Assignment1: Argumentative Academic Essay
Assessment weighting: 30% of final grade
Word Count: 2000 words (+/- 10%), excludes reference list
Assessment Declaration:
I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the Assessment declaration (Links to an external site.)
Assignment Brief
The purpose of this Assignment is to develop students’ critical thinking skills and to test their knowledge of relevant theory and course content learnt.
In this Assignment you are given the following statement: ‘Organizations can make very little impact on strengthening creativity, innovation and design thinking processes as these are dependent on individual employees’.
Using this statement as a prompt, you are required to write an argumentative academic essay of 2000 words (excluding reference list). In your essay, identify and define what is meant by creativity, innovation and design thinking, whether you agree, do not agree or partially agree with the statement and why you agree/disagree/partially disagree using relevant theory. You must also use real-world corporate examples (e.g., examples from companies like Google, Tesla etc) to justify your stance.
What is an argumentative academic essay?
An argumentative academic essay is a piece of writing that examines and interprets a given ‘claim’ or ‘statement’ and defends or refutes it with the use of theoretical and practical evidence. In such an essay, you are essentially building up and presenting your own argument(s) on the statement while using scholarly (i.e., journal articles, textbooks, theories etc.) and practical evidence (e.g., corporate stories, news items relating to companies etc) to support your arguments. Hence, you are not simply describing or summarizing what others have said about a given statement but introducing and developing your own arguments on it. Your arguments must be backed by evidence if they are to be valid. In summary, in writing an argumentative academic essay, you are using your critical thinking skills.
VERY IMPORTANT: Please refer to the following links for further information on:
- Argumentative academic essays: Link (Links to an external site.)
- Critical thinking: What is critical thinking? (Links to an external site.)
The importance of critical thinking skills
As students undertaking undergraduate study in Singapore, you are expected to develop your critical thinking skills. Critical thinking goes beyond just describing and summarizing phenomena or criticizing phenomena to find their faults. It involves higher level thinking and reasoning skills to independently ‘analyse (break things down), evaluate (make judgements based on evidence) and synthesize or create (put parts together into a coherent whole)’ (RMIT University n.d). Critical thinking involves doing independent research, reading critically (questioning what you read with an open mind), analyzing and evaluating what your findings, developing your arguments based on solid evidence and synthesizing your arguments and presenting them appropriately.
These skills will help you to become good researchers, independent thinkers and challenge established ideas and perspectives.
Reference:
RMIT University n.d., What is critical thinking?, RMIT University, viewed 1 February 2020, <https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/content/what-critical-thinking>
Guidelines for writing the argumentative academic essay
In writing your argumentative academic essay, you may want to follow the following guidelines:
- Read the given statement carefully and understand what it means.
- Use course content learned in class as well as external research done using scholarly work to further investigate the given statement. Remember to read critically on this topic so that you are able to critically evaluate what others have said about the topic and come to your own conclusions on the topic.
- Based on the research you have carried out, decide your ‘stance’ relating to this statement. Your stance means whether you agree with it, disagree with it or partially agree with it (you may agree with some aspects of the statement but disagree with other aspects). It’s very important that the argumentative academic essay clearly expresses the writer’s stance.
- Write your essay to include the arguments you want to set forth and provide at least 10 references that include a minimum of 5 scholarly works and practical examples (at least 2) to support your arguments.
Structure of the argumentative academic essay:
Your argumentative academic essay must have the following components:
- Introduction: must include (a) the purpose of writing your essay (e.g., The purpose of writing this essay is to critically evaluate and put forth arguments on whether organizations can impact the strengthening of their creativity, innovation and design thinking processes )
- the stance taken by you (e.g., I agree with the given statement)
- the scope of the essay – what theories will be used in your essay, what real-world examples will be given in your essay
- the structure of the essay – what will you explain in body paragraph 1, what will you explain in body paragraph 2 etc.
- Body paragraphs: Your argumentative academic essay can include 3-4 body paragraphs. You can give each paragraph a sub-heading if you wish.
In the body paragraphs, you must provide scholarly definitions of what is creativity, innovation and design is, what arguments you present to support the stance you have taken, and corporate examples as well. Remember that the stance you have written in the Introduction and the stance you take in the body paragraphs must be the same. You must also include in-text references of all scholarly work (i.e., journals, academic textbooks, e-books etc) and of non-scholarly work (i.e., company websites, newspaper articles, company videos etc) used. Non-scholarly work has to be cited when real-world corporate examples are used to support your arguments.
- Conclusion: Provide a brief summary of your essay including the arguments you presented and the real-world examples you gave
- References: List all scholarly and non-scholarly work you have used in the essay in the reference list. The reference list is not included in the word count. References should be in alphabetical order and in RMIT Harvard style.