Toulmin Methods in Little Girls or Little Women
Argumentative writing is a writing, which seeks to examine and analyze a given topic by an author. The author is then required to generate evidence supporting his or her view on the topic he/she is talking about by taking a logical stand on whether he/she opposes or supports the idea in the context (Driver, 288). In this case, the topic of discussion is about Toulmin analysis of the effects of social media on little girls and young women. The author seeks to come up with an argumentative essay based on an extensive research with detailed information of the topic from other literature articles. The main essay book in this case is talking about the effect of Disney Princes on Little girls or little women where the author uses Toulmin methods to analyze its effect on these young women (Driver, 288). This essay seeks to explore how different social media platforms tint the image of our young women in one way or another.
From the article, we realize that Toulmin uses six perspectives for the argumentative writing. Media being the major target on creating a conventional world for the young women, Tulmin choses to use the six perspectives in coming with a perfect essay on how the media makes the world different to the young ladies (Drunker, 20). The six cornerstones of his method included claim, warrant, ground, support, rebuttal and the qualifier. The author tries to bring our attention to the fact that our young women are slowly changing from whom they are to what they see the media displaying on screens and even social media platforms. She does an extensive research to support this argument by going an extra mile of involving parents. She interviews guardians and parents to young women who are showing signs of evolution resulting from the media exposure. Toulmin approach being providing the ground from which she bases her arguments, she proves to some extent that the evolution experienced by the young women is because of media effects. Her perspective being that the content displayed by the media are misleading and an appropriate action should be taken by either the parents or the government to counter measure this crisis (Drunker, 20). She goes ahead to suggest that parents can prevent this by regulating and controlling what girls watch on the screen.
She goes ahead to claim that monitoring the social media sites through the internet contributes a lot in controlling the girl’s feelings. The changing world and perception of things in the modern world and as the world progresses gives to some extent supports her view that monitoring and controlling is just the best way of dealing with the situation since parents are not constantly there to prevent them from watching such movies. All this argument is from Toulmins approach methods mentioned earlier (Erduran, 915). From her research, she found out that there are some parents who are completely not aware of the changes in their girls while other are quite aware of the changes the changes their girls are undergoing. Those who are not aware of the changes in their girls also happen to be unaware of the fact that there are some pictures or rather images in the media that may affect the behavior of the young children they have. She uses the Toulmin technique to base her argumentative article for instance for a parent who was able to discover the effects of Disney Princess to her child. The parent claimed that her daughter changed her lifestyle and even the dressing code after discovering Disney Princess. The author of the book however explains that Disney Princess adverts aim is to make young women desire to look in a specific way.
Despite all this, the author tries to say that some parents feel that banning of Disney adverts and fairy tales is not the solution to effects caused by these adverts to their young children (Erduran, 915). Despite this fact, some parents on the other hand feel that banning of such adverts will be of great benefit to them. They even suggest that adverts of movies should have a different storyline to enable their children to keep off from imaginations and mislead desires. The author supports her claim using statistical evidence the data she collected from the Central Florida University. This study reveals that most young girls falling in the age bracket of three and six years tend to develop fears and worries that they are fat, number of young girls who play sports and quit when they grow to around middle school is increasing. This is because they think it does not look good when they play sports forgetting the fact that sports keep them healthy. The author, Hanes as well argues that the number of women joining careers, which in the earlier days were meant for men, is growing. The media refers to such women as sexy. The media refers to those big names as sexy with an intention of influencing the young women to feel and appear in a unique way. The media analyzes every woman aspiring to vie for a political seat and this they do with a purpose of giving our young woman a certain image.
In summary, the author tries to explore Toulmin’s model essay and analyzes how the media affects our little growing women in one way or another. The essay is all about how media affects the young woman from different social media platforms and how parents react to changes their children develop after watching all these.
Work Cited
Driver, Rosalind, Paul Newton and Jonathan Osborne. “Establishing the norms of scientific argumentation in classrooms” Science education 84.3 (2013): 287-312.
Drunker, S. L. C. Chen and G. J. Kelly. “Introducing content to the Toulmin model of argumentation via error analysis.” NARST meeting, Chicago, IL. 2015.
Erduran, Sibel, Shirley Simon, and Jonathan Osborne. “TAPping into argumentation: Developments in the application of Toulmin’s argument pattern for studying science discourse.” Science education 88.6 (2014): 915-933.
