David Morrow and Anthony Weston build on Weston's acclaimed A Rulebook for Arguments to offer a complete textbook for a course in critical thinking or informal logic. Features of the book include: Homework exercises adapted from a wide range of actual arguments from newspapers, philosophical texts, literature, movies, YouTube videos, and other sources.Practical advice to help students succeed when applying the Rulebook's rules.Suggestions for further practice that outline activities students can do by themselves or with classmates to improve their critical thinking skills.Detailed instructions for in-class activities and take-home assignments designed to engage students in critical thinking.An appendix on mapping arguments, a topic not included in the Rulebook, that introduces students to this vital skill in evaluating or constructing complex and multi-step arguments.Model responses to odd-numbered exercises, including commentaries on the strengths and weaknesses of selected model responses as well as further discussion of some of the substantive intellectual, philosophical, and ethical issues raised by the exercises. The third edition of Workbook contains the entire text of the recent fifth edition of the Rulebook, supplementing this core text with extensive further explanations and exercises. Updated and improved homework exercises ensure that the examples continue to resonate with today’s students. Roughly one-third of the exercises have been replaced with updated or improved examples. A new chapter on engaging constructively in public debates—including five new sets of exercises—trains students to engage respectfully and constructively on controversial topics, an increasingly important skill in our hyper-partisan age. Three new critical thinking activities offer further opportunities to practice constructive dialogue.

“This short book makes you smarter than 99% of the population. . . . The concepts within it will increase your company’s ‘organizational intelligence.’. . . It’s more than just a must-read, it’s a ‘have-to-read-or-you’re-fired’ book.”—Geoffrey James, INC.com From the author of An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language, here’s the antidote to fuzzy thinking, with furry animals! Have you read (or stumbled into) one too many irrational online debates? Ali Almossawi certainly had, so he wrote An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments! This handy guide is here to bring the internet age a much-needed dose of old-school logic (really old-school, a la Aristotle). Here are cogent explanations of the straw man fallacy, the slippery slope argument, the ad hominem attack, and other common attempts at reasoning that actually fall short—plus a beautifully drawn menagerie of animals who (adorably) commit every logical faux pas. Rabbit thinks a strange light in the sky must be a UFO because no one can prove otherwise (the appeal to ignorance). And Lion doesn’t believe that gas emissions harm the planet because, if that were true, he wouldn’t like the result (the argument from consequences). Once you learn to recognize these abuses of reason, they start to crop up everywhere from congressional debate to YouTube comments—which makes this geek-chic book a must for anyone in the habit of holding opinions.

This book provides you with all the tools you need to write an excellent academic article and get it published.

Giving Reasons prepares students to think independently, evaluate information, and reason clearly across disciplines. Accessible to students and effective for instructors, it provides plain-English exercises, helpful appendices, and a variety of online supplements.

In the past 15 years a host of critical thinking books have appeared that teach students to find flaws in the arguments of others by learning to detect a number of informal fallacies. This book is not in that tradition. The authors of this book believe that while students learn to become vicious critics, they still continue to make the very mistakes they criticize in others. Thus, this book has adopted the approach of teaching the construction of good arguments first and then introducing criticism as a secondary skill. Moreover, the emphasis of the book is not on learning to name fallacies, but on being able to identify weaknesses in an argument so as to be able to construct an effective critique of that argument. The book is accompanied by a workbook featuring a wealth of examples to help students acquire the material.

Also contains the entire text of the fourth edition of the Weston's Rulebook, while supplementing this core text with extensive further explanations and exercises.