ARGUMENT ESSAY/QUESTION TYPES These should not be ignored:

y y y y y y

You are not being asked to agree or disagree with any of the statements in the argument You should analyze the arguments line of reasoning You should consider questionable assumptions underlying the argument You should consider the extent to which the evidence presented supports the arguments conclusion You may discuss what additional evidence would help strengthen or refute the argument You may discuss what additional information, if any, would help you to evaluate the arguments conclusion.

The above suggestions are extremely valuable to help guide your thinking. According to the guidelines, we should examine assumptions and the effectiveness or suitability of evidence; further, we should hypothesize what additional evidence could be used to strengthen or refute the argument. These three suggestions comprise a pretty reliable outline of the essay. Another important suggestion in the guidelines is that the Argument Task is not like the Issue Task for one key reason: you will not be asked to contribute your own opinion. If you encounter an argument advocating the consumption of soy to prevent depression, do not begin your essay by agreeing or disagreeing and providing evidence for your stance. Almost all the material for your writing is contained within the given argument. The Flaws Because nearly all of your writing material comes from the given argument, you can imagine these arguments are not impenetrably persuasive. All arguments will contain multiple flaws and logical fallacies; some of those fallacies will come straight from that Intro to Logic class you might have taken in college (e.g. post hoc, fallacy of accident, etc). Lucky for us, we wont have to recall the fancy names of these fallaciesjust being able to recognize them is good enough. Heres a quick overview of some of these flaws in plain English:
y y y y y y

Assuming that characteristics of a group apply to each member of that group Assuming that a certain condition is necessary for a certain outcome Drawing a weak analogy between two things Confusing a cause-effect relationship with a correlation (famously known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e. correlation does not imply causation) Relying on inappropriate or potentially unrepresentative statistics Relying on biased or tainted data (methods for collecting data must be unbiased and the poll responses must be credible)

CAUSAL FLAWS STATISTICAL

ANALOGY

SAMPLE/SURVEY

NO 3RD VARIABLE INVOLVED

X LED TO Y

NO REVERSE CAUSE

CAUSAL

ANALOGY

THE TWO THINGS ARE RELEVANTLY SIMILAR/COMPARABLE

THE SAMPLE REPRESENTS

SAMPLE/SURVEY

GENERAL POPULATION

STATISTICAL FLAW

MISINTERPRETED DATA

% = NOS

LANGUAGE SHIFT

CONCLUSION AND PREMISE

HAVE DIFFERENT INFORMATION