Building an argument: title analysis
time to complete: 10 minutes
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:
- What are the keywords in this title?
- What exactly does the tutor want the student to include when they ask her to ‘discuss’?
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.)…
- First, the student should explore the relationship between the two topics (culture & conversational style). There are some examples of what conversational style could include.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
…and discuss the possible implications of this for intercultural (mis)communication and/or for language teaching.
- Second, the student should explore the relationship between the impact of culture on conversational style and one or two more topics i.e. intercultural (mis)communication and/or language teaching. So, basically the tutor is asking ‘What does this impact mean for intercultural (mis)communication and/or 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:
- What should people do to improve their intercultural communication skills?
- What should language teachers do to help students with their intercultural communication?
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).