Confirmation and Refutation

When you "confirm" or prove something, you give your audience reasons to persuade them that something is true, that it really happened, that it was a good idea, or that we did something the proper way or that the right people accomplished the task.

When you "refute" or disprove something, you give your audience or readers reasons that something is false, that it did not happen, that it could not have happened, that it was a bad idea, that we used the wrong methods and the wrong people.

It might help if you imagine that you are a lawyer and your audience is the jury or judge. When you "confirm," you are a prosecutor who is trying to show that someone committed a crime. When you "refute," you are like a public defender who tries to show that your "client" did not or could not commit the crime.

Although you may not aspire to become a lawyer, confirmation and refutation have many academic and everyday world applications. This exercise will help you evaluate behavior or decisions others have made. You will be prepared to argue whether political policies, decisions, and actions were helpful or proper. You will improve your ability to analyze and critique historical events. Finally, you'll be able to defend or critique your own behavior.

Essay Assignment (300 points)

Write a complete essay (introduction, supporting paragraphs, conclusion) that either refutes or confirms a past decision, event, or behavior. As always, demonstrate your ability to use the strategies covered in Chapters 1-5.

In other words, the fundamental question is, "Did X make the right decision when he or she decided to _________ ?" It may be "local" (i.e. something you, a friend, parent, or Grand Junction person decided or completed) or it can be regional, national, or international.

I've noticed that students really struggle staying focused on a past event or decision. Too often students will turn this essay into a version of Chapter 3 that uses a story to introduce a general topic. Do NOT use someone's decision or action as a launching pad into the general topic.

Instead, describe a decision or action and persuade us that that person who made that decision or took that action made the right or wrong choice.For example, if, say, you smoked pot in high school, then your task now is to persuade us that that decision was a good or bad idea at that point in time. DO NOT use your story to argue about the merits and problems of smoking pot. Just persuade us that you made a mistake or you did the right thing at that particular time and place. We don't care, for example, if you continue to smoke pot or if you think everyone should or shouldn't. All we care about is whether or not you made the right choice when you decided to smoke pot in high school. That's it.

Historically, students have written about their decision to attend CMU, put their mom in a hospice care, buy a truck when they were sixteen, buy a snake (or dog, or cat, or whatever), allow their daughter to attend a slumber party, run away from home when they were in their teens, marry X, have a baby, etc. Or, they wrote about American's decision to go to war against X (name a war), their son's decision to drop out of school, their husband's decision to change jobs, the city's decision to build round-abouts, their neighbor's decision to drive while drunk, etc. 

Again, the basic question to answer is, "Did X make the right decision she decided to ___________ ?" At the end of the essay, your goal is to persuade the reader that X did or did not, in fact, make the right decision at that point in time and place.

If you write about the present or the future, I'll return your essay without a grade, and I'll ask you to rewrite it.

As always, you cannot write about abortion, gun control, or capital punishment.