Chapter 12 in the Bedford Researcher is all about developing your thesis statment and assessing the intefrity of your argument. A lot of people ask 'How can I support my thesis statement?' the first step to this is to choose reasons to support your thesis statment, to do this you can generate ideas by brainstorming, freewriting, looping or clustering. The next step is to select evidence to support your reasons. The third step is to decide how to appeal to your readers, you need to assess your apeals to authority, to emotion, to principles, values, beliefs, character, and logic.
The second part of chapter 12 asks 'How can I assess the integrity of my argument?' You must check for fallacies based on distraction. A red herring is an irrelevant and distracting point, an ad hominem attacks attempt to discredit an idea or argument by suggesting that a person or group associated with it should not be trusted, and an irrelevant history argues that a proposal is bad because someone came up with the idea while under the influence. These are all forms of distraction to avoid. You need to look for fallacies based on questionable assumptions like sweeping generalizations, straw-man attacks, citing inappropriate authorities and jumping on a bandwaggon. You should search for fallacies based on misrepresentation, for example, stacking the deck, base-rate fallacies, and questionable analogies. Lastly, you must locate fallacies based on careless reasoning.
Good work on the appeals you can use to interest your audience--and persuade them!
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