- Communicative Objective: Develop the ability to compare opposing arguments, identify their strengths and limitations, distinguish evidence from assertion, and formulate a balanced critical assessment.
- 5 Core Functional Sentences:
- Although both arguments are plausible, the first is supported by considerably more compelling evidence.
- The claim would be more convincing if it distinguished clearly between correlation and causation.
- What the opposing argument fails to account for is the possibility that several variables may be interacting simultaneously.
- Not only does this interpretation rely on limited evidence, but it also appears to generalize from an unusually narrow sample.
- On balance, the evidence lends greater support to the second explanation without conclusively disproving the first.
- Grammar Focus: Inversion with negative and restrictive adverbials, concessive clauses, hypothetical conditionals, cleft constructions, and complex comparative structures.
- Vocabulary Focus: plausible, compelling, correlation, variable, conclusively
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Evaluating Competing Arguments Critically
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