Pro-con vs. argument essays

Essay by ktp05College, UndergraduateA+, April 2006

download word file, 4 pages 3.4

When slating your own ideas on a certain subject, it is not unusual to take one side or the other. But in some cases it can occur that you have no particular opinion on the topic and therefore an argument arises in which you do not take sides and instead lay out the facts for the reader to decide which side he or she, if also undecided, will take.

In the essays "The case for college" and "I'm not racist but..", the authors do not take any particular sides. Instead they present you with information on both sides of the argument and let you decide what you would like to think. This is very visible in "The case for college", where Mrs. Bird uses many examples to show you actual circumstances that occur. In this essay she tells us how today's society is pretty much brainwashed to think that all high school graduates must go to college or they will not succeed in life.

In the reality of this many that have given into the pressure and pursued the college experience have come to realize that although we think our economy can't take in a large quantity of untrained 18-year-olds, it is also true that it can not take in a large number of trained 21-year-olds. When asking college graduates what they felt that they actually came away from college with, a large number responded to this question not with the answer of intellectual learning, but with personal development. Many felt that the real value of their college experience actually had nothing to do with the curriculum, but with the social factor of getting along with others. So one must wonder why you would choose a college experience that has nothing to do with intellectual growth when there is so...