Many students might already have an opinion about Lance Armstrong. Does their opinion of Armstrong change any if they see him on the cover of Every Second Counts? What about Jackie Chan? Does he have a viable ethos for a milk advertisement? As group work or a homework as- signment, have students consider how ethos figures into an argument in which no person is visible.
How can a newspaper have an ethos? What ethos does the New York Times have? But using evidence responsibly is complicated.
Students will need to become comfortable critiquing facts as well as opinions, questioning surveys and statistical evidence, and uncovering assump- tions that lie behind enthymemes. The concept of the arguable proposition might help students see that making a distinction between fact and opinion can sometimes be difficult.
Certain propositions are not arguable: the square root of 81 is 9; Spain borders Portugal; Charles Dickens wrote in English. We do not argue about these claims because we accept them as commonplaces: they are, for most purposes, facts. But other facts are arguable: Christopher Columbus discovered America, William Shakespeare wrote all the plays attributed to him, clear-cutting in the rain forest has little environmental impact.
At some point in the not too distant past, these last three facts were commonplaces, at least to certain audiences. But now they are arguable propositions: reasonable people could dispute the claims and offer other evi- dence in support of counterarguments. They will need to click through a gallery of posters that use many of the same tactics to find the one printed here. Ask your students to read the mission statement on the Web site to further understand the context within which this image was created.
Depending on the makeup of your classroom, this image might generate heated conversation and opinions from all sides of the political spectrum. It will help if you keep the focus on the visual and verbal strategies employed here. A good place to start might be to break your class up into small groups and ask them to dis- cuss how the text is subverted by the image. How does the image appeal to emotions? Have them report back to the class with their findings. Discuss whether the following statements are examples of hard evidence [inartistic] or rational appeals [artistic].
Not all cases are clear-cut. This chapter distinguishes between artistic and inartistic proofs: the first relies on authorial invention enthymemes, syllogisms, analogies, and so on , and the second on specific pieces of evi- dence.
You will need to help your students see the effectiveness of artistic appeals, too. We offer several excerpts that you could use to explore artistic ap- peals, but a quick look at any newspaper op-ed page will reveal many more examples.
As an introduction to Toulmin logic and as evidence for the idea that artistic appeals can be effective, have your students find the claims and reasons embedded in newspa- per editorials. Student newspapers also offer, in our experience, examples of ineffective artistic appeals. Stu- dents are often especially interested in logical fallacies, and the assignment in which they rewrite the headline for the shampoo ad will help them think about why some people intentionally choose to use logical fallacies.
In what contexts is a fallacy more effective than a rigorously argued logical claim? In those cases, what role do facts and reason play? Ask your stu- dents to examine at least twelve of the sample arguments.
Can they generalize about the kinds of situations that benefit most from logical appeals? The next few chapters emphasize how rhetoric can help them produce arguments. The rhetorical concepts that the book has introduced help students to understand how and why people make the arguments that they do. First-year writers, who bring a range of experiences and abilities to the classroom, may know some of these concepts under different names.
But once they can articulate these ideas, they can think, read, and write more consciously and critically. Encourage your students to explore their familiarity with these concepts by asking them to name examples of each of the categories of argument. Popular advertisements are a good tool for showing stu- dents the power of carefully crafted appeals; students have some- times studied advertisements in psychology classes, and they come to think of advertising as a series of tricks.
But rhetorical analysis can help them see advertising — and therefore many other forms of dis- course — as communication that they can understand. Describe a persuasive moment you can recall from a speech, an article, an editorial, an advertisement, or your personal experi- ence. Some students may feel energized by the idea that they can discover hidden agendas through the application of rhetor- ical concepts. And is the Chronicle really addressing the quality of its ethos, which is what Zombietime ultimately attacks?
A careful discus- sion of the sample should help students make their own argu- ments about the images that they find.
Having students present their rhetorical analysis of the photo to the class will force them to articulate how they broke the text down into in- dividual elements. These exercises ask a great deal of students and could easily serve as paper assignments. Make sure that your students choose clearly argumenta- tive texts to analyze.
