Sunday, September 23, 2012

How my group organized the presentation on logical fallacies

Our group prepared a presentation on identifying logical fallacies. Jon Madden and I had both chosen logical fallacies as our topic, so we formed a group of two after checking everyone's topic. I moved over by Jon since I use my laptop. Once we got together, we began reviewing the assignment instructions and clarified what we needed to do. After that, we reviewed our topic by going to the LEO website and navigating to logical fallacies. Next, I searched through my Bedford Handbook to see if there were any topics on arguments and logic, and located a section on this, while Jon used Google to search for web resources on logical fallacies. After I finished looking through my book, I went to help search for web resources for use on logical fallacies. After evaluating several resources, we decided we would use the original LEO webpage, the Bedford Handbook, and a page from Purdue on logical fallacies as our sources. We then began to consider what specific logical fallacies we wanted to cover. We decided we should try to include two logical fallacies from each main category on the LEO website. We looked over each fallacy and considered what ones we found the most interesting and what ones we thought were either most important or most common. Eventually we agreed on the following: Appeal to Authority, Straw Man, Presupposition, Either-Or Fallacy, Slippery Slope, Circular Reasoning, Appeal to Force, Attacking the Speaker, Hiding Information/Half Truths and Hasty Generalization. After deciding on these ten logical fallacies, we began considering how to write up these fallacies for presentation. We decided we would need to provide a definition explaining each fallacy and an example applying to each fallacy for we would be able to show how the fallacy might appear in text or speech. At this point, we split the list in half for each of us could work on half of the definitions and examples, then we would put them together when we were finished. For each choice we analyzed the definitions provided by each source that covered that fallacy, and then paraphrased a definition of the fallacy based on that information. After completing the definition on a fallacy, we then went on to review the examples used in our sources, and created our own examples that properly applied to that fallacy. We then went on to repeat both these steps for each fallacy we had choose to cover. After we both completed our assigned fallacies, we posted them on our blogs, and then one of us copied them all into one post and formatted it to ensure consistency. We then reviewed our post for spelling and grammar, and then published a final copy. Once the final copy was published, each of us updated our post to show the final version. It was our plan to show these definitions and examples to the class, and then explain how the definitions apply to the examples during our presentation for the students would better be able to identify logical fallacies.

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