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Logic: Generalizations
Vague generalizations give comfort to the
non-thinker, or to the thinker who feels fatigued, bored, or indecisive.
Misuse of evidence sometimes helps generalizations do their work of
oversimplifying. Good writers recognize that they will sometimes, because they
are human, feel tired and lazy.
They take breaks in order to gain new
perspective on their words, seeking out the most persuasive aspects of
arguments. Thinking of writing as persuasion helps a writer test for
generalizations, prejudice, and empty rhetoric.
A. Either/Or
Either/or is the most common generalization,
our heritage, in part, from elections where Candidate X and Candidate Y blitz
each other into false extremes ("Either you vote for me or the entire
country will go to hell in a handbasket").
In inaccurate either/or thinking, a specific
first statement is attached to a huge and unwieldy second statement:
If you support the reporter's protection
of sources, newspapers will become hostages to organized crime.
If professors start requiring more papers in their courses, everybody will
start having nervous breakdowns.
Or the world is seen as offering only two
choices:
America: Love It or Leave It.
B. Prejudice
Prejudice makes unfair generalizations about
other people, prejudging their worth on the basis of false or irrational
evidence. Prejudice refuses to recognize complexity and diversity. A common
sign of prejudiced thinking is the argument ad hominem (at the man). This
argument can support or undermine an issue by misusing the personality behind
it:
Pat Snodgrass is the perfect candidate
for President; he's good-looking, he used to play football, he makes good
speeches, and he's a real family man.
Pat Snodgrass would make a terrible President; she's divorced, she speaks
with that funny accent, and she's got support from some real weirdos.
"Get rid of prejudice" is not as
useful a directive as "find out why you think this way." Prejudice
is a sign of misused emotion in writing, but that doesn't mean all strong
feeling is bad. A quote from Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux Indian who witnessed
the wars for the Black Hills, illustrates how strong feeling, even so-called
"partisan" feeling, can make writing beautiful and moving:
When I look back now from this high hill
of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped
and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with
eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody
mud....A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream....the nation's
hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred
tree is dead.
(Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)
C. Gas-bag Words
Certain words or phrases sometimes encourage
you to oversimplify. They are signs of impatience, making you see the world in
extremes, giving you false and facile choices, selling you a half-truth
disguised as a fact:
The truth of the matter is...
What it all comes down to is...
The issue is clear...
In a nutshell... (what really goes in a nutshell?)
That's what the establishment says. (which establishment?)
Only a fool (commie, hippie, fascist, extremist, bigot) would believe...
...And "advertising copy" words
which emphasize power, strength, freedom, totality, perfection, or
exclusiveness:
Only Hotshot batteries give you continual
power and total quality high-tech performance every day of your car's life.
Smilefast has more strength to kill pain faster. (more than what? faster
than what?)
D. Useful Questions
1. Test your ideas with relative words.
A book, a trunk, or a door is either open or
shut, but a criminal case, an election, or a mind is often a bit of both.
English has lots of relative words which can make an absolute statement more
accurate: sometimes, some, few, most, occasionally, often, seldom help show
that the relationships you discuss in writing have complex histories or
multiple meanings. Try inserting these words in your most general statements,
when appropriate, to argue more accurately. The statements which result might
encourage you to think more deeply.
2. Find out what your thesis is and ask if
you really believe it.
When writers turn out papers quickly, working
either to please an outside authority or simply to get the assignment done,
they often say what they don't mean. From forced sincerity or artificial
arguing flow the illogical examples illustrated above. Merely correcting a
random sentence by making its absolute claims sound relative is not enough. A
good writer asks, sometimes uncomfortably, what she believes and why. Asking
that question may make writing a paper more work, but it will lead to clearer
thinking and stronger writing.
3. Deliberately draft a bad argument.
Sometimes writers work better when they
deliberately take time to exorcise the demons of false reasoning before
writing a serious and convincing argument. Writing a parody of your own best
argument can show you what won't support it: slippery statistics, hasty
inferences, puffy quotes from big shots, mad leapies, innuendoes and outright
lies. Having "argued" that Edgar A. Guest is a better poet than
Shakespeare, that Emily Dickinson was the illegitimate son of Charles Dickens;
having "demonstrated" that the world began on October 31, 1144 B.C.
at 4:30 p.m., or that all Siberian violinists are schizophrenics, you now have
a standard of comparison. Nonsense can lead to good sense.
Misuse
Of Evidence
Generalizations
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