You might consider taking any one of these exercises and modeling the response for your classes to help build their confidence before they begin their own rhetorical analyses. When students write a rhetorical analysis, they fre- quently become so concerned with breaking the argument apart to isolate separate elements that they overlook the purpose of the argu- ment.
A rhetorical analysis that recognizes the goals of an argument can identify why the creator of the argument makes certain choices, including choices to omit, for example, a reliance on logical claims. Tutorial 3 will help keep students focused on judging how well the ar- gument they are analyzing accomplishes its goals. But for reasons that we explain in the chapter, Toulmin logic can also be a powerful as an analytic and productive tool. Our experience has been that when first-year students commit themselves to understanding and using the Toulmin framework, their writing im- proves noticeably.
Students begin to make arguments that use evi- dence effectively, and they write papers that show greater sensitivity to audience. The system holds students accountable for every part of their argument, while forcing them to question the foundations and assumptions underlying their claims. But like any complicated system, Toulmin logic takes time to learn. Do not expect your students to become comfortable with the con- cepts immediately.
Instead, plan to introduce and review the various elements of Toulmin argument over a period of weeks. This chapter explains the system in a few pages, but the material is significantly more complex than that of the previous chapters. Take your time leading students through the idea of claims and reasons. These two key elements might take a week to explain completely, especially if you use real-world examples in which claims and reasons are not made explicit.
Letters to the editor of any newspaper will illustrate the problems of making clear claims supported by coherent reasons. Some letters will serve as examples of good, clear writing; others will make great counterexamples. Students usually struggle with the idea that there are two kinds of evidence — in support of reasons and of warrants — and that an argu- ment might be exemplary in its use of one while completely ignoring the other.
The Toulmin system gives you a way of explaining to your students exactly what the evidentiary problems are in their argu- ments. Show them pages filled with long para- graphs that reach all the margins on the page, and their eyes will give them plenty of information before they start reading. If you can access the Web in class, you might show students im- ages of newspaper front pages from the early twentieth century beside current front pages of USA Today.
The importance of white space will be immediately clear to them. After comparing images from different time periods, have them make up their own announcements about a July 4th celebration. Following is a claim followed by five possible supporting reasons.
State the warrant that would support each of the arguments in brief. Which of the warrants would need to be defended? Which would a college audience likely accept without significant back- ing? Bush; Al Gore should have won the election. You can help students learn Toulmin logic by taking every op- portunity to use the terminology in class.
The more students hear the words, the more comfortable they will be using them them- selves. Reason: Because I want everyone to see each other in the discussion. Warrant: Seeing other students in a discussion is good. Warrant: If I want a student to do some- thing in class, the student should do it. Reason: Because I have not eaten since last night. Reason: Toulmin is too complicated. In short, use the system to show how powerful it can be.
A final note: students work hard in other classes to learn com- plicated systems. Every academic field has terminology and a tax- onomy that take time to learn. You should make no apologies for teaching difficult material. Toulmin is hard to learn, but the effort is repaid many times over. Enthymeme: If students work hard to learn in any other classes, then they can expect to work hard to learn in a writing class, too.
Before an argument can progress to the next stage, everyone must agree that something did happen. Consider a missing person case. If no one knows where the person is and no body can be found, then authorities cannot arrest and try someone for murder, decide that an accident occurred, or rule the death a suicide.
First, there must be agreement that something happened; only after the parties have agreed that something has hap- pened can they determine which term or definition best applies.
An argument of fact is the basis of further claims. Your students may find arguments of fact to be especially interest- ing because they have long understood facts to be immutable. Prob- lems arise, however, when they begin to consider what kinds of facts can be reasonably argued and which cannot be reasonably argued.
For instance, in the exercises for this chapter, the statement that there has only been one Roman Catholic president of the first forty-three hardly seems arguable. A quick look in any encyclopedia would confirm this fact.
But what if a historian found evidence that an earlier president was a Roman Catholic who had suppressed his religious affiliation because he feared the anti-Catholic prejudice that was common in the late nine- teenth century?
