Using Murder Cases to Teach Argumentative Writing

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this text. I thought it is was really interesting and presented a lot of the teaching strategies that would be quite useful in the classroom. One of the ideas that I was most attracted to was the one that stated that one of the best ways to show students how to use evidence to support their claims is to show them how evidence works in a criminal case via a drawing of a possible crime. When using this strategy the teacher would give his or her students the ability to draw their own conclusions about the scene. They would then have to prove their points by explaining the rules behind their logic. I really liked this explanation of argumentative writing and would definitely use this idea in my own classroom. I especially thought it was useful that the appendix of the book gives definitions of different legal terms involved in murder cases.