Chapter 48 Summary

When writing an argumentative academic paper, you need to evaluate all of your arguments. You want to make sure that your arguments are reasonable and not fallacies. There are several different types of fallacies. Fallacies are false or mistaken ideas. Generalizations are a very common type of fallacy that writers use. There are two major types of generalizations. One is a hasty generalization. A hasty generalization is "a conclusion based on insufficient or unrepresentative evidence". The other major type of generalization is stereotyping. Stereotyping is a hasty generalization that is made about a group.  Another type of fallacy is drawing a false analogy. A false analogy is when someone has "assumed that because two things are alike in one respect, they must be alike in others."

Cause and effect is a complex process, so a lot of writers will over simplify it. A lot of writers will "assume that because one event follows another, the first is the cause of the second." This fallacy is known as post hoc, which means "after this, therefore because of this. Another fallacy is the either or fallacy. This is when writers set up a false choice between their preferred option and and one that is clearly unsatisfactory. When writers use this fallacy they suggest that there is only two options when there is in fact more. It is unfair to the readers. Another fallocy is making assumptions. "An assumption is a claim that is taken to be true - without the need of proof." The main problem with assumptions is when there is an argument with a missing claim.

Another thing that you need to do when you are writing an argumentative paper is distinguish between legitimate and unfair emotional appeals. Emotional appeals can be very effective, but you need to make sure that you are being fair. A lot of unfair emotional appeals use biased language. "Attacking the persons who hold a belief rather than refuting their argument is called an ad hominem." Bandwagon appeal is when you claim that an idea should be accepted because a lot of people are in favor. One way to build credibility is to address opposing arguments fairly. A lot of writers will do a lot to win an argument including ignoring opposing views altogether or misrepresenting such views and attacking their proponents.

One thing that a lot of writers do to win an argument is deliberately misrepresent the view of their opponents. One way they do this is by setting up a "straw man", which is a character that is so weak that they are easily knocked down. "The straw man fallacy consists of an oversimplification or outright distortion of opposing views." A lot of writers will quote the words and views of others that hold opposing views. This can be a good idea because it can assure some level of fairness and accuracy, but the fairness and accuracy can be an illusion. This happens when a source is misrepresented because it is quoted out of context. A fair writer would explain the context to their readers. "Sometimes writers deliberately distort a source through the device of ellipsis dots. Ellipsis dots tell readers that words have been omitted from the original source. When those words are crucial to an author's meaning, omitting them is obviously unfair."

When I write an argumentative paper, I will try my best to make it fair. I will try my best to avoid the use of these fallacies. I know that it is human nature to use fallacies, but I will try my hardest to write the fairest argumentative paper. I will make sure that I do not misrepresent opposing views.

Happy Endinds, Obituary, and Oompah Loompa Dialogue

I think that Mr. harvey had his students' best interest at mind, but I feel that he was going about it the wrong way. Telling the students that they were horrible would probably not get his students to learn Standard English any quicker. In fact, I think that it would actually make them not want to learn it. I agree with him that the students do need to learn Standard English to have better lives in adulthood. I feel that the students would get stuck in mediocre jobs if they spoke pidgin.

I think that Mr. Harvey was very rude to his students. He had good intentions, but I do not feel that he was a good teacher. You need to be kind to get children to listen to you. If you are rude or belittleing the students will have more of a tendency to rebel against the teacher and loathe being im the class with them. If the children are praised for what they were doing right they would be more likely to listen to the teacher and take in and actually learn what the teacher is teaching.

Chapter 47 Summary

Chapter 48 discusses how to write a good argument paper. The goal of writing reasonable arguments is to "explain your understanding of the truth about a subject or to propose the best solution available." The purpose of a reasonable argument paper is to convince readers to rethink their opinions by providing them with new information that makes them question their viewpoint. You do not want to be to aggressive or too passive when stating your position on the topic that you are arguing. You want to "create an assertive tone by acknowledging different opinions and supporting your view with specific evidence."