In that case, even this seemingly straightforward, eas- ily verified claim becomes arguable. A good argument with good evidence can make new facts. This example, which will fall far afield from the work that students will produce in their classes, nonetheless might help them understand that facts can be arguable.
Research will play a crucial role in developing good factual arguments, and the brainstorming exercises included below should help them sort out which arguments would be particu- larly viable for a paper. To extend this exercise, you might ask students to find examples of arguments made visually that mislead the viewer. You might also spend some time look- ing at the different graphs that appear in USA Today.
For each topic in the following list, decide whether the claim is worth arguing to a college audience and explain why or why not: [Answers will vary; some suggestions are provided. How well can we measure hurricane strength before the Saffir- Simpson scale was created? How do we compare hurri- canes that are now hitting populated coastal areas to those that hit coastal areas with few residents? What do we consider high pay? What if we run out of fossil fuels or if obtaining them becomes too costly?
These exercises would be especially helpful for helping students brainstorm paper topics of their own. You might use exercises 2 and 4 as group work in class. Immediate peer review of topic ideas will help some students see how reasonable their claims might be as well as how much work individual claims might require. Exercise 3 gives students a number of examples of factual arguments to look at as models. This tutorial helps students to see how factual sources can have an agenda and to understand that the existence of an agenda or bias a particularly loaded word for many students does not necessarily hurt the credibility of a source.
This tutorial will also help students understand that how a source or a student writer uses facts is part of an argument. This example works well in the classroom as an introduction to arguments of definition: an urn is discovered to be missing from a house and is found in the house of another man.
At the level of fact, there is agreement: the defendant has the urn that be- longs to the plaintiff. But there is considerable disagreement about definition: the plaintiff argues that the urn was stolen, whereas the de- fendant argues that it was merely borrowed. The case can go no fur- ther until the parties settle the question of definition. Toulmin logic will help you explain the contested — and the rhetorical — nature of definitional claims. Because definitional criteria are warrants, they must be chosen with audience in mind if the audi- ence members do not accept the criteria you choose, they will not ac- cept any other part of the argument.
You could return to the urn example to demonstrate the need for shared definitions of theft or borrowing. If, for example, you were to argue that borrowing without explicit permission constitutes theft, you would need to provide evi- dence for that criterion; your evidence must be tailored to a particular audience.
Not everyone would accept that criterion: what about close friends who share their possessions without needing permission each time they borrow something? Some students who struggle will be able to place an object within a given class a fiddle is certainly a violin; prostitution is an exploita- tion of women; paid workers are not volunteers but will balk at the need to explore or defend definitional criteria.
Turn to Toulmin to show that they might have evidence in support of their reasons but not in support of the warrants — the definitional criteria themselves. You might extend the exer- cise by asking students to bring or create images that illustrate their preferred definitions of patriotism.
The adaptation of the Uncle Sam recruiting poster might be an especially interesting image to ask your students to work with. How might they ap- propriate this image to put forward their own definition of pa- triotism? You can have them describe how they might put together a poster of their own, but many of your students can manipulate images to create their own poster, so you might consider asking them to bring those images into class or posting them on the Web.
Briefly discuss the criteria you might use to define the italicized terms in the following controversial claims of definition. Compare your definitions of the terms with those of your classmates. These exercises offer suggestions for helping students think of their own definitional claims by extending examples in the text.
Another good exercise is for students to come up with far-fetched definitional claims: Oprah Winfrey is a cult leader; Disney is a virus; Tom Cruise is an alien. When students write about the more creative claims and experiment with off-beat arguments, they have a greater opportunity to say something fresh. They often establish fundamental agreements, and if an author or a speaker can convince an audience to accept his or her definition, then the rest of the argument becomes much easier.
For homework, ask students to identify the definition claim and the audi- ence for the claim. What competing claims of definition can they iden- tify, and how might they take those competing claims into account if they were writing a paper on this argument? The parties disagree about the nature of the incident. One says the urn was stolen, and the other says it was merely borrowed.
