Evaluation Arguments

What is an evaluation argument? It's an argument that talks about superlatives: this is the best of something, and here's why; this was the worst of something, and here's why. This kind of argument sets forth a system of ranking something, and usually does so in the service of affirming that a particular item of note falls at an extreme end in the ranking system. Here are some examples of evaluative claims:

"Citizen Kane" is the best movie of all time.

Hurricane Katrina was the most destructive Atlantic hurricane to hit the United States.

The new Bugatti is the most luxurious sedan ever built.

James Buchanan was the worst president the United States ever had.


Evaluative arguments usually have fairly simple central claims. What makes evaluative arguments interesting is often not the claims so much as the support that comes with them. In evaluative arguments, the supporting information behind the claims--the grounds and warrants--are called criteria. It's the criteria used in setting up an evaluative argument that give the argument its substance.

claim: Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane" is the greatest movie of all time.

grounds: When movie critics, directors, actors, and film scholars are asked to rank the best films of all time, no movie appears at the top of the list as often as the film that launched Orson Welles's career, and that also almost destroyed him. Released in 1941 when Welles was only twenty-three years old, it has influenced virtually every filmmaker who has made a movie since. No major director since Welles, in fact, has failed to pay tribute to the many features of Welles's masterpiece that have affected them or challenged them.

warrant: Welles's invention of the jump cut, his extraordinary use of tracking shots, and the myriad innovations of his narrative technique were unprecedented when he used them in his first film. The jump cut allowed Welles to begin a scene at one point in time and then, by combining a visual cut with an overlay of sound that bridged the cut, indicate in a uniquely cinematic way that time had passed in the story. The tracking shot, which existed before "Kane," was used by Welles in a way that only the imagination of a genius could devise. Earlier directors had used simple tracking shots to follow briefly the simple movement of a character through space. Welles's tracking shots did something totally new, something totally movielike: they conveyed the movement from one character's perspective to that of another. Said another way, his tracking shots both figured and animated psychological space in a way that no one anywhere had ever witnessed before. Though many great films had been made before "Kane," it was not until Welles presented his story of a great man who becomes a monster that people were able to see that movies can tell stories in ways that no other medium can even approximate. "Citizen Kane" announced to the world that the movies are, at their best, a true art, and it did so in ways that have yet to be surpassed, even nearly seventy years after it was first shown.

Arguments of evaluation are usually epideictic (concerning the present) but can also be forensic (concerning the past). Evaluation arguments fall into two basic groups: qualitative and quantitative. The sample discussion above is an example of a qualitative evaluation. Qualitative evaluations give a ranking in terms of criteria that relate to values expressed in non-numerical terms. These values express distinctiveness in terms of ideas like best, most influential, worst, most important, least important, and so forth.