232 CHAPTER 8 | FRom ETHos To Logos: APPEALing To YouR REAdERstesting assumptions like this one — that any attempt to create change is
doomed to failure because women do not receive equal pay for equal work.
We could ask, for example, whether inequities persist in the public sector.
And we could point to other areas where the women’s movement has had
measurable success. Title IX, for example, has reduced the dropout rate
among teenage girls; it has also increased the rate at which women earn
college and graduate degrees.- Bandwagon. When an author urges readers to accept an idea be -
cause a significant number of people support it, he or she is making
a band wagon argument. This is a fairly common mode of argument in
ad vertising; for example, a commercial might attempt to persuade us to
buy a certain product because it’s popular.
Because Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley have all added a multicultural compo-
nent to their graduation requirements, other institutions should do so as well.
The growing popularity of an idea is not sufficient reason to accept that it
is true. - Begging the Question. This fallacy entails advancing a circular argu-
ment that asks readers to accept a premise that is also the conclusion read-
ers are expected to draw:
We could improve the undergraduate experience with coed dorms because both
men and women benefit from living with members of the opposite gender.
Here readers are being asked to accept that the conclusion is true despite
the fact that the premises — men benefit from living with women, and
women benefit from living with men — are essentially the same as the con-
clusion. Without evidence that a shift in dorm policy could improve on
the undergraduate experience, we cannot accept the conclusion as true.
Indeed, the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. - False Analogy. Authors (and others) often try to persuade us that
something is true by using a comparison. This approach is not in and of
itself a problem, as long as the comparison is reasonable. For example:
It is ridiculous to have a Gay and Lesbian Program and a Department of
African American Culture. We don’t have a Straight Studies Program or a
Department of Caucasian Culture.
Here the author is urging readers to rethink the need for two academic
departments by saying that the school doesn’t have two other departments.
That, of course, is not a reason for or against the new departments. What’s
needed is an analysis that compares the costs (economic and otherwise) of
starting up and operating the new departments versus the contributions
(economic and otherwise) of the new departments. - Technical Jargon. If you’ve ever had a salesperson try to persuade you to
purchase a television or an entertainment system with capabilities you abso-
lutely must have — even if you didn’t understand a word the salesperson was
saying about alternating currents and circuit splicers — then you’re familiar
with this type of fallacy. We found this passage in one of our student’s papers:
08_GRE_5344_Ch8_211_256.indd 232 11/19/14 11:04 AM