Writing well is hard, typically much harder than one might have originally thought.  Keep this is mind as you write and revise your term papers.  This guide is meant to serve as a primer is how to write an argumentative essay well.  In particular, I will give you a general feel for how the structure of argumentative papers ought to look and some key tips for presenting different types of arguments.  By a paper’s “structure” I mean the order in which you present your ideas.

Here is one good general road map that may be helpful to ordering the key points in an argumentative paper (although it is by no means the only road map for a good paper): (1) your thesis, (2) key terms, (3) your main argument, (4) an objection to your main argument, and (5) your response to that objection. This is by no means the only way to clearly organize a paper but, if you order the components of your paper in this way, you’re off to a pretty decent start already. For the rest of this guide, I’ll briefly provide some tips for how to write each of these sections of the paper.

The first thing you’ll want to do in your paper is to write a strong thesis statement.  Put simply, a thesis statement is two to four sentences that tell your reader what you will argue for and how you will argue for it.  Since the thesis statement is supposed to make sure the goal of the paper is clear, you need to be very explicit about what your conclusion is and how you’ll reach it.

A strong thesis, then, needs to have three things:

1. A specific conclusion: tell your reader exactly what it is you’re arguing for. Be specific here. A thesis for an argumentative essay shouldn’t say things like “Such and such practice poses an ethical problem.”

2. A reason to accept that conclusion: give your reader the main reason you will discuss to accept that conclusion. When writing an ethics paper, you can often do this well by presenting a general moral principle that you’ll defend in more detail throughout the paper (see “Moral Principles” below).

3. Some initial details to support the argument: give your reader the main detail about the big picture reason you have for accepting the conclusion. In other words, provide some initial support for the big picture idea you’re sketching. For instance, you might give some brief reason to support the moral principle that forms the backbone of your argument.

This is just a big picture overview of what a strong thesis statement should look like. Click here for a more detailed development of these ideas.

Having a strong thesis is only the beginning of writing an excellent argumentative essay.  Now you’ll need to fill in the details of the argument itself.  Generally, in your thesis, you will have used terms or phrases that roughly correspond to one of the following three categories:

(a) terms that most people would be familiar with and there is no (relevant) technical way in which prominent/relevant authors have used the term,

(b) terms that most people would be familiar with but there is a technical way in which prominent/relevant authors use the term, and

(c) technical terms that most people are not familiar with.

You should always define key terms in categories (b) and (c) as they become relevant in the paper. More often than not, this will be at the very beginning of the paper (but perhaps not always). This can be done in a few different ways, for instance, by briefly defining a term early in the paper in terms that are easy to understand before defining it more carefully in a section very early on in the paper. For more detailed advice, click here.

In an argumentative essay, it is crucial to outline any crucial background assumptions that you will be holding/using throughout the paper. Explicitly stating relevant assumptions will both clarify the thesis narrow the scope of your paper.  Your thesis should tell you what background assumptions you need to make; not always explicitly, of course, but you can generally see what it might be plausible and helpful to assume for the sake of the argument once you’ve written the thesis.

There isn’t any hard and fast rule about what makes an assumption implausible, but there are some ways of narrowing down what assumptions you need to include.  When determining what assumptions to include in the paper, ask yourself the following questions about the assumption/claim you’re looking to include in the paper: 

(1)   Is the assumption/claim more implausible than the conclusion?  

(2)   Will most or all of my opponents automatically reject this assumption/claim?  

(3)   Will my argument work if this assumption/claim is false?

If your answer to all three questions is “no,” then you have a good candidate for an assumption that is both plausible and helpful for the paper.  I should emphasize that this is merely a rule of thumb; it is not a hard and fast formula. I work through this rule of thumb in greater detail here.

Many arguments in ethics rely on general principles.  Moral principles are, roughly, claims about how we ought, morally, to live.  Moral principles usually have two components, what I’ll call the type of moral principle it is and the scope of the principle.  There are a variety of types of moral claim you might be dealing with.  The most common types of moral principles are principles of:

(1)   Obligation (it is morally obligatory to act or refrain from acting in some way just in case just in case one has strong moral reasons to act or refrain from acting in that way and those reasons are not easily outweighed by other moral reasons).

(2)   Wrongness (it is morally wrong to act in some way just in case not acting in that way is morally obligatory), and

(3)   Permissibility (it is morally permissible for one to act in some way just in case that action is not morally wrong).

So, a moral principle has to tell you if an action is morally obligatory, wrong, or permissible.

Moral principles can be narrower or wider in scope.  You can think of a principle as narrower or wider in scope, roughly, depending on how many instances of that kind of action the principle classifies as morally obligatory/wrong/permissible. The moral principle “it is morally wrong to kill humans” is quite wide: it classifies a lot of cases of killing as wrong.  A wider principle governing the ethics of killing might be “it is morally wrong to kill animals.”

Arguments often rely on moral principles, so learning how to develop them is important . Here, I sketch some suggestions for developing plausible moral principles.