ABSTRACT
It is important to determine, at the outset of the book, why ‘argument’ (the product) and ‘argumentation’ (the process) are significant categories. There are different perspectives that need to be addressed here, some of which suggest that argument is too ‘high’ or abstract a category to be useful to student writers. This chapter argues the case for argument, providing a theoretical basis for the rest of the book based on the work of Bakhtin, Habermas, and Vygotsky.
