COMS 369 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Stephen Toulmin

• School: University of Calgary
• Department: Communications Studies
• Course: COMS 369
• Professor: Lisa Holly Bryce

Document Summary

When creating your own persuasive argument, remember that it is your audience who needs persuading: ensure that your use of appeals (character, emotion, and logic) are based on your audience"s values, beliefs and assumptions. You must consider your audience"s values and what they think are truths, so you can select relevant and appropriate evidence to support your claims: that is, evidence that will make sense to your audience. When reading our own arguments, one of the hardest flaws for us to see are our unintentional use of logical fallacies. It is essential to get feedback from another person about your argument to ensure you are not making logical errors. Also known as a bad/false/faulty/questionable analogy, argument from spurious similarity, false metaphor. Definition: when an analogy is used to prove or disprove and argument, but the analogy is too dissimilar to be effective; that is, it is unlike the argument more than it is like the argument.