Good Arguments: Making Your Case in Writing and Public Speaking
Overview
This brief introduction to making effective arguments helps readers to understand the basics of sound reasoning and to learn how to use it to persuade others. Practical, inexpensive, and easy-to-read, the book enables students in a wide variety of courses to improve the clarity of their writing and public speaking. It equips readers to formulate firmly grounded, clearly articulated, and logically arranged arguments, avoid fallacious thinking, and discover how to reason well. This supplemental text is especially suitable for use in Christian colleges and seminaries and includes classroom discussion questions.
- Seeks to teach readers how to develop good arguments
- Examines practical tips, as well as warnings about potential pitfalls
- Provides guidelines designed to help readers understand what goes into making good arguments
- Introduction: Why Arguments Are Good
- The Basics of Good Arguments
- Reasoning and Logic
- Fallacies
- Belief, Fact, and Opinion
- Defining Your Terms
- Drawing Analogies
- Cause and Effect
- On Good Authority
- Making Your Case
- Case Studies
Top Highlights
“Fallacy is the word logicians use to refer to a mistake in reasoning, and an argument that contains one or more fallacies is called a fallacious argument.” (Page 11)
“the three laws of logic or sometimes the three laws of thought: identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle.” (Page 25)
“Our definition of an argument is the process of giving a systematic account of reasons in support of a claim or belief. Instead of thinking about ‘winning’ an argument, we would do better to think about ‘winning someone over to our side’” (Page 2)
“The word argument, as we are using it, simply refers to the process of giving reasons or evidence in support of a belief or claim. An argument is a series of statements: a claim and one or more additional statements given as reasons that we should think the claim is true. The main claim being made is usually called the conclusion (even though the conclusion often comes at the beginning of an argument, rather than at the end). Each statement that supports the conclusion is called a premise. While no set number of premises is required in an argument, there must be at least one. So, at a minimum, an argument is composed of at least two statements: the conclusion and at least one premise that supports the conclusion.” (Page xi)
“The straw man fallacy is one in which you create an intentionally weakened, distorted, or obviously false version of your opponent’s argument, and then attack that version specifically because it is easier for you to defeat than the real thing.” (Page 45)
Most textbooks on argumentation cover too much or too little, aiming either too high or too low. Good Arguments is just right. Clear, compact, and complete, it's just the text I've been looking for. I know it will serve my writing students well.
—Karen Swallow Prior, professor of English, Liberty University; author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me and Fierce Convictions--The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More: Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist
While written for a broad readership, this engaging book gives preachers solid guidance on how to mount arguments in our sermons that are interesting, fair, and convincing. Though the art of oral argument has a noble history in Christian preaching, we haven't heard much on that subject lately. Holland and Forrest correct that, and those of us who preach will benefit from their efforts.
—Will Willimon, professor of the practice of Christian ministry, Duke Divinity School; United Methodist bishop, retired
In an extremely approachable yet detailed primer, Holland and Forrest present instructions for lucid and humble argumentation in speech and writing. Good Arguments provides ample illustrations--some jovial and some provocative--that improved my ability to think clearly and to persuade, even when I found myself disagreeing with some of the examples. Believers are asked to provide a reason for the hope that resides within them, and this text will support that good work
—Amy Peeler, Wheaton College
- Title: Good Arguments: Making Your Case in Writing and Public Speaking
- Authors: Jr. Richard A. Holland, Benjamin K. Forrest
- Publisher: Baker Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2017
- Pages: 160
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Reasoning; Logic
- ISBNs: 9781493410903, 9780801097799, 1493410903, 0801097797
- Resource ID: LLS:GOODARGUMENTS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-06-13T18:25:30Z