The Quality of Peoples Opinions‘From Coffee Shop Talk to Referenced Opinion’

Writing a Positional paper

Opinion (Coffee Shop Talk)

• Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System is a much better game than Halo or Call of Duty for X-Box 360.

Opinion (Coffee Shop Talk +1)

• Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System is a much better game than Halo or Call of Duty for X-Box 360. This is true because more copies of Super Mario Bros. have been sold than Halo or Call of Duty.

Referenced Opinion (‘FACT’)• Super Mario Brothers for the Nintendo Entertainment System is a much

better game than Halo or Call of Duty for X-Box 360. This is proven by the games popularity around the world. Super Mario Bros. has sold 40.23 million copies, where as Halo has only sold 8.1 million copies (Sinclair, 2008), and Call of Duty has only sold 7.481 million copies (Brightman, 2009).

• Best-Selling Video Games". Guinness World Records. Archived from the original on 2006-03-17. Retrieved

2008-01-31.

• Sinclair, Brendan (2008-01-03). "MS: 17.7 million 360s sold". GameSpot. http://www.gamespot.com/news/6184291.html. Retrieved 2008-01-04.

• Brightman, James (2009-12-14). "NPD: Top 10 Games Through November Reveal Nintendo Dominance". IndustryGamers.

Summary of Opinions

• Opinion: What someone says or writes based on what they think or feel.

• Supported Opinion: The same as an opinion with an supporting example that may be less than 100% accurate.

• Referenced Opinion: An opinion that is supported by referencing ‘factual’ information such as quality research.

Putting it all together…

• In your groups you are going to construct a mind-map.

• You will use the information given to you to and ‘pick out’ the information that you can use to support your opinion.

Mind-Map Example

Super Mario Bros. is the best video game of all time.

. Super Mario Bros. has sold

40.23 million copies

Super Mario Bros. is

in the Guinness Book of World

Records.

was named in IGN's

top 100 games of

all time list twice (in

2005 and 2007)

The game ranked first on

Electronic Gaming

Monthly's "greatest 200

games of their time

Topics To Outline

Should the legal driving age be 18 or lower?