Persuasive Paper Issues

11/15/2023 notes for ENSC 105W

Critical thinking

• Bloom’s Taxonomy

  • created by benjamin bloom

  • It is a hierarchy

    • 
    • as you move higher up the skills get harder
      • persuasive paper is around evaluate

  • The cognitive domain

    • knowledge

    • Comprehension

    • application

    • analysis

      • separating material

    • synthesis

      • put ideas together to form a whole

    • evaluation

  • Critical thinking and cognition

    • Critical thinking

      • involve application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation
      • the ability to ask questions
      • answering questions is easy
        • asking perceptive question is difficult

  • The effective Domain

    • Receiving phenomena:

      • learners demonstrate awareness, willingness to hear
      • selective attention

    • Responding to phenomena:

      • participate actively by attending
      • reacting to phenomenon

    • Valuing

      • attching worth to a particular object
      • phenomenon
      • behavior
      • ranging from simple acceptance

    • Organization

      • organizing values into priorities by contrasting different values

    • Internalizing Values

      • learners demonstrate a value system that controls their behavior in ways that are pervasive

  • The psycho-motor domain

    • Perception

      • Learners demonstrate the ability to use sensory cues

    • Mind set

      • Learners demonstrate a readiness to act

    • Guided response

      • learners are at the early stages in learning a complex skill that includes initiation and trail and error

    • mechanism

    • adaption

• Mental Models

  • Dualistic

    • analyzes problems as black and white

  • Relativistic

    • analyses the problem as shades of gray

  • Probabilistic

    • analyzes problems based upon the balance of probabilities

  • Commitment

    • analyzes problems based upon all of the above.

Recognizing and dealing with flaws

• Pitfalls in persuasive papers

  • No persuasion:

    • writing an informative paper instead of persuasive

  • Lost cause

    • choosing a persuasive topic but failing to establish common ground

  • Straw man:

    • arguing against a position that no reasonable, thinking person would hold

  • Bias:

    • Overstating your case
    • or using loaded language
    • onsided arguments

  • Overstatement:

    • making absolute statements
      • if one exception happens then it would weaken your argument

  • No support

    • lack of citations to provide support

  • Overwhelming

    • using too many citations, where possible use your words to convince
      • using synthesis

  • Dichotomous thinking

    • don’t have a binary system
      • use

• Post Hocfallacy

  • post hoc

    • false causation