In Chapter 9 of "Everything's an Argument", the text book discusses how to understand and develop arguments of definition. It emphasizes on the importance of a word's or phrase's different definitions because it can cause controversy. The book uses the example of the text from President Obama's speech where he uses the term "patriotism". He defines "patriotism" as many different things such as loyalty, love, support for his country. He goes into more detail of the word "patriotism" to show all possible definitions to gain acceptance from the audience. The book further goes into the example of the definition "human intelligence" which could mean a couple different things. It could mean that someone's intelligence is strictly determined by their standardized test scores like the SAT or IQ or the ability to perform specific practical tests. There is controversy between those two meanings for the definition of "human intelligence" in our society. The book explains that dictionaries are a form of reference for a general knowledge of a word but that there is so much more in depth to the word than just that definition.
The text also explains the different kinds of definitions and gives examples of each to further the reader's knowledge. It says that there are two main kinds of definitions; formal and operational definitions. Formal definitions are the general direct definitions someone would find in a dictionary. These definitions give the word a general label and place it in a certain category for better understanding. It gives the example of "hybrid car" and how its formal definition would list that it is a passenger vehicle that operates using two or more sources of power. The next kind of definition is an operational definition and it defines a word by what it does or what conditions create it. The example they give in the book is "sexual harassment" and how it is not officially called "sexual harassment" unless three conditions take place. These definitions are also highly debatable in society because personal opinions differ between what conditions took place to consider it an official serious term like sexual harassment. The person that sexually harassed the individual might not consider that all the conditions took place but the person harassed would definitely consider the actions taken more seriously.
It discusses the steps in developing a definitional argument. The first step is to formulate a tentative claim addressing a specific definition. If the definitional argument was "volunteer" the writer must write down what is and what is not a volunteer and try to accommodate both sides of the argument of the word. The writer needs to come up with reasoning behind their claims for each side while being considerate of both sides and they do this by researching their topic very in depth. Then they would need to match their claim to the definitions. They would then need to develop their conclusions on the definitional arguments.