Diana Hacker offers some very valuable tips for how to write a reasonable argument. The first tip she writes about tells you that you should examine the issue's social and intellectual contexts. She states that if you are not informed about the social or intellectual contexts of your issue you will be at a serious disadvantage for trying to argue your point because most of readers know the social and intellectual contexts of your issue. If you do not know them then you will appear to be ill-informed on your issue, which will make your argument not as trustworthy.The next tip that Diana states is that you should view the audience of your paper as a panel of jurors. This is a great tip. It will help you figure out what points are strong enough to support your argument and which ones are not. Another tip is to anticipate objections and counter opposing arguments. The last tip Diana writes about is that you should build common ground. Basically, this means that you should show your readers that do no initially agree with you that you share their concerns.

In the introduction of your paper you need to establish your credibility and state your position on your argument. You establish credibility by showing your readers that you know about and understand what you are writing about. The next thing that you need to do is back up your thesis with persuasive lines of argument. You also need to support the claims in your paper with evidence. There are lots of types of evidence that you can use. One of the most common forms of evidence is using facts and statistics. Facts and statistics are very strong sources of evidence because they have been verified. Citing expert opinion can also be a strong type of evidence that you can use. Using examples and illustrations cannot really prove a point by themselves, but they can be rather strong when used in combination with other forms of evidence.

I plan to use these tips next time I have to construct a reasonable argument. Of course I will be using evidence to support my position on the argument. I will definitely research the topic that I am arguing so that I make sure that I am well-informed on the topic. The more that I show that I a well-informed the more likely my readers will consider my point of view.

Essay Workshop 2

“I am very proud of you, Michelle.” Those words echo through my mind even though they were said to me by my father six years ago. It was an amazing day for me. My father was holding my daughter for the first time just a day after she was born. It took 17 years of my life for him to finally say those words to me. Just like Sarah Vowell in “Shooting Dad”, my father and I did not have a very close relationship until I got older and matured.

My father and I were very different people when I was growing up. He was a computer programmer. He would spend hours a day developing new programs for his computer and playing games that I thought were stupid and confused me. He would spend hours cooped up in his tiny little office in our house. I remember thinking that he was insane for staying in that room from the time that he got home from work until dinnertime. After dinner he would go right back in that room and continue working on his complicated projects.

I was a little girl with lots of energy. I could not understand how anybody could sit in a little tiny room with barely any light and no noise except for the tapping of the keys as he hit them and the clicking of the mouse. I wanted to spend all of my time running around in the park that was down the street from my house. Soccer and gymnastics also helped me run off energy so that I could focus on my homework later in the day.

Soccer was a major part of our family. My sister played on a travel soccer team, and after she got into high school, she played on her school team. Almost every weekend from August until October she would have a soccer tournament that we would have to drive to. We would spend the whole weekend there. When I was younger I did not mind being dragged to these tournaments, but eventually I started to loathe them. They took away my time to play with my friends and do whatever I wanted to do. I also did not get a lot of attention during these tournaments because my parents were so focused on the games that my sister was playing in. I remember being able to just run around the parks that the tournaments were held in with no parent supervision.

I also partook in soccer. To my dad though, it was not good enough for him. I did not play on a travel team or my high school team. I attended the travel team tryouts, but my heart was not in it so I never made the team. I did not like travel teams because I did not play soccer for the competition, but for the fun of being able to run around and kick the soccer ball. This lack of interest in competitive soccer seemed to anger my father.

During my soccer games for the local recreational league my dad would yell at me throughout the entire game that I was not trying hard enough or was doing the play wrong. Eventually I stopped enjoying my father being at my games. I dreaded the games that my father would be there. There were even times that I had to skip my own games to attend my sister's tournaments. This made me very irritated.

When I was in ninth grade my father started getting displeased with the fact that I was not yet on a competitive team. He ended up giving me an ultimatum. If I did not make either a travel team or my high school's team I would no longer be able to play soccer. This infuriated me immensely. Why couldn't my father understand that I played for the fun of the game and not for the competition? Per my father's request I attended the tryouts for both the local travel team and my high school team. I believe that because my heart was not fully into the tryouts I did not make the teams. My dad held true to the word of his ultimatum. My parents stopped paying for me to play on the local recreational team, so I stopped playing soccer.

