[Applause] all right tim freitas here with another set of quick questions well it's a quick question but i've been seeing questions about this uh arise a lot recently and that is about counter arguments and the questions that i've seen are should a child or a child should a student have a kind of argument in his or her essay should a student put his or her kind of argument first last or wherever it might go and will my student not get the sophistication point if there is no counter argument and i'm going to try to clarify all of that for you here today now before i get into the answers to those questions though i just want to make something entirely clear is that honestly we cannot treat writing like a checklist where it's like if you have all of these things you can just do these things right you can write an excellent argument that is not a counter argument that has no counter argument and still get the sophistication point and get full credit on your ap exam you can also write an argument that's all counter-argument and still do a great job think about whether from a birmingham jail uh by martin luther king jr think about um the robert l stevenson's letter to father damian um that is really a letter about father damian i mean those are really good examples of arguments that are all counter-argument that are excellent arguments that are sophisticated um and so please note here that we want to make sure that we teach our kids that they have to respond to things in the context of what's provided to them and if the argument prompt is one that can offer an opportunity to engage with a counter argument well then good we want to teach kids how to do that but sometimes prompts just don't allow for that i think about the prompt from 2012 where it says argue your position on the relationship between certainty and doubt i cannot for the life of me figure out what a counter argument for that would look like if i've got a student who's arguing that the relationship is that they're inversely proportionate so as one goes up the other goes down what's the counter argument that someone's going to bring into that some might argue that they're actually opposites well if we talk about being inversely proportionate that shows that they are indeed related and therefore even if they're opposites they're related and it just doesn't work out so we're trying to force a square peg into a round hole and that's never any good so we need to teach kids right here's what a counter argument looks like when the opportunity allows for one but you don't necessarily have to have one to have a strong sophisticated argument now if your child or child if your student can have or if you are a student watching this and you can't have a counter argument in your paper and it's not something that you have to absolutely force here's a couple things that you want to think about in terms of placement of your counter argument couple things number one if you want your argument to follow a style that has been around for thousands of years and has worked perfectly and that would be the classical argument style your counter argument would be placed right before your conclusion so you would actually create your claim you'd support your claim you'd address a counter argument or a concession and then you would go into your so what that is a tried and true method okay however because we are writing for diverse circumstances there are more things that you might have to think about so you might want to say to yourself maybe my counter argument should actually be put at the beginning of my paper and when would that happen that would happen in particular when your audience is contentious towards what you're talking about and the reason why is because you can either concede or put your counter argument up front because that shows your audience right away that you've already thought from their perspective and rather than them having go through your whole presentation and uh having them say oh yeah well what about oh yeah well what about oh yeah well what about in their minds and then you finally get there at the end so they haven't been paying attention to anything before if you can actually alleviate that tension from the get-go by saying i know what you all might be thinking this might be the case i'm willing to concede this but i'm also going to prove this part wrong in that case right you will have a much much stronger case so when it comes to a counter argument do you absolutely need one no can you still write really well without one yes if you have one where should you put it it depends it depends on the context if you have a contentious audience i would suggest you put it up at the front if you have an agreeable audience i'd say you put it at the end or the other thing i forgot to mention is that it depends on how your thesis is set up if your thesis starts with an although or a while or some sort of concession if you start with the concession in your thesis that should be the order of your paper so follow your thesis so if you start with a counter argument or concession you should begin your paper with your counter argument or concession if your thesis is nice and complex and you end with a kind of like however this also has to be understood well then fine then it will go near the end so follow your thesis think about your audience if they're contentious it goes up front if they're not contentious it can go down at the end um you might have a paper that actually works better if you do all counter arguments like i said check out whether from a birmingham jail or that other one that i referenced from robert louis stevenson about the um about father damien um and whatnot so anyway i hope this is helpful for you um we have a bunch of other quick questions that you can access up here um to help you get through those kind of quick things that you want to know about um and i'm gonna ask that you press like and subscribe because that really helps us here at the garden of english as we begin to go as should i say as we continue to grow and we appreciate your support and we look forward to coming back with some more quick questions i think the next one we'll talk about is should we list rhetorical choices in our thesis statement and we're going to bring on a good friend to help us with that one so you all have a great one you