While reading Planting the Naysayer in Your Text, many good points and ideas were mentioned. In high school we had to have counterarguments in some of our essays. Our teachers told us that we should have a whole paragraph dedicated to the counterargument and our response to the argument. They always had us find actually credible sources for our arguments. We couldn’t just have random quotes of some other might have said like Joe Jackson did in his article on page 84. He just puts in quotes like “Smoking Kills” with no actual source that had said it. 

Having a counterargument to your source can also hurt or help you depending on how well you defend your point. This chapter talks about how if you just dismiss the counterargument without responding with helpful information from your point, your point isn’t very persuasive. On page 79 it also says that if you have a counterargument it makes you seem more open-minded which will help you, but if you don’t have one you seem close-minded which could hurt you. In high school our teacher would tell us that we should briefly bring up our counterargument at he the start of the paragraph and then just debunk that counterargument with creditable information about your topic. 

I also found the part of the chapter that talks about grouping people very helpful. When writing a paper I never really take into account how I place people into categorize in my papers. The templates in that section will be very helpful in future argument papers.