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Assignments: Analyzing Arguments

1. Find Examples of Any Two of the Logical Fallacies. You might look in newspapers, online web pages, blogs, and so forth. Copy out the language that contains the fallacy and explain why it is what you say it is.

2. Find Examples of Figurative Thinking. Look at prose rather than poetry so that you can locate figurative thinking as it operates in everyday writing. You can choose a piece of academic writing to see how figurative thinking operates there. Or you might look at a magazine feature article or other essay or even in your college catalog. Copy out the relevant language and explain how the figurative thinking works. Use the four-step procedure for exploring the logic of metaphor.

3. Apply Toulmin’s Scheme to an Editorial. Choose any editorial from your local newspaper and run it through Toulmin’s scheme, which we have repeated below:

• Data: what evidence does the editorial offer in support of its position? (Data respond to the question “What have you got to go on?”)

• Warrant: what general principle or reason is used to connect the data with the claim? (The warrant responds to the question “How did you get there?”)

• Claim: what conclusion does the writer draw?

After you have anatomized the editorial in these terms, assess its strength more carefully. What do you find most and least convincing about it, and why? Do you detect any logical lapses—into categorical thinking, say, if not actual logical fallacies? Write up your assessment in a few paragraphs.

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Chapter 10

Using Evidence to Build a Paper: 10 on 1

IN THIS CHAPTER, WE ARGUE for the importance of saying more about less. The phrase we use for this idea is 10 on 1. The term 10 on 1 was briefly mentioned in Chapter 2, Toolkit of Analytical Methods I, as a variant of Notice and Focus, an observation strategy. In this chapter, 10 on 1 is used to talk about essay structure as well as the analysis of selected data.

The phrase 10 on 1 stands for the principle that it is better to make 10 observations or points about a single representative issue or example (10 on 1) than to make the same basic point about 10 related issues or examples (1 on 10). Doing 10 on 1 teaches writers to narrow their focus and then analyze in depth, drawing out as much meaning as possible from their best examples.

ORGANIZING PAPERS USING 10 ON 1

Use The Method or Notice and Focus to find a revealing pattern or tendency in your evidence (see Chapter 2).

Select a representative example.

Do 10 on 1 to produce an in-depth analysis of your example.

Test your results in similar cases.

DEVELOPING A THESIS IS MORE THAN REPEATING AN IDEA

When the time comes to compose a formal paper with a thesis, it is very common for writers to abandon the wealth of data and ideas they have accumulated in the exploratory writing stage, panic, and revert to old habits: “Now I better have my one idea and be able to prove to everybody that I’m right.” Out goes careful attention to detail. Out goes any evidence that doesn’t fit. Instead of analysis, they substitute the kind of paper we call a demonstration; that is, they cite evidence to prove that a generalization is generally true. The problem with the demonstration lies with its too limited notions of what a thesis and evidence can do in a piece of analytical thinking.

FIGURE 10.1

Doing 1 on 10. The horizontal pattern of 1 on 10 (in which “10” stands arbitrarily for any number of examples) repeatedly makes the same point about every example. Its analysis of evidence is superficial.

A paper produced by repeating a single unchanging idea generally follows the form we call 1 on 10: the writer makes a single and usually very general claim (“History repeats itself,” “Exercise is good for you,” and so forth) and then proceeds to affix it to 10 examples (see Figure 10.1). A writer who reasserts the same idea about each example is going to produce a list, not a piece of developed thinking. By contrast, in nearly