Narrowing a Topic With Stasis Theory

In many college courses courses, you will be asked to write a paper that looks at multiple views in a debate in order to better understand the issue. For your Persuasive Project, you've been asked to develop a researchable question with a potential for at multiple answers/viewpoints. This chapter will help you venture beyond identifying simple pro/con viewpoints to exploring issues in their complexity. Understanding how to classify arguments made in a debate not only helps you narrow an effective topic but also allows for easier organization in researching and drafting.

Remember back when you were six and you were asked to clean up the toys? But that wasn’t the worst part. You weren’t allowed to simply stash the random Polly Pockets, Hot Wheels, Bionicles, Barbies, and Legos on just any shelf. You were tasked with the Herculean act of putting the toys where they belonged. It was enough to make you want to lie on the floor in despair, with Legos digging into your back to add to the dramatic effect.

Hopefully, some compassionate adult was there to show you the shelf for the dolls and Bionicles, the box for the Legos, and the bag to keep the Polly Pocket clothes out of the way of the vacuum. Today, as a college student, you can organize your dishes, spices, and socks as expertly as Martha Stewart. And you would too, if you weren’t working two jobs and going to school.

When you are given a research assignment, it can be just as overwhelming as cleaning your room was when you were six. You might feel the same loss of hope when you look at your digital mountains of database searches and Google results. Fortunately, research and research writing don’t have to be daunting, especially if you know how to mentally sort the information you find. As luck would have it, the ancient Greeks and Romans gave us shelves and bins to sort out debates and make complex information more manageable.

TYPES OF CLAIMS: WAYS YOU CAN NARROW YOUR TOPIC

Classical rhetoric identifies arguments by levels or stases (plural for stasis). The idea of Stasis Theory, as it is called, comes from traditional argument and issue exploration and helps writers start where their audience is to move through a logical flow of information. 

When you research your topic, picture these five stases, or types of arguments, as shelves or bins to sort the issues about your topic:

While questions at the level of fact can involve genuine disagreement—particularly in scientific or historical contexts where evidence must be interpreted—it is generally inadvisable to pursue a pure fact stasis question for a persuasive project of this scope. For example, consider a debate about social media and teenagers:

• At the fact level, participants must first agree on whether a problem exists at all (for instance, whether social media use is associated with measurable mental health effects).

In general, the fact that social media shows measurable mental health effects is agreed upon by a general academic audience. This is not something we as writers could effectively enter into a debate about unless In order to enter into a debate on this question and make a persuasive argument a writer would need specialized expertise, extensive data analysis, and the ability to perform empirical research that exceeds the expectations of a college-level argument essay. For this reason, we'll focus ont he four levels of stasis that correspond to the types of arguments we can make from a rhetorical perspective. Consider the areas of debate in the topic of social media and teens for these remaining levels of stasis:

• At the definition level, the debate may shift to what counts as “harm,” “addiction,” or “excessive use.”

• At the causal level, writers might disagree about why these effects occur—algorithm design, screen time, social comparison, or external social pressures.

• At the value level, the question becomes whether these effects are serious enough to justify concern or intervention.

• At the proposal level, the debate includes actions like regulation, age restrictions, or educational reforms

It is important to note that the stases are hierarchical, meaning they build on one another. A proposal argument only works when the earlier stases have been sufficiently resolved. For instance, arguing that schools should ban smartphones assumes agreement on how harm is defined, what causes that harm, and why the issue is significant enough to warrant action. If an audience disagrees about whether social media use is actually harmful, or whether the harm is caused by technology rather than social or economic factors, a proposal argument will fail regardless of how reasonable it may seem. 

Examining each level of stasis shows us how to narrow our focus, what other issues might be contentious in a debate, where the real contention lies in a debate, and that there are often more than just two sides to a debate. Choosing a stasis for your issue will help you narrow down your topic and keep your research question manageable. Keeping your topic narrow will help to avoid frustration as you sift through the digital piles of information for your annotated sources or any other research you’re assigned. In other words, you’re only asked to sort through the Legos, and then, only the Star Wars Legos.

Definition

Definition arguments seek to classify an occurrence or condition. The definition stasis is used when there is some disagreement about what to call something. For example, if you are researching bullying. You could use the definition stasis to seek to classify which behaviors should be considered bullying:

Question: What is bullying?

• Viewpoint 1: Bullying is ‘a harmless rite of passage in childhood’ and can be ignored.

