Argumentative Essay in the Perspective of Toulmin’s Model: Needs of Evoluting Indonesian Society from Spoken Culture to Written Culture

The low quality of argumentations in argumentative essays should become the crucial concern of Indonesian scholars. This is due to the low understanding of the essay structure and the sharpness of the argument. Besides, this is also due to the long lasting spoken culture instead of written culture owned by most members of Indonesian society. The pressing needs of evoluting members of society to the right side of culture are thus very essential to be fulfilled. Therefore, it is deemed very necessary for the researchers to develop appropriate strategies to improve the quality of argumentative essay writing. This research is a preliminary study of a more rigorous development study. The source of the data for this study was argumentative essays written by students. The data was gathered by employing an observation method. Further, for the data analysis, the researchers were employing the distributional method and the content analysis. The research results showed that the essay structure as well as the arguments’ sharpness should be improved. The description of the quality of the structure as well as the sharpness of the arguments was elaborated in the discussion part of this paper. The research results also highlight the researchers to design strategies to improve the quality of argumentative essays, and to trigger Indonesian society’s evolution towards the qualified written culture, switching from the very long lasting spoken culture