After being forced to stop playing a sport that brought me so much enjoyment when I was on the soccer field, my relationship with my father suffered a great deal. I was extremely angry with him for taking away my ability to participate in a sport that was one of my greatest passions. I started to rebel against him. I stopped listening to what he told me. Instead, I did the complete opposite of what he told me to do. Back talking to him became a daily activity for me. I guess in my mind I decided that since he made me miserable by taking soccer away from me, I would make him miserable.

These behaviors of mine lasted probably about 3 years until I became pregnant with my first daughter and went to a rehabilitation center. During my treatment at the center I matured a lot. I learned to forgive people that may have hurt me and make amends to those that I may have hurt. On my first visit to my parents house I decided to have a talk with my dad. In this talk I apologized to him for my past actions. I explained to him that his decision to take soccer away from me angered me, and that anger caused me to act out against him.

My father acknowledged that he was wrong to try to force me into competitive soccer just because my sister was into it. He apologized for not realizing how much playing soccer meant to me. On this visit my dad took me out to the movies and to dinner. We started to mend our relationship after years of rough times. Every time that I came to visit their house, or my parents came to visit me in the rehabilitation center, my dad would take me out to do something special with just him. During this father-daughter time we would have long talks about things that we enjoyed. We came to realize that we had quite a bit in common.

The next time I saw my father was when my daughter was born. They drove down the day after she was born. We spent several hours together as a family, my mom, my dad, and me. At some point my mother left my dad and I alone in the hospital room. My dad was holding his first granddaughter. He looked over at me and told me that I did a good job bringing her into the world. He then told me that he admired me for not letting the fact that I was having a child at 17 get in the way of graduating high school a year before I was supposed to. He also told me that he was very happy that I started attending classes at the local junior college despite the fact that I was having my baby two weeks into the semester.

“I am very proud of you, Michelle.” I waited 17 years to hear those words come out of my father's mouth. When they finally did an overwhelming feeling of happiness and joy washed through my entire body. It took 17 years, but my father and I finally had a meaningful and close relationship. I think that Sarah kind of felt this way the day that she shot the cannon with her father. I believe that when Sarah had asked to go with her father to shoot the cannon he felt a sense of pride. Just like my dad did when I graduated high school and was attending junior college at 17 with a new baby.

Insufficiency of Honesty

Carter's first example was that of a husband confessing to his wife on his death bed that 35 years earlier he had been unfaithful to his wife. He gave this example to show that honesty can be "fake honesty- or it is honest but irrevelevant and perhaps even immoral." What he meant by that is that a person may be being honest, but it is too little too late. Being honest at this point causes more harm to other people than good. People try to use this "honesty" to make themselves feel better, but do not think about the harm that it can cause other people.

I would have to say that I definitely agree with Carter's reasoning. He provided a perfect example. Yes, the husband was honest with his wife before he died. He harbored a lot of bad feelings and guilt throughout the years for keeping this secret from his wife. I think the husband was selfish to drop this bomb on his wife just before he died. He wanted to clear his conscience before his passing, but in doing this he caused a great deal of hurt and pain to his wife. He ruined the image that she had had of her husband as a loving and loyal man. This could possibly cause her to harbor ill feelings towards him, even if she forgives him. It can also cause her to have problems trusting people down the road.

I actually have a personal experience with this type of thing. My 3 year olds father passed away when she was 10 months old. Before he died, he told me that he had not been faithful to me the year and a half that we had been together. It broke my heart. I thought that he had been faithful to me. Him telling me that brought up a huge amount of mixed feelings. I was glad that he did tell me, but I was very angry and hurt that he was unfaithful to me. I know that I shouldn't because he is no longer alive, but I find myself harboring ill feelings towards him. It gets really hard sometimes because we had common friends. It is hard when they talk about missing him, but all I can think about is what he did to me. I have to try to put those feelings aside when I am around those friends so that I do not upset them. It will be hard when my daughter is old enough to be told what happened to her father. I will have to try to keep these ill feelings that I have towards her father from showing so that she does not have a bad image of her father because he did love her very much. So, I definitely agree with Carter that people should not be selfish, and need to think about how their actions and words will affect other people.

