After several years of teaching at Columbia and two years of teaching Contemporary Civilization in the university’s Core Curriculum, I’ve found that students often share common difficulties in writing argumentative essays. Since I’m no longer teaching at Columbia, I decided to write up some advice that has proven helpful to my students in CC, many of whom were unsure of how to approach these assignments. Although I had CC in mind as I wrote this document, I imagine that my suggestions are applicable to courses in a wide range of humanities disciplines: certainly classics and philosophy, but even literature (for those of you in LitHum).
You can download my write-up as a PDF. Like the other content on this site, the PDF is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Feel free to distribute it to students and teachers alike.