My Topic: The Online Sport Gambling Industry – I will attach my assignments from the Inquiry Presentation and Literature Review so you can see what this position paper is building off from (it is important you read these).

The Position/Stance that I would like you take: The Online Sport Gambling Industry and increased legalization in more and more states in recent times is overall hurting society. There needs to be more regulations and awareness surrounding this industry (use court cases and show the process of regulations to help develop this argument). Arguments should include dangers of developing gambling addiction; marketing techniques that are essentially ‘trying to suck you in’ (the overall purpose of the industry is for them to try to take your money). There will need more arguments that support this stance (those I mentioned are necessary however) 

– You MAY use as many sources, statistics, etc. from my Literature Review and Inquiry Presentation if they help the position you are making and would make sense to include in the assignment.

Full Assignment: You will compose an 8-10-page position paper (I already have about 3 pages) plus a Works Consulted page featuring at least 20 sources. (90% of these sources need to be scholarly (ex. Google Scholar Search Engine)). It is okay to have a few sources to not be scholarly (newspaper articles, magazines, etc), but a majority need to be scholarly sources (This is important).

Purpose: You have been working towards this essay all semester, gathering research throughout the term and considering (and re-considering) your position as well as others’ in order to determine the strongest argument or best course of action. Your work in this essay is to take a position within the debate that you’ve investigated and meditated on for a good deal of this semester. Your position should thus build on your work in the Inquiry Presentation, Research Mini Projects, and Literature Review.

Keeping in mind this course’s central interest in academic writing as a skill that enables civic engagement and communal participation, the goal of the position paper is to build on what you’ve learned so that you can now (finally!) take a position within the conversation and make a new claim within your issue. This argumentative essay will be the place where you can share the fruits of your research and argue for the ideas you have developed through your writing and research process, keeping in mind what is at stake and for whom.

Audience: Your immediate audience for this essay is me, an academic. Remember the genre of the essay: you are making an academic argument. Remember, though, that academics are not the only people who read academic arguments; you and your classmates have been reading academic arguments across this semester. Thus, you should think of your audience as people like me and your classmates, an interested group who expects to encounter a thoughtful, informed, and persuasive essay.

Writing the Position Paper

You may feel as if you’ve said all there is to say on your topic, but you actually haven’t gotten a chance to argue just yet. Using the strategies discussed and observed (causal arguments, arguments from definition, ethical arguments, arguments about appropriate procedures) think about what sorts of arguments you have on this topic. Synthesize yourself into the conversation. What do you have to contribute to what’s being said?

For this project, you are required to have a bibliography of at least twenty sources. At least 10 of these sources need to be academic (academic press books or peer reviewed articles); the others might include blogs, interviews, magazine or newspaper articles, YouTube videos, or graphs from government or think tank websites. All sources must be reputable, credible, and useful for your case. While you can draw on the research you’ve conducted thus far, you’ll also need to conduct more research. A great part of your success in this assignment will be determined by how well you synthesize your research. 

One of the trickiest parts of a long argument is organization. You need to give an overview, stake your claim, offer evidence, refute evidence—how will you put it all together? There are two rhetorical tools to help you here. 

The first is the stases. You can use the hierarchy of the stases, the way that an issue in one stasis depends on or interacts with an issue in another stasis, to help shape the paper. If you are making an argument about action, for example, you might introduce your thesis, but then bring in issues from fact/definition to establish background, issues from cause/effect to show exigence, issues from value to further develop a sense of importance and urgency, and then come to more extensive support for your claim about action.  

The second  is the parts of a full argument. These parts are the classical parts that expert arguers and speech writers used in classical time. They include an introduction of the key topic either directly or indirectly, a narration of the key facts and relevant terms, a partition which states your argument and how your paper is laid out to achieve that argument, a confirmation where you employ a number of argumentative paragraphs, a counterargument where your concede and counter a point, and a conclusion where you remind your audience why they need to care about this topic.

You are not necessarily disagreeing with the counterarguments rather showing they exist and another perspective exists. This is a common mistake for students trying to pin point other arguments as “incorrect.”