Topic Summary for Writing About Literature

A good thesis for an argument paper needs to be debatable. It should be written in a way that gives your position on the topic that you are writing and should leave room to be argued by other people that have a different position on that topic. The thesis statement should not have too little information. Your thesis statement should not be a summary of the topic. You need to state a position so that you can support it in the rest of your paper.

I plan to use this information to write better thesis statements. I will make sure that I do no just write a summary as a thesis. I will make sure that my thesis statements have my position on the topic, and that the rest of my paper stays focused to the thesis and supports it.

Chapter 4

Chapter 4 explains some great ways to build effective paragraphs. It also describes the different types of paragraphs that you can write. The first thing that Diana  Hacker says that you should do to build an effective paragraph is to focus on a main point. What she means by this is that each paragraph should be about one topic, so that your readers do not get confused by your paragraphs jumping around. One way to make sure that your paragraphs stay focused is to use a topic sentence, and then have the following sentences support that topic sentence. A good way to make sure that your paragraphs flow is to use transitional sentences. These sentences can ease the transition between two topics in two different paragraphs. Sometimes, without the use of transitional sentences, the essay or paper does not flow together, which makes it very hard for readers to read and understand. Any sentences in a paragraph that do not support the main point should be removed from the paragraph to avoid confusion. You should avoid using a lot of small paragraphs because they do not give enough information and support to be convincing.

There are lots of different types of paragraphs that you can write. The different types that Diana describes are: examples and illustrations, narration, description, process, comparison and contrast, analogy, cause and effect, classification and division, and definition. According to Diana, "examples are appropriate whenever the reader might be tempted to ask, 'For example?'." Illustrations are more detailed examples. Narration tells a story that is usualy a personal experience. A description paragraph describes a person, place, or thing with such detail that it paints a picture for the readers. Process paragraphs is usually written in chronological order. They are used mainly to describe how to do things. Say if you were writing a paragraph about how to tie your shoes, you would want to use a process paragraph so that each step was written in the right order. Comparison and contrast paragraphs can be written in two ways. The two subjects that you are comparing or contrasting can be written one at a time, or they can be written together, comparing or contrasting one aspect at a time. Diana states, "Analogies draw comparisons between items that appear to have little in common." Analogies are used often in arguing a subject. Cause and effect paragraphs can be written in two separate ways, just like comparison and contrast paragraphs. They can either be written with the effect as the topic sentence with the causes following in the body of the paragraph, or they can have the cause be written first and, as the paragraph progresses, move to talking about the effects of that cause.Diana defines classification as "the grouping of items into categories according to some consistent principle." She defines division as taking one item and dividing it into parts. "A definition puts a word or concept into a general class and then provides enough detail to distinguish it from others in the same class."

I would like to work on incorporating the tips that Diana gave in this chapter into my future work. I am going to work on making sure that my paragraphs stay on topic. I want to make sure that each of my paragraphs talk about one thing. I do not want them to jump around. I also definitely want to incorporate useing transitions into my future work. I have somewhat struggled with using transitions. I want to learn to use transitions better so that my papers flow and my readers do not get confused by my different paragraphs jumping topics.

Shooting Dad

I think that what accounts for the narrator's struggles with her dad is the fact that he is a gunsmith, and she does not like guns. Her dad's life was all about guns, and she could not stand guns. They also had different political views which probably got in the way of their relationship a little bit. It can be hard to get along when you believe in totally different things. Her dad loved guns and she loved art. I believe that she may have felt that her dad liked her twin sister better than her because her sister loved guns like her dad. I think that she may have felt that her dad maybe thought a little less of her because she was not into guns like her sister, and had different political views as him.

As she got older and matured more, they were able to put aside their differences and become closer together. I can really relate to this. My dad and I did not get along when I was growing up. We had different views on life. I was very active, where my dad liked to sit on the couch and watch television. He did take an interest into my sports activities, mainly soccer. It was nice to a point. I did not really like the way that he got involved in my soccer. Instead of supporting me, since I played for fun not the competition so much, he would yell at me from the sideline things that I was doing wrong. As I got older and matured more, and stopped playing soccer due to asthma and injuries, we started to get along better. Now we get along great. You could not tell that we had struggled to have a good relationship when I was a child.