When writing any argumentative essay, you will always need evidence to support your claim. For English this year, we were given essays, and with these essays, we had to find quotes from those essays to support our claims. This example below is from my Metaphor’s Essay and I explain how some metaphors are too strong for patients, and in turn, it can hurt them in recovery.
Metaphors are forceful and can be filled with endless amounts of unseen context. In referencing Khuller’s essay, he says how metaphors are not a good thing to tell patients that are fighting illness. However, some may say that metaphors are a great thing to tell patients to help keep focused and reach their end goal in the battle they are in. Khullar explains, “For many patients, thinking of their treatment course as a fight or battle may be helpful, an important part of their journey, invoking ideals of courage, resilience, and determination.”
This quote was chosen to set up a whole paragraph of an argument. Most of the time, a claim is made, and then quotes are found to support it. In this case, I found the quote first, and wrote the paragraph around the quote. Even though this isn’t as common, it still works.
This is very true for some patients. At the end of the day, it depends on every patient individually. Some may find that the challenge to fight and grow like a soldier is best for them, but others have a hard time fighting for themselves, and being afraid of failure. People who are afraid of failure tend to collapse under the stress it creates on them, and they let the illness win over their body. In these cases, it’s best for the patient to hear something other than military words, and hear language more comforting to them since metaphors can be a real punch to the gut.
As you can tell, this is the explanation of the quote. The biggest thing to take away from this is that a strong quote can lead up to a very strong paragraph. A quote with alot of meaning can lead to some of the strongest body paragraphs. It’s strategy to search through essays to find quotes to use in your argument. The best approach is to make your own argument, and then try to find quotes that support what you want to support. This isn’t the only way to find quotes, but I defiantly think its the most effective way to do it.
I developed a lot as a student throughout the year on integrating my ideas into a paper. I will admit, I do think I was pretty at doing this before the year started, but this class took it to the next level for me. Using ideas from class and the book, “They Say, I Say,” I found new ways to construct ideas and create new arguments that my high-school self didn’t have the ability to do. Finding a quote is only have the battle, and the other half, of course, is using it the right way. English 110 gave me so many new ways to integrate my claims and arguments.
