Chapter 16

Chapter 16 focuses on the importance and use of evidence in arguments.  The use of evidence is vital in most majors today, which is the primary focus in our next writing project.  Simply asserting a statement does not always guarantee that people will believe it. Evidence is a key component in convincing your audience to believe what you are presenting to them. Evidence is a large part of the science field, especially in the engineering and medical field.  Take for example, a medical journal. A medical journal will contain evidence of both ethos and logos. Logos as evidence helps establish ethos in this particular example. Researchers spend millions of dollars to collect hard evidence to prove that their findings are credible and that the data that is found can be repeatable for other researchers interested in the same field.  Personally I would not want to take a pharmaceutical drug that does not list side effects and the efficiency of that drug. Evidence is what people seek before trialing these pharmaceutical drugs. When big companies introduce drugs commercially, they must collect data (evidence) before introducing the drug commercially. The labels on prescription bottles are the evidence (logos) that these companies find and publish.

Another form of evidence is the evidence in analytical a papers. You can provide evidence in the form of quotations or paraphrasing from other sources to provide evidence for your argument. This is an example of the evidence we used in the previous two writing projects in this class. Evidence helps make the statement you are trying to present more concrete. People are more willing to side with your stance in an argument more easily if evidence is provided. I would consider evidence highly crucial in any paper, or oral argument. Without evidence, an argument is empty words.

Style and Word Choice

Chapter thirteen focuses on style and presentation in arguments. The section I found most interesting was the section on the style and word choice. Vocabulary helps define your style in an argument. The vocabulary used also sets the tone in your argument. I took notice of the activity on page 420, and I found it really useful in comparing pictures to different styles of writing. Take for example the picture below, when a person looks at this picture they mentally link this picture as  laid back, and casual.

This type of style correlates to some styles authors use. The words, "cat, help, bag, and book," are some casual words. This sort of style relates to a younger audience, or to an audience attracted to lower level vocabulary.

Now for this next example, the picture displayed above. The clothes represent a more "work attire" look. This correlates to a more sophisticated style of writing. So instead of using words like "cat, or help," you can use different synonyms of these words to attract a different audience. You could replace the list of words above with "feline, assistance, tote, and novel." So you advanced a step ahead of the style of writing. This style can be for a general audience, usually young adults and college students.

Now the example above, is what most deem "wedding attire." People are only going to wear this type of clothing if they are going to a formal event. This style of attire can correlate to the most sophisticated of writing styles. A sophisticated writing style is more complicated and takes more knowledge to comprehend as the vocabulary is higher. So replacing the first list of words, you would use, "felis catus, succor, satchel, and dissertation." You can see how the difference in the style of wording use. And this would be examples of different styles of writing.