the essay planning stage, and more specifically analysing the title/question you were given.
Let’s look at an example.
Task: Read the following essay title from applied linguistics and think about the questions:
Discuss how a person’s cultural background can impact on their conversational style (for example, speech act modification, patterns of turn-taking, silence, politeness, overlapping talk etc.) and discuss the possible implications of this for intercultural (mis)communication and/or for language teaching.
Now, check your answers with our explanation below.
The question has two parts:
Discuss how a person’s cultural background can impact on their conversational style (for example, speech act modification, patterns of turn-taking, silence, politeness, overlapping talk etc.)…
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…and discuss the possible implications of this for intercultural (mis)communication and/or for language teaching.
By using the word ‘discuss’, the tutor expects the student to write about the topic in detail and demonstrate different ideas and opinions about it, mainly by drawing these from evidence.
In a way, this is a written debate which will help the student decide her answer to the following questions:
This page was just a brief reminder of the importance of title analysis for the process of building an argument.
If you need more information on how to analyse essay titles/questions as well as more practice, feel free to visit our Coherence lesson (see Building an argument: further resources & references).