Assignment: A Comparison of Arguments

From your reading in Elements of Reasoning, you're learning how Edward Corbett identifies some major kinds of arguments: definition, cause/effect, evaluation, and proposal.  You also know that a number of argumentative techniques are used: Socratic dialogue, induction (which predicts), deduction (which draws conclusions from facts and evidence), and analogy.  Furthermore, you're discovering several ways in which arguments can be dishonest or flawed: hasty generalizations, unrepresentative sampling, faulty comparisons, non sequitur, equivocations, post hoc ergo prompter hoc, falsely honorific or pejorative terms, and shifting criteria.

Listen to conversations, watch TV, listen to a radio program, or look through a newspaper to find one argument that you believe is effective and honest.  Then look for another that you believe is ineffective, flawed, or maybe even unethical.  Summarize the two arguments.  Explain which type each argument seems to be (definition, cause/effect, evaluation, proposal).  Give specific reasons why you think the one argument is effective, while the other is not.  Suggest ways in which each argument might have been presented more effectively.

You might write about 3 typewritten pages (500-600 words).  You will be presenting it to a small group of your classmates.
 

Student's Response: "Two Sides of a Coin"

Persuasion is the ever thirsty leech that sucks blood of human foolishness.  Somehow we evolved into prospective fools, destroying our bodies with drugs and alcohol.  And we die like fools afraid of what we cannot sence.  And those among us who are evel stand on roof-tops of bazars and encourage us to remain half-wits

Look at me my children.  You can see me think.  I must exist. I'm flesh and bone and spirit.  And when I die I will seize to exist.  Fear not hereafter.  Live life now.  For tomorrow you will die like fools.

And the man with his hanging beard and flowing robes hands down the fire stick and says

Look children, point the stick, release the soul and let loose the days of evil.  Fear not death for today it is what we fight and die for.

And I like a fool stood by and agreed with words I thought good.  Not realizing I was selling my soul to a man who had already given his to the devil.  And all the time the wolf was screaming laughter at my face, he said,

Come with me children.  Let us today kill for religion.  Let the children run explosives tied to their chests to detonate beneth the tank.

Or better still, let them walk ahead to give the enemy marksman a chance to waist ammunition or to blow up any mine that lies in our way.

And when the battle was over, there were only the dead left.  The blood like a dirty ink written on a clean sheet of paper, wanting to be removed.  All that remained was the memory and all that stayed was the nightmare to follow.  And yet we did not learn, we waisted our tears and swore to revenge the blood with even more the next day.

And what did I fight for, I asked God.  It could not have been religion.  For religion makes us human, doesn't it?

No! cried the devil.  Let me answer you.  After all it was I all along.  You fought for land to human adversary.  You fought for a new world under my world order.

Yesterday I asked a friend of mine that he suppose one day he got married and in a few years had a child.

I asked him to imagine a child just torn from a womb, unprotected, fragile from a place as unknown to us as afterlife.  If their I was to appear before you and ask for your child in exchange of anything and everything he desired would he agree.

He replied no, and yet I said we do it everyday of our lives.  Placing value over human life.  Today it is worth the price of oil, tomorrow it could be anything.  The beauty of human life is its pricelessness and no amount of persuasion should change that.