The prewriting activities in this lesson will help you plan your argument essay—identifying a controversial topic, researching the issue, developing a position about it, and gathering reasons, evidence, and responses to objections.

Prewriting to Consider Controversies

Effective argument essays focus on controversial issues. A controversy is a subject about which people disagree. Facts don't leave much room for disagreement because they can be directly proven. Controversial topics involve the following:

• Opinions are personal preferences such as the best U.S. president or the most important qualities of a video game. One person states an opinion and provides reasons to support it, but someone else can have an opposing opinion.
• Proposals are suggestions about what should be done in the future. Since no one knows for certain the future outcome of any action taken now, proposals cannot be directly proven until after they have consequences.
• Hypotheses are explanations for how something might be working. They are "educated guesses" about what is going on. Arguments and experiments can provide reasonable support for them, but hypotheses only become scientific theories or laws after extensive experimentation.

You can think about controversies locally, at your school and in your community, or more broadly, in your country and around the world. What do people feel about the controversies? What opinions, proposals, or hypotheses are most commonly linked to them? One student jotted down the following controversial positions that he encountered at school, read about in local and national newspapers, and discovered on Google News.