The defendant might argue that he stole the urn for a good reason: the urn contained water that he needed for his ill child. The defendant now makes an argument of evaluation: the act of theft was, he claims, praiseworthy. You can use the story of the urn to show your students how argu- ments of evaluation grow out of arguments of definition. Nevertheless, most students will benefit from thinking of the two as separate, at least in the abstract. Many students will need help choosing the level of evaluative ab- straction for their arguments.
The best argument probably lies be- tween those extremes, and most students will need help crafting a strong, arguable thesis. Some students will be content to argue that something is good or bad; push them to complicate their ideas so that they write more interesting arguments.
As with arguments of definition, evaluative arguments challenge students to defend their criteria. Toulmin logic will show that criteria are warrants and must be developed with audience in mind.
If the au- dience does not accept the criteria, the evaluative judgment will not be accepted either. Ask stu- dents how they might rearrange this chart.
What information could they highlight or suppress? How might a supporter of the American effort in Iraq present the same information?
You might ask students to research how political campaigns use charts and graphs to present information. How do they design visual information to make their arguments? Choose one item from the followings lists that you understand well enough to evaluate. Develop several criteria of evaluation you could defend to distinguish excellence from mediocrity in the area.
Then choose another item from the list, this time one you do not know much about at all, and explain the research you might do to discover reasonable criteria of evaluation for it.
You might use this exercise as an in-class activity, having students work in groups according to which topics they know best. Many students will be sur- prised by how many criteria the group can come up with and how challenging it can be to establish criteria that many people can accept.
Exercises 2 through 5 highlight the importance of developing evaluative criteria, which in our experience has been the step that most frustrates students.
Because students generally feel comfort- able with evaluative arguments in some form such as for movies and sports , they can usually generate topics and claims with ease.
They tend to have more difficulty tailoring criteria to specific au- diences. With supplementary exercises, therefore, we recom- mend that you focus on helping them think about the warrants for particular claims, a skill that they can then transfer to their papers. Exercise 6 encourages a more analytic approach to evaluation using a genre that students probably have not studied much.
This exercise also helps move students from some potentially simple evaluation arguments what makes a good pizza? With this ar- gument more than any other, students need to be reminded of the im- portance of supporting their arguments so that their target audiences will find their claims persuasive. For homework, ask students to identify the evaluative claim and the audi- ence for the claim. What are the implied criteria for evaluation? The guide to writing causal argument in the chapter can help walk students through the process of writing a causal argu- ment.
In some versions of the stases, causal arguments came before ar- guments of evaluation; in others, they came after. Show your class by using the examples from this book or from elsewhere that regardless of their place in the order of the stases, causal arguments build on and set up other arguments.
Like definitions and evaluations, they rarely appear in pure form, though we provide some examples of such pure causal arguments in the text. The situations that open the chapter suggest such ideal causal arguments, though they also rely on defini- tional issues. We have found that students typically try to tackle causal argu- ments that reach too far for a regular class paper.
Remember, too, that because the logic of causal arguments can be complex, students will likely benefit from extra time and help as they make causal claims. For useful models, you might turn to sports writing. Students can easily see how reasonable, informed observers can differ on why a team or an individual won or lost a competition.
The causes of the following events and phenomena are quite well known and frequently discussed. But do you understand them well enough yourself to spell out the causes to someone else?
Working in a group, see how well and in how much detail you can explain each of the following events or phenomena. Which explanations are relatively clear-cut, and which seem more open to debate? In the class discussion or in the papers they write, push students to identify a potential audience for this presentation.
How much prior knowledge does someone need to have about malaria to understand the argument? What kind of action does some one need to be able to take to be a target audience for this argument? Then ask them to focus on the argument itself: Would these claims be more effective if they were presented more simply? Do the bells and whistles of the presentation add to or detract from the main point? If they were to simplify this argument, what claims and evidence would they choose to em- phasize?
Exercises 2 and 3 would work well as large-group activities. For exercise 2, go around the class several times to see how far afield from the initial cause you can go. Alternatively, go around the class only once for each cause, but choose several initial causes to take to extremes. Exercise 4, which offers students practice at dif- ferentiating between types of causes, would also make a good in- class exercise, though you might have each student work individually or in pairs and then compare causal arguments.
