Chapter 12 Summary - The Bedford Researcher

In chapter 12 of Mike Palmquist's book, The Bedford Researcher, Palmquist discuses how to develop your argument. The first half of the chapter is on how you can support your thesis statement by choosing reasons; selecting evidence to support your reasons; and deciding how to appeal to your readers. Something that Palmquist really emphasizes is appealing to your readers, you accomplish this through appeals to authority; appeals to emotion; appeals to principles, values, and beliefs; appeals to character; and appeals to logic, which includes deduction and induction. In the second half of chapter 12 Palmquist goes through how you can assess the integrity of your argument through the use of checking for fallacies based on distraction; looking for fallacies based on questionable assumptions; searching for fallacies based on misrepresentation; and locating fallacies based on careless reasoning. Within each of these fallacies categories is fallacies subcategories. Things like a red herring, stacking the deck, sweeping generalizations, non sequiturs, and circular reasoning are just to name a few of the way writers can get caught up in the integrity of their argument.