Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Entry #2
The Claim present in the article provided in journal entry #1 was a claim of fact. The data was that our governement was covering up a conspiracy about 9/11. It based this off the grounds that we did not know why we were attacked that day, and we needed a reason to go to war in the Middle East. It was backed by a poll that said 1/3 of Americans believed this theory. It rebuttled it's arguement saying that the president's father had started a war in the middle east and this could be him working through his son's administration to finish the war that he had started over oil.
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Two things:
ReplyDelete1. You need to be careful to make the distinction between the claim of the article and the claims of people the article discusses. The article you refer to, for instance, does not claim that 9/11 was an inside job; rather, it claims that many people believe it was an inside job. This is a huge difference.
2. The Toulmin analysis should be more focused. It could be built around the following:
Claim: 9/11 was an inside job
(we know this because)
Data: gov't wanted to go to war in Middle East, and 9/11 provided a good reason to
The rest of the parts of the Toulmin model need to relate to the claim and data you single out. Right now, it's not clear where the poll fits in, for instance. (And authors tend not to rebut their own arguments.)