English 12 / Unit 9: Advanced Argument and Synthesis
9.2 Evidence, Reasoning and Appeals
Notes
Evidence alone is not an argument. You must explain how the evidence supports the claim.
- Claim, evidence, commentary (reasoning): quote or summarize evidence, then explain why it matters.
- Types of evidence: statistics, expert testimony, examples, anecdotes, historical facts.
- Appeals: ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), logos (logic and evidence).
- Fallacies are errors in reasoning, such as straw man (misrepresenting an opponent's view), slippery slope (claiming small step leads to disaster without proof), ad hominem (attacking the person), hasty generalization (conclusion from too little evidence), false dilemma (only two options when more exist).
Practice
An author cites a national survey of 5,000 teens to support a claim about sleep. This is mostly an appeal to:
Statistics from a large survey appeal to logic.
A speaker argues, "If we let students use phones in class once, soon no one will learn anything." This is:
The speaker claims a small step leads to disaster without proof.
After a classmate suggests later start times, a student says, "You only want to sleep in because you're lazy." This is an example of:
It attacks the person rather than the argument.
Ready for more? Take the Unit 9 test.