Revising for Logical Fallacies

This lesson is part of a unit on persuasive writing. In this lesson students learn about specific logical fallacies, how to identify them and how to correct them.  The main objective in this lesson is to help students look for logical weaknesses in their argumentative thesis papers. 

I walk students through the slides fairly slowly, asking them for examples as we go and encouraging them to think carefully about each logical fallacy.  

The discussion about assumptions of common sense and overgeneralizations are particularly lively as students try to think of a piece of knowledge that everyone would know.  I remind them of the breadth of human experience and the importance of acknowledging that in their papers by carefully documenting their sources of information. I point out that well-documented papers look better because it shows that they care about their topic and they believe in what they are writing enough to learn about it and support it.