Practical Argument: A Text and Anthology

What Is an Evaluation Argument?

When you evaluate, you make a value judgment about something or someone—for example, a product, service, program, performance, work of literature or art, or candidate for public office.

Evaluation is part of your daily life: after all, before you make any decision, you need to evaluate your options. For example, you evaluate clothing and electronic equipment before you make a purchase, and you evaluate films, concerts, and TV shows before you decide how to spend your evening. Before you decide to go to a party, you evaluate its positive and negative qualities—who will be there, what music you are likely to hear, and what kind of food and drink will probably be on hand. You also evaluate your teachers, your classes, and even your friends.

When constructing an evaluation argument, you have several options: you can make a positive or negative judgment, you can assert that someone else’s positive or negative judgment is not accurate or justified, or you can write a comparative evaluation, in which you demonstrate that one thing is (or is not) superior to another.

As a college student, you might read (or write) evaluation arguments based on topics such as the following:

Is the college bookstore doing its best to serve students?
Is a vegan diet really a practical option?
Is Moby-Dick the great American novel?
Is the SAT a valid testing instrument?
Are portable e-book readers superior to print books?
Are Crocs a marvel of comfort and design or just ugly shoes?
Are hybrid cars worth the money?
Is Taylor Swift the most important musical artist of her generation?

IDENTIFYING BIAS

Everyone has biases, and these are likely to show up in evaluations, where strong opinions may overcome objectivity. As you read and write evaluation arguments, be on the lookout for evidence of bias:

When you read evaluation arguments, carefully consider what the writer reveals (or actually states) about his or her values, beliefs, and opinions. Also be alert for evidence of bias in a writer’s language and tone as well as in his or her choice of examples. (See “Detecting Bias in Your Sources” on pages 261–262 for more on this issue.)
When you write evaluation arguments, focus on trying to make a fair assessment of your subject. Be particularly careful not to distort or slant evidence, quote out of context, or use unfair appeals or logical fallacies. (See “Being Fair” on pages 268–269 for more on how to avoid bias in your writing.)

Criteria for Evaluation

When you evaluate something, you cannot simply state that it is good or bad, useful or useless, valuable or worthless, or superior or inferior to something else: you need to explain why this is so. Before you can begin to develop a thesis and gather supporting evidence for your argument, you need to decide what criteria for evaluation you will use: to support a positive judgment, you need to show that something has value because it satisfies certain criteria; to support a negative judgment, you need to show that something lacks value because it does not satisfy those criteria.

To make any judgment, then, you need to select the specific criteria you will use to assess your subject. For example, in an evaluation of a college bookstore, will you base your assessment on the friendliness of its service? Its prices? The number of books it stocks? Its return policy? The efficiency or knowledge of the staff? Your answers to these questions will help you begin to plan your evaluation.

The criteria that you establish will help you decide how to evaluate a given subject. If, for example, your criteria for evaluating musical artists focus on these artists’ impact on the music industry, the number of downloads of their music, the number of corporate sponsors they attract, and their concert revenue, you may be able to support the thesis that Taylor Swift is the most important musical artist of her generation. If, however, your main criterion for evaluation is the artist’s influence on other contemporary performers, your case may be less compelling. Similarly, if you are judging health-care systems on the basis of how many individuals have medical coverage, you may be able to demonstrate that the Canadian system is superior to the U.S. system. If your criteria are referral time and government support for medical research, your evaluation argument might support a different position. Whatever criteria you decide on, a bookstore (or band or health-care system) that satisfies them will be seen as superior to one that does not.

Image shows Talor Swift performing, with some background singers/dancers in the background. — Taylor Swift: The most important artist?

John Medina/Getty Images

Consider another example. Suppose you want to evaluate the government’s Head Start program, which was established in 1964 to provide preschool education to children from low-income families. The program also provides medical coverage and social services to the children enrolled, and in recent years it has expanded to cover children of migrant workers and children in homeless families. On what basis would you evaluate this program? Would you evaluate only the children’s educational progress or also consider the program’s success in providing health care? In considering educational progress, would you focus on test scores or on students’ performance in school? Would you measure long-term effects—for example, Head Start students’ likelihood of attending college and their annual earnings as adults? Or would you focus on short-term results—for example, students’ performance in elementary school? Finally, would you evaluate only the children or also their families? Depending on the criteria you select for your evaluation, the Head Start program could be considered a success or a failure—or something in between.