Fight Club Strategies in Writing

The most important skill that we practice in fight club is framing our arguments as responses to others. This ability is important because it gives your audience a reason to care about your argument. It also helps make one’s argument more convincing by forcing us to consider possible objections to our positions and preemptively address those concerns in our own writings. Debates are the perfect tool to develop this ability because you are directly engaging another person, so you have a clear position to argue against. However, these skills do not always transfer easily to other assignments because in fight club the pro and con of each argument is clearer. When we do our fight club debates each side is clearly defined and we don’t have to come up with our own positions. In order to write papers like our final paper we have to define the sides ourselves. This can make things more difficult because if you are proposing a new idea there may not be a clear opposing view for you to argue against, especially if there are several other alternative proposals already in the conversation. It is also much harder to respond to possible criticisms when writing a paper because you don’t have access to immediate feedback like you do when debating in person. This means we have to try to anticipate every possible counter to our own arguments before hand, which is a useful practice, but not always an easy one. One benefit to writing as opposed to arguing verbally is you do have more time to prepare your arguments and collect evidence which can help make the arguments you are preparing more convincing.