You could focus in particular on the dis- cussion of the book New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. As a discipline, history is especially concerned with causal arguments, and Charles Mann articulates a causal argument about the population decline in the Americas. Have students pay special atten- tion to how Mann talks about using sources to build his arguments. What sources can they consult to build their own causal arguments?
You can ask students to define terms carefully, to explain their evaluative criteria, or to explore the causal connections more thoroughly. This is a fun unit to teach because students put their rhetorical training to use and use language to change the world. Students often enjoy writing about practical problems on campus or in the community. If your students write policy proposals, be sure to teach them the dangers of biting off more than they can chew.
We have asked students in our classes to do extensive audience analysis as part of the writing process. In the early stages of the writing process, ask students to write about their audience and con- sider the approaches that will be most rhetorically effective. Remind your students that if a proposal is to be accepted, it needs to be finely tuned to the demands of its audience.
Toulmin logic could help some students understand their audience by drawing attention to warrants. No other stu- dent-written argument seems to lend itself to a variety of student presentations as well as the proposal argument.
This exercise asks students to think particularly about a local audi- ence, either their school or community. Many of your students are likely to have highly developed technical skills, so you might consider requiring them to create Web sites for their proposal arguments.
But you might also ask them to think about what kinds of proposal arguments might benefit from simpler, less technical presentations.
This exercise might be even more interesting if you ask your stu- dents to think of some possible defenses of off-the-wall sugges- tions. But perhaps the most important aspect of this exercise lies in pushing students to move beyond relatively simple solutions. We have no objections to more ed- ucation, but encourage your students to make more specific pro- posals. The exercises focus on two key issues for proposal arguments: developing claims that represent responses to real problems and tailoring proposals to a specific audience.
Extend the exercises by asking students to examine a variety of proposals — from editori- als in the student newspaper to large-scale governmental policy proposals — in terms of those same issues. How have editorial writers targeted their audience in their pro- posals?
Is the claim primar- ily a policy or a practice proposal? What special strategies do these proposals use to appeal to a particular audience? Does the proposal call for a feasible action? You might discuss several of these proposals in class to help students formulate support for their own claims.
This chapter might best be approached as part of another unit so you can show the relationship between figures and definition, for ex- ample. Metaphor is a definitional argument, after all. By combining this chapter with others, you can illustrate the ways figures argue and are not merely dressing on top of already established arguments. You can also push students to think carefully about what tropes they can include in their own arguments.
Use this chapter to help them be- come more conscious about how they write. Challenge your students to find figures or tropes that we have not listed in this chapter. They could do research into the ancient rhetori- cal terms, or they could develop their own.
Give students a piece of writing that is rich with figurative language, and ask them to identify each of the figures. Are there any sentences that seem to contain no schemes or tropes? Remind them that figures represent changes in the ordinary syntax or signification; how might these remaining sentences be read as different from the ordinary? Exercises 1, 2, 4. These exercises ask students to become more conscious of style both as readers and as writers. Students who are alert to nuances of details in clothing can help the rest of the class un- derstand the importance of details and presentation in writing.
Style, in writing or in cloth- ing, helps create meaning. In the following advertising slogans, identify the types of figura- tive language used: metaphor, simile, analogy, hyperbole, under- statement, rhetorical question, antonomasia, irony, parallelism, antithesis, inverted word order, anaphora, or reversed structure. Given that Jackson speaks deliberately and is frequently interrupted by ap- plause, students will probably have time to identify some of the tropes and schemes that he employs.
If the speech moves too quickly for them to follow or if you want to extend the exercise, ask students to find the full text online and analyze it for figurative language. You might also ask them to rewrite sections of the speech by omitting or changing the figures and to compare their creations to the original text. Be sure to allow time to discuss how these tropes enhance the spoken presentation, making the speech accessible as well as memo- rable. Some humor — like that in the animated television show South Park, for example — can be obviously argumentative, and many stu- dents will have little trouble identifying arguments from that show.
