"The thirty essays in this book, drawn from the scholarly literature, represent major traditional and contemporary scholarship on argument. The essays display the evolution and widening scope of the scholarship in recent decades, as well as tensions among traditional and recent views and emphases. They reflect an array of scholarly perspectives on the values, rules, and conceptual structures that people bring to public deliberation-and that affect how they achieve agreement. The essays also examine argument in various contexts and spheres, with a particular focus on it as a vital, productive means for people to negotiate differences through discussion, especially in a diverse, democratic society."--pub. desc.
Evenly divided between practical instruction and exemplary readings, this textbook thoroughly explains what arguments are, why they are important, how to tell good arguments from bad, and how to construct and present original arguments. The readings include philosophical, journalistic, social scientific, and political pieces concerned with lying, witch hunts, love, risk, beauty, and families. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Everything’s an Argument helps students analyze arguments and create their own, while emphasizing skills like rhetorical listening and critical reading. The text is available for the first time in Achieve, with downloadable e-book, grammar support, interactive tutorials, and more.
Argumentation theory is a distinctly multidisciplinary field of inquiry. It draws its data, assumptions, and methods from disciplines as disparate as formal logic and discourse analysis, linguistics and forensic science, philosophy and psychology, political science and education, sociology and law, and rhetoric and artificial intelligence. This presents the growing group of interested scholars and students with a problem of access, since it is even for those active in the field not common to have acquired a familiarity with relevant aspects of each discipline that enters into this multidisciplinary matrix. This book offers its readers a unique comprehensive survey of the various theoretical contributions which have been made to the study of argumentation. It discusses the historical works that provide the background to the field and all major approaches and trends in contemporary research. Argument has been the subject of systematic inquiry for twenty-five hundred years. It has been graced with theories, such as formal logic or the legal theory of evidence, that have acquired a more or less settled provenance with regard to specific issues. But there has been nothing to date that qualifies as a unified general theory of argumentation, in all its richness and complexity. This being so, the argumentation theorist must have access to materials and methods that lie beyond his or her "home" subject. It is precisely on this account that this volume is offered to all the constituent research communities and their students. Apart from the historical sections, each chapter provides an economical introduction to the problems and methods that characterize a given part of the contemporary research program. Because the chapters are self-contained, they can be consulted in the order of a reader's interests or research requirements. But there is value in reading the work in its entirety. Jointly authored by the very people whose research has done much to define the current state of argumentation theory and to point the way toward more general and unified future treatments, this book is an impressively authoritative contribution to the field.
In the second edition of this witty and infectious book, Madsen Pirie builds upon his guide to using - and indeed abusing - logic in order to win arguments. By including new chapters on how to win arguments in writing, in the pub, with a friend, on Facebook and in 140 characters (on Twitter), Pirie provides the complete guide to triumphing in altercations ranging from the everyday to the downright serious. He identifies with devastating examples all the most common fallacies popularly used in argument. We all like to think of ourselves as clear-headed and logical - but all readers will find in this book fallacies of which they themselves are guilty. The author shows you how to simultaneously strengthen your own thinking and identify the weaknesses in other people arguments. And, more mischievously, Pirie also shows how to be deliberately illogical - and get away with it. This book will make you maddeningly smart: your family, friends and opponents will all wish that you had never read it. Publisher's warning: In the wrong hands this book is dangerous. We recommend that you arm yourself with it whilst keeping out of the hands of others. Only buy this book as a gift if you are sure that you can trust the recipient.
Understanding Rhetoric: A Guide to Critical Reading and Argumentation is a composition textbook that outlines three essential skills – rhetoric, argument, and source-based writing – geared towards newcomers and advanced students alike. Though comprehensive in its coverage, the book’s focus is a simple one: how to move beyond a "gut reaction" while reading to an articulation of what is effective and what is not, while explicitly answering the most important question of "Why?" This text gets at this central concern in two fundamental ways. First, the text teaches composition as a cumulative process, coaching you how to question, challenge, and expand on not just the readings you hold in your hands, but also how to interrogate the internal processes of writing and thinking. The book's blend of composition methods detail the cross-point of product and process to turn reading and writing from a matter of coming up with answers to questions to learning what type of questions need to be asked in the first place. The "right" questions, the text argues, are fundamentally rhetorical in nature. Second, the content of the practice-based chapters is framed into a larger mesh of intellectual history to show how the writing and thinking you are doing today is continuous with a long history of writing instruction that goes back to the ancient world. This book provides equal representation from classical and contemporary theory with the recognition that theory cannot be fully grasped without practice, and practice cannot be fully understood without its theoretical antecedent. After all, you can’t write "outside the box" until you know where the box is and what it looks like.
Forming effective arguments is essential to students′ success in academics and in life. This book′s engaging lessons offer an innovative approach to teaching this critical and transferable skill.
