Don’t commit the “straw man” fallacy.
The “straw man” is a particular type of logical fallacy. According to our textbook, “a straw man argument is a diversionary tactic that sets up another’s position in a way that can be easily rejected” (57). In other words, if a particular counterargument is too difficult or too complex to respond to in an easy or simple way, we sometimes create an oversimplified or otherwise distorted version of that counterargument–a version that’s easier to rebut.
The problem is that you’re being unfair to the opposing viewpoint, since you’re giving the reader a less than accurate version of it. Moreover, by dumbing down your counterarguments, you’re effectively dumbing down your own paper; you’re preventing your own argument from developing and growing stronger.
How do we prevent this? By actually citing and quoting from a source every time we raise a counterargument.
Consider the following example, from one of your drafts:
Some may say, that vaccines are harmful because they contain toxins such as mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde, and antifreeze. (For example?) The truth, however, is that vaccines are mostly water with antigens that require additional ingredients in order to stabilize the solution or increase the vaccine’s effectiveness. (CITE) Parents worry about mercury because some vaccines used to contain the preservative thimerosal, which breaks down into ethylmercury. Researchers now know that ethylmercury doesn’t accumulate in the body—unlike methylmercury, the neurotoxin found in some fish. But thimerosal has been removed from all infant vaccines since 2001. (CITE HERE) Also, it is true that vaccines contain aluminum salts. Yet, these are used to enhance the body’s immune response, stimulating greater antibody production and making the vaccine more effective. Although aluminum can cause greater redness or swelling at the injection site, the tiny amount of aluminum in vaccines—less than what kids get through breast milk, formula, or other sources—has no long-term effect and has been used in some vaccines since the 1930s. (CITE) Dr. Ari Brown adds, “It’s in our soil, in our water, in the air. You’d have to leave the planet to avoid exposure.” As for antifreeze, it is simply not in vaccines. Parents may be confusing its chemical names—both ethylene glycol and propylene glycol—with the ingredients used in the vaccine-manufacturing process (such as polyethylene glycol tert-octylphenyl ether, which is not harmful). (CITE)
Another point: target audience(s).
Many of you are leaving it unclear exactly who your target audience is. To whom does your argument matter? If your paper doesn’t answer this question yet, a good place to do it is in the concluding paragraph. Indeed, specifying the target audience is in many ways the perfect job for a concluding paragraph. A good strategy for doing this in your concluding paragraph would be to be extremely straightforward, using some variation on the following:
(Pretend, for example, that I’ve written a paper arguing that daily use of smart phones and other social media-equipped technologies is bad for children’s psychological and social development.)
To conclude, allow me to address an important question that I have yet to address head-on: to whom does this topic matter? As I see it, the issues discussed in this paper have the most immediate consequences for two audiences in particular. The first is parents. Given the numerous negative effects that social media use has on the adolescent brain, parents should find ways to limit the time that their children spend using such technologies. A second audience that has a stake in this topic is public school administrators. Given that most parents can’t monitor their children’s activity 24/7, part of the burden falls upon school administrators to more effectively crack down on social media use during school hours.
MLA Info
1) Citing a book:
Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. Publisher, Publication Date.
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. Penguin, 1987
In-text citations for books:
Gleick argues that “akdsfnadskngsdl” (12).
As one critic puts it, “akdsfnadskngsdl” (Gleick 12).
2) Citing a scholarly article:
Author(s). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal, Volume, Issue, Year, pages.
Duvall, John N. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo’s White Noise.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3, 1994, pp. 127-53.
In-text citation for scholarly articles:
Duvall argues that “sngsdkjgn” (145).
As one critic puts it, “asjdngsfjkgnsjkdng” (Duvall 145).
3) Citing web sources:
Last name, First name. “Page Title.” {if no clear title is given, use what’s written in the tab title} Website title. Sponsoring Institution/Publisher {usually by the copyright symbol at the bottom of the page}, Publication Date. Date Accessed.
Lundman, Susan. “How to Make Vegetarian Chili.” eHow, http://www.ehow.com/how_10727_make-vegetarian-chili.html. Accessed 6 July 2015.
In-text citations for web sources are difficult to wrap one’s head around at first. This is because there are no page numbers. So if not the page number where you’ve found the quote, what do you put in the parenthetical citation?
The answer is simple: you put the first thing that appears on the Works Cited page entry for that source. This would be the author’s last name, or if no author is given, then the title of the web page. Examples:
There is evidence of this commonly held misconception all over the web; as one commentator puts it, “blabh lakblkanfdklnafbn” (Kennedy).
*If you use the author’s name when you introduce the quote, no parenthetical citation is necessary:
Kennedy exemplifies this commonly held misconception when he asserts that “blabh lakblkanfdklnafbn.”
In-text citation for a web source when no author is given:
There is evidence of this commonly held misconception all over the web; as one anonymous commentator puts it, “blabh lakblkanfdklnafbn” (“10 Fatal Diseases Curable Simply by Drinking Lemon Water”).
Here are some more helpful tips regarding how to locate all the bibliographic data for a web source:
http://courses.semo.edu/library/infolit/mlastyle_web.htm
Rhetoric & Writing I 