The Bedford Researcher Chapter 12 Summary

Chapter 12 of the Bedford Researcher titled "Developing Your Argument" covers the topics of supporting your thesis statement and assesses the integrity of your argument.  Laying the foundation for developing your own contribution and developing your argument involves selecting evidence that would support your reasoning and appeal to your audience.  To be effective you should assess the integrity for your reasoning and evidence.

In supporting your thesis statement, you need to choose the reasons that will support it.  You need to take your audience into consideration and the type of document you are writing.  You will also need to select evidence to support your reasons.  Discover the reasoning in what information you are using to support your thesis, identify relevant evidence, determine if you are too heavily relying on one source or one type of evidence and check to see if it is consistent with the type of document you are writing.  To appeal to your readers, you need to find strategies that serve as a foundation to captivate to your audience as you develop your argument.  You want it to be accepted as appropriate and valid.  Persuasion can be accomplished by appeals to authority, emotion, principles, values and beliefs, character and logic.

In distinguishing the integrity of your argument, you will need to avoid logical fallacies.  Fallacies based on distraction include a red herring (distracting or irrelevant points), ad hominem attacks (attempts to discredit by suggesting that a source cannot ne trusted), and by including irrelevant history (showing how an idea is flawed.).  Fallacies based on questionable assumptions following sweeping generalizations (ignoring the exceptions to the rules), straw-man attacks (dismissing arguments by oversimplifying or distorting), citing inappropriate authorities (using information from sources that are not experts in on a subject), and jumping on the bandwagon (implying that if a large number of people believe in an idea, it must be true).  Fallacies based on misrepresentation include stacking the deck (presenting evidence from only one side of an argument), base-rate fallacies (using statistics incorrectly), and questionable or false analogies (making inappropriate comparisons based on assumptions based on similarities).  There are also fallacies based on careless reasoning such as post hoc fallacies (arguing that one incident is the cause for something else), slippery slope arguments (warning that a single incident will definitely lead to a bad situation), either/or arguments (presenting only two choices where one has an extremely undesirable outcome when there are other choices available), non sequiturs (applying statements that do not follow logic), and circular reasoning (restating a point that has already been made as evidence for itself.)