From Chapter 14, "Evaluation Arguments," in Kirszner and Mandell's Practical Argument, it was not a particular essay that stood out to me so much as two things I found when reading all the essays: the variety of structures that the different authors employed, and in most of them, a much more complex evaluation than I was expecting.
In this chapter of the text, they list "several options" for "constructing an evaluation argument" (Kirszner and Mandell 2011, p. 386). When I first read the chapter, all of these options seemed pretty clear cut to me; one can pass a positive or negative judgement, make a comparison, etc. Then when the book describes the structure for an evaluation argument on page 388, only one, very clear cut and organized example of structure is provided. While I knew that these were not concretely the only ways to write evaluation arguments, my mindset was relatively limited to these ideas when I began to read the essays about Harry Potter given at the end of the chapter. To my surprise, I discovered a different way of writing an evaluation argument in each essay, as well as main points that were much more complex than the "positive/negative" judgements I had been anticipating.
The element of structure that most stood out to me among the essays was the beginning(s). Each essay's first paragraph is written in a different style, none of which exactly mirror the typical introduction I have been taught to expect, with a clearly stated thesis followed by a blueprint of the evidence the author will use to argue their point. The first essay, by Kakutani, begins with a paragraph of sentence fragments describing the last Harry Potter book. While not the most sure-fire way to begin one's argument, this technique certainly grabbed my attention and subtly alluded to or at least transitioned into the rest of the argument. Webber started her essay, the second to appear in this section of the chapter, with an entirely separate section of paragraphs summarizing the plot of the Harry Potter series, then has a title before the "meat" of her essay begins. While the summary is helpful for those people like me who don't know much about the book series, without a subtitle (e.g. "For those of you who don't know the series, here's a summary..." or something to that effect) warning that the first part was not really an essential part of her argument, I did not really like it because it made me nervous that her whole essay was going to be filled with pointless details about the story. In his essay, A. S. Byatt gets to the heart of his argument more quickly within the first paragraph, but includes three (rhetorical) questions that, once again, made me fear that it would be more of a tiring questionnaire rather than a sensical argument.
The judgements or evaluations I expected from these essays consisted of clear variations of a statement to the effect of "Harry Potter is a great/horrible series." However, when I read Kakutani's argument comparing the Harry Potter series to the work of Tolkien and other world-famous authors, but not doing so in a very "1-2-3" style, I began to understand how a comparative evaluation argument can be made on a slightly more sophisticated level. Likewise, in Webber's and the other authors' essays in the chapter, I was not able to clearly identify theses that stated the authors' complete and direct opinions on the Harry Potter series, but through several different statements each author made throughout their essay, I was able to gather what they thought about not only the books, but literature at large, effects the books have on different groups of people, and even societal trends such as sexism.
The subtlety with which these authors communicated their relatively complex ideas about Harry Potter appealed to me, and I admire many of the choices the authors took in freely structuring their essays to fit their arguments, instead of the reverse. However, many of the essays without clear theses or end points stated near the beginning had me wondering why I was reading... whatever it was this "essay" was supposed to be, and where the author was going with it. I would be curious to hear what the authors would have to say about their writing if it were pointed out to them that their arguments lack clear beginning structure, which may confuse or deter some readers.
Works Cited
Kirszner and Mandell. Practical Argument: A Text and Anthology. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2011. Print.
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