Chapter 12

            Chapter 12 is about developing your argument. To develop your argument, you must support your thesis statement, and to do this, remember these steps: choose reasons, select evidence to support your reasons, and decide how to appeal to your readers using things such as authority, emotion, principles, values, and beliefs, character, and logic. After this you must assess the integrity of your argument. Check for fallacies based on distraction such as red herrings, ad hominem attacks, and irrelevant history. Look for fallacies based on questionable assumptions like sweeping generalizations, straw-man attacks, citations of inappropriate authorities, and jumping on bandwagons. Search for fallacies based on misrepresentaion such as stacking the deck, base-rate fallacies, and questionable analogies. Make sure to locate fallacies based on careless reasoning such as post hoc fallacies, slippery slope arguments, either/or arguments, non sequiturs, and circular reasoning. Remember that these are all things to AVOID at all costs. You don’t want fallacies in your paper, or you will literally be proving yourself wrong. Check your paper paragraph by paragraph, line by line looking for these things, because one bad fallacy, or even a worse a string of them, could all but completely discredit your paper and the information in it.