Thursday, September 16, 2010

Fallacies: Straw Man

I was lucky enough to have already encountered this type of fallacy in my English 1B class, so I was able to use the book that we used in class for reference which was Writing Logically, Thinking Critically by Sheila Cooper and Rosemary Patton. According to the book, a Straw Man argument is when “a person creates and then attacks a distorted version of the opposition’s argument.”  For example:

The manager wants to put up new shelves for shoes, clothes, and accessories. She said she might  hire someone new to help in the store too. And she's going to decrease our salary to be able to do it.   

In a Straw Man fallacy the statement says something positive that will completely deceive the reader as if everything about it is great. However after describing the statement in a positive note, the statement would suddenly distort the argument by identifying something negative that would oppose what was first specified. By doing so, it discourages the reader to believe all the positive statements mentioned because of the negative comment, thus making the reader think negatively of the statement.


1 comment:

  1. I liked your post very much. Your post demonstrated very well that you knew this topic and it actually taught me a lot about the Straw man fallacy. I also liked your example of the manager and his workers because it demonstrated how a positive statement can change into a negative one very clearly. I am glad that your English 1b class coincided with our class because thanks to your incite I got to know more about this concept which made my post better and allowed me to understand this concept better. Over all this was a good post that allowed me to better understand this concept.

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