I may be wrong. I frequently am.
I was having my regular end-of-day talk with my son yesterday, and we happened to end up discussing tactics for writing good General Paper essays. So he was explaining his thoughts on opening with a counter-thesis, then coming in all guns blazing to dismantle the counter-thesis, thus ensuring that any resistance is futile even before he needs to get to his actual thesis! OK, so I guess that's one way of doing it... but of course Daddy must have a view also right? So I suggested to him that his tactic could make a lot of sense, but perhaps more so in another context. What context is that? I asked. And he thought for a bit, and answered, "A debate". Eureka. The very purpose of a debate is to win the argument. On the other hand, the purpose of a General Paper essay is not to win an argument. It is to demonstrate the writer's ability to understand and communicate the issues. For this reason, having the mindset of utterly destroying the counter-thesis to your proposition c