Another animated TV program, Family Guy, is an example that most of your students will be familiar with, but its arguments might not be clear-cut to them. Once they see how these sources use humor, they should find it easier to see the ar- guments in some kinds of humor that they have been thinking of as argument-free. The concepts presented in this chapter — satire, par- ody, and detail — should help them improve their analyses.
For each of the following items, list particular details that might contribute to a humorous look at the subject. You might, therefore, encourage your students to manipulate the images to add some humor, which will test their application of the principles in this chapter. Alternatively, ask them to pro- vide captions that comment humorously on the image.
In this case, you might have students bring in several images, display them in the classroom, and compete to write the wittiest caption. If you want your class to explore humor without spending days listening to friends or searching the Internet, you could ask them to bring political cartoons to class for discussion. Students could use Toulmin logic to analyze the many claims that cartoons make; a single cartoon could make many claims, of course.
Ask your class to pay special attention to audience: Who would find the cartoons funny? Who would not? The CD allows students to read the excerpt and then click on six discussions of the goals of the essay. You might consider asking students who are writing a humorous piece to analyze some of their own text in this way; if they make their goals ex- plicit, then they can make better choices about how to incorporate humor in their writing.
But your students may need a framework for understanding such argu- ments so that they can review them critically in what they read and use them honestly in what they write. This chapter offers that framework and takes a highly rhetorical approach to visual arguments.
That is, the chapter does more than make recommendations about choosing fonts or effectively position- ing items on a page though it includes such advice as well ; it also asks students to ponder the rhetorical impact of visual texts and im- ages on readers.
The final sections of the chapter offer advice on reading and writ- ing visual texts, as well as focus on rhetorical concepts. For instance, the elements of successful visual presentations are arranged accord- ing to three of the four appeals or lines of argument discussed ear- lier in the book so that writers are asked to consider visual arguments based on character, logic, and emotions.
You might ask students to offer more examples of how these appeals translate when operating in highly visual texts such as advertisements or magazine covers. In- deed, magazine advertising is a rich source of visual arguments be- cause almost all ads make the same claim: the reader should buy our product.
Once your class is comfortable analyzing advertisements, you could move on to other visual arguments, such as textbook illustra- tions, statistical charts and graphs, product logos, and photojournal- ism — all of which are visually represented in this chapter.
The discussion of these stamps should be a productive classroom exercise. How do argu- ments about America change from decade to decade? Or have them look at international stamps: how do the arguments made by stamps in other countries differ from those of American stamps?
Exercises 1—4. These exercises encourage students to write about visual images, a challenging task. Once students are comfortable thinking critically about images in class, they will be more able to go off on their own to do critical analyses. You could bring to class examples of good writing about images: short pieces of art criticism, incisive movie reviews, columns by popular cultural critics.
Alternatively, you might have the students write an analysis of one of the images from the CD as homework and then present their arguments to the rest of the class. Help your students understand that audience awareness, style, and appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos are important means of persua- sion in any argument.
Web sites present rich opportunities for rhetorical analysis: they usually contain textual and visual arguments; their organization can differ radically from print texts; and they face a potentially worldwide audience. But when students make their own arguments in electronic environments, the tools of rhetoric will guide their decisions. This chapter also offers a rhetorical approach to spoken argu- ments. Writing courses are increasingly being called on to address speaking abilities, and persuasive, skillful oral presentation needs to be learned and practiced as surely as written presentation does.
Ask students to read carefully, perhaps even somewhat dramatically. Exercises For exercise 1, make sure that students take no more than four paragraphs of a written essay to work with.
You might suggest that they enlarge the type and increase the line spacing when they rewrite the text for oral argument. These changes will allow the student to highlight certain words and insert reminders to pause or slow down, ask for questions, or offer extratextual comments. You might give students the op- tion or even the requirement that they present one of their ar- guments for your class in a format other than a traditional essay.
In particular, proposal arguments, which often come last in a writing class, lend themselves to a wide variety of formats. Ask- ing students to consider alternative means of presentation al- most always forces them to think more fully about the audience to whom they might address their arguments, a step that often results in higher-quality work.
