Introduction

So far this year, your writing has been geared toward an academic audience, but academic writing is not the only kind of writing that you will be doing at UCI or beyond the campus. We use writing in our everyday lives to communicate, persuade, prompt change, and get people to think about and respond to social and universal problems. This effort often takes the form of opinion pieces, which can range in form from a newspaper op-ed article by a member of the public to a persuasive comment on a blog.

This assignment asks you write an opinion article with the goal of persuading a large, public audience. Professor Lazo defines the genre in his Writer’s Handbook chapter “Writing Opinion Articles” as an “argument or judgment that takes a strong position on a controversial issue or question.” In writing your opinion pieces, you will be, quite literally, writing to a larger, public audience with the goal of publishing your article in a peer-reviewed journal. Each HCC section will select the strongest opinion article to submit to a selection committee, which, in turn, will select the best three articles to submit for publication in UCI’s online undergraduate writing journal, Word Count.

For this assignment, your “issue” concerns the legal status of torture warrants. The UN Convention against Torture prohibits acts “by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, [are] intentionally inflicted on a person.” But as we know, officials regularly use forms of torture for interrogation. The question, as Alan Dershowitz frames it in his article “Tortured Reasoning,” is how to hold American officials involved in acts of torture accountable for their actions. The best way to ensure this accountability, Dershowitz argues, is to require “torture warrants,” which, by making torture more transparent, would in his opinion ensure more responsible forms of behavior.

Elaine Scarry forcefully disagrees in her response to Dershowitz, “Five Errors in the Reasoning of Alan Dershowitz,” claiming that the legalization of torture in any form (even the exception) legitimizes it as a practice. She argues that this dangerous turn in our legal stance would undermine our position on torture altogether and could lead to an excessive number of warrants being drawn up for citizens to be tortured. Instead of making things more transparent, she believes the legalization of torture would at once normalize torture and push such acts of violence underground.

But the exchange does not end there. A number of writers enter into heated discussion about the legality of “torture warrants.” In an effort to develop a complex position of your own, you will locate additional opinion articles that respond to Dershowitz’s proposal.

Assignment

Using counterargument strategies as a way to establish your position, write an opinion article that either challenges or supports Alan Dershowitz’s position on the implementation of “torture warrants.” While your opinion piece may include counterarguments offered by Elaine Scarry, it must also include a line of reasoning that Scarry does not address.

Note: Keep in mind that Dershowitz does not argue that torture should be made legal. Rather, the problem is whether or not the use of torture warrants in exceptional cases (as an extra-legal measure) should be implemented.

This paper will be 3-4 pages in length and will count as 25% of your writing grade.

The Writing Process

Begin by carefully re-reading Alan Dershowitz’s article and Elaine Scarry’s rebuttal to Dershowitz, as well as the Writer’s Handbook chapters “Writing Opinion Articles,” “Counterargument,” and “Logical Fallacies.” As part of your brainstorming process, you will complete a research task that helps you locate additional opinion pieces on the problem of “torture warrants.” Take time to read these opinion pieces, which model the genre in which you will be writing, in order to complicate your position. Using evidence drawn from these articles, you will engage in an in-class debate in which you will either support or reject the use of “torture warrants” in exceptional cases. This debate will serve as a Working Draft of your paper and will require extensive brainstorming, prewriting, and outlining.

Keep in mind that, as Professor Lazo argues, opinion articles require you to engage your audience at a heightened level. You must pay special attention to your pacing, your ethos, and your word choice.

When you have written your opinion piece, you and your classmates will then devise a plan for nominating the strongest piece for publication. How you go about organizing this selection process is up to you and will require planning and collaboration.

Student Learning Goals: