Chapter 12-Developing Your Argument

Chapter 12 is all about creating a strong and effective argument. The first part to this chapter is the ways to support your thesis statement. The first thing you want to do is to choose your reasons. You will want to have many reasons that will support your thesis. The reasons you choose will vary depending on the type of document that you are writing. The next step is to find evidence that supports those reasons. Each claim or reason you present you also need evidence to back it up. A good way to gather this evidence is from the sources you found, you can use things like visual images, quotes, and statistics. After that you have to decide how you are going to appeal to your readers. Are you going to appeal to them through authority, emotion, character, logic or principles,values and beliefs?

The second part to this chapter is how to assess the integrity of your argument. Something you can do is check for fallacies based on distraction. These are things like a red herring that are used in real life to throw prey off the scent. For example, "Why worry about the rising cost of tuition when the government is tapping our phones?" This is a red herring because "government surveillance has nothing to do with increases in college tuition" (215). Another thing you can do is look for fallacies based on questionable assumptions. An example of this is sweeping generalizations. The book provides the example of "arguing that the rich are conservative and always vote for republican...assumes that anyone who is rich is just like everyone else who is rich" (216). You can also search for fallacies based on misrepresentation.  In my opinion, what shows up the most is something called stacking the deck, which is where the writer only provides reasons and support for one side of the argument. Therefore the other side of the argument is unknown the the readers leaving them wondering why the writer decided not to mention it. Lastly, you can try to locate fallacies based on careless reasoning. An example of this is non sequiturs. In the book these are described as "statements that do not follow logically from what has been presented" (217).