Have stu- dents bring their notes on these other arguments to class and work in small groups to discover what similarities or differences in strategies they identified.
Were the strategies and their success determined by audience, personal preference, or something else? How would they deliver these arguments in differ- ent ways? Would they use different kinds of diction and figurative language? When you show your students that they have a wide range of sources and forms available to them, their arguments will probably improve. As with some of the other chapters in Part 4, this chapter might be best taught in conjunction with a larger unit: combine a discussion of evi- dence with an assignment to write an evaluative argument, for in- stance.
Once you explain to your class that evidence can take many forms, you can move on to a discussion of the inventional role evidence can take: finding one piece of evidence can lead students not just to other pieces of evidence but also to new ways of making their arguments.
Searching for evidence in libraries, interviews, or observations is not simply a one-way activity that goes from one source to the next. In- stead, it can help students understand what claims they want to make, how they can approach the argument, and how they should tailor their arguments to an audience. First-year writers have not usually chosen a major, but they might have some interest in a particular field or discipline.
You could ask your students to interview faculty in their chosen field to find out what counts as evidence in that discipline. Students could then present their findings to the class.
This is a two-part lesson: students have to find evidence about evidence. Exercises 1—3. These exercises focus on the inventional role of evidence gath- ering, not just the technical questions of how to find evidence. Many of your students will not remember the incident surrounding these papers, and you might ask them to think about how their own political predilections influence their thoughts about the evidence. Are fans of George W.
Bush less likely to demand visual proof that he shirked his National Guard duties? Do Bush critics expect those who doubt the veracity of these letters to present evi- dence for their opinion? This exercise offers an excellent op- portunity for discussion of how our opinions and beliefs shape how we use and interpret evidence.
You could develop other limit-setting exer- cises for other forms of evidence. Ask the librari- ans if they offer a guided tour or tutorial for students.
Technical re- search skills are valuable, and first-year students rarely learn them except in their writing classes. Is the testimony by the police officers more reliable? In short, use this tutorial to help press students to think critically and skepti- cally about evidence — and to help them figure out how to build an argument from pieces of evidence that might be insufficient on their own or seem otherwise disconnected. You could ask your students to do research into the topic of fallacies.
If you combine this chapter with the one on evidence, you could also make this a disciplines-based activity because fallacies differ from field to field. Arguments that one audience might accept could be rejected by another audi- ence that considers the reasoning fallacious. Following is a list of political slogans or phrases that may be ex- amples of logical fallacies. Discuss each item to determine what you may know about the slogan; then decide which, if any, fallacy might be used to describe it.
Your students might really enjoy exercise 2 if you encourage them to write extreme examples of the fallacies. Exercises 3 and 4 ask students to find fallacies in other texts. These exercises might prove to be difficult, but that difficulty will help students understand that many so- called fallacies are audience-specific.
Exercise 5, which asks stu- dents to see how other writers read fallacies, might also reinforce the slipperiness of calling an argument fallacious. You might ask the students then to try to make the same argument without depend- ing on the fallacy: Is that even possible with all of these arguments?
Is it ever OK to offer a consciously fallacious argument? But plagiarism is only a small part of the intellectual property debate, and its parame- ters are far from well defined. Thoroughly updated with fresh new models, this edition of Everything's an Argument captures the issues and images that matter to students today.
LaunchPad for Everything's an Argument provides unique, book-specific materials for your course, such as brief quizzes to test students' comprehension of chapter content and of each reading selection. LearningCurve--adaptive, game-like practice--helps students master important argument concepts, including fallacies, claims, and evidence.
Also available in a version with a five-chapter thematic reader. The book starts with proven instructional content by composition luminaries Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz, covering five core types of arguments. Download bltadwin. This OER repository is a collection of free resources provided by Equella. A streamlined argument guide plus provocative thematic reader, Everything's an Argument with Readings helps students understand and analyze the arguments around them as well as create their own.
Lucid explanations cover the classical rhetoric of the ancient Greeks through the multimodal rhetoric of today, with. Bireaux Merleau.
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