Rewrite: Fighting in Hockey

Rewrite Advice

The paragraph is an introduction to the Rebuttal argument. The author argues that fighting in hockey, when it’s retaliatory and conducted by “enforcers” whose job is to dole out justice to bullies who pick fights with star players, actually REDUCES violence and injuries, putting a quick end to the feud by sending the clear message that it will not be tolerated. The full paragraph is shown below, divided into sentences. Recommended alternatives will be revealed. The replacement sentences, if they’re successful, will:

1. Express the author’s convictions in bold, clear language.
2. Provide evidence instead of hinting at it.
3. Call out the opposition’s flawed conclusions, whatever they are.

No idea comes without a counterargument and this theory remains true in regard to fighting in hockey.

Even the best and truest thesis can be argued, so there are critics of fighting in hockey.

. Critics take a surface level look at the violent aspect of the game but fail to appreciate the positivity and safe environment it creates.

They see a drop of blood on the ice, but can’t calculate the carnage that drop of blood prevents.

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Without a true deep dive into the understanding of the players’ minds on the ice, the opposition would draw an incorrect impression.

They think the fighter loves the violence, when in fact his role is to prevent it.

. Additionally, failing to acknowledge the empirical evidence surrounding fighting is another key flaw in the counterargument.

If they bothered to run the numbers, they’d find that teams with feared enforcers suffer far fewer injuries and lost ice-time than teams that let their players get bullied and pushed around.

. While fighting in hockey has advantages both seen and unseen on the ice, critics cite injury, and that hockey glorifies violence leaving a bad example for children and viewers.

They let the hard hits blind them to the benefits of hitting back and retreat to platitudes about teaching kids to misbehave by example.