• Viewpoint 2: Bullying is any mean or rude behavior.

• Viewpoint 3: Bullying is any behavior that employs an imbalance of power to control or harm others where the actions are repeated.

Remember that in order to move beyond the binary, you want to be able to find three or more views on the issue to consider. Sometimes, a third viewpoint and beyond may be difficult to find. The reason might be that it’s sitting right in front of us as the accepted status quo and we don’t stop to recognize it’s such a common practice or belief that it isn’t given a second thought. Think back to the issue of how many cells make up a human microbiome. It took nearly 40 years for scientists to start questioning where the original estimate came from. As in the question on how to define bullying, one of the viewpoints is what most people traditionally thought about the issue generations ago, and, sadly, how that idea carries forward today. Questioning the status quo or commonly accepted ideas helps identify prevalent viewpoints and allows for other viewpoints to be considered and proposed.

Cause and Effect

Asking cause & effect questions helps narrow down a topic to the reasons behind and results surrounding an issue. Sometimes, asking cause & effect questions can be tricky, because they often produce a “laundry list” of causes or reasons for an issue rather than answers that are diametrically opposed. If we ask a cause-and-effect question like what are the benefits of recycling? we get a list of reasons: to conserve resources, to offset our carbon footprint, to feel good about ourselves, to have a zero-waste community, to save money. These reasons are not actual viewpoints, especially since all three reasons aren’t mutually exclusive; each of these reasons can exist happily with the other reasons, so the question isn’t likely to identify a real issue or debate.

When asking a cause & effect question, there must be at least two answers that are mutually exclusive, meaning they can’t exist together. Here’s an example:

• Viewpoint 1: Recycling saves resources by reducing the need for raw materials and conserving energy.

• Viewpoint 2: Recycling—particularly plastics—often does not save resources because the energy and water required for the process outweigh the benefits.

• Viewpoint 3: The primary effect of recycling is not material savings but increased public awareness of consumption habits and waste practices.

The above example takes a very small part of the recycling issue, whether recycling plastics saves resources, and identifies opposite viewpoints of the effects of the issue that allow for debate.

Value

Questions on the value stasis deal with how widespread, severe, pervasive, beneficial, or important an issue is. An example is a piece by Nellie Bowles called “A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley.” This article that appeared in The New York Times can be classified as a value stasis argument because it addresses how serious the issue of children’s screen use is to the parents creating the technology. Bowles reports that an increasing number of tech executives and programmers—the ones responsible for the apps and the devices to run them—are limiting and even forbidding screentime for their children. Here are the viewpoints presented:

Question: How safe is screentime to children’s brains?

• Viewpoint 1: Any amount of screentime is absolutely harmful to children

• Viewpoint 2: Screentime isn’t a concern. Today’s screentime is similar to excessive television watching of previous decades and there are plenty of adults today who grew up watching a lot of television and turned out just fine.

• Viewpoint 3: Screentime has advantages and drawbacks and should be used with careful purpose and be strictly monitored.

Policy

Issues of policy answer the question what should be done? Suppose your workplace has a problem with workers not showing for their shifts. You decide to research that question and find the following solutions:

Question: How can workplaces decrease absenteeism?

• Viewpoint 1: Punish absenteeism. Decrease salaried workers’ pay for absences not cleared 48 hours in advance. Allow only X number of sick days. Write up non-salaried workers for missing shifts and give only 1 warning before terminating employment.

• Viewpoint 2: Consider the causes of absenteeism and solve the problem by offering childcare and sick rooms for children of workers. Also, offer free bus passes or Uber credits.

• Viewpoint 3: Focus on productivity not attendance. Abolish the attendance policy. Allow workers to take off any time they need as long as their work is done. For workers who must be present for customer-service work, offer bonuses instead of flexible schedules.

Sometimes after identifying several potential policies, your topic may seem too broad. At this point it may be helpful to focus your research question on only one of the solutions at the cause & effect stases. For example:

• Question: Should X program be implemented?

• Viewpoint 1: Yes, because _____.

• Viewpoint 2: Yes, because of an entirely different reason.

• Viewpoint 3: No, because _____.

Adapted from "Using Stasis Theory to Narrow Your Topic: A Lesson in Writing a Viewpoint Synthesis/Issue Exploration Paper and in Organizing Your Room" by Stacie Draper Weatbrook, located in Open English @ SLCC Copyright © 2016 by SLCC English Department. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.