Favorite Concept

My favorite concept that we learned from the book was how to refute arguments.  I feel like this was by far the most applicable to my life and also it came up a lot in our final project.  This is when I could really see how forming arguments was important, but refuting them was equally important, especially in our mock business world setup.  In making decisions such as who to hire, being able to consider what someone says and then think of the pros and cons logically and be able to weigh them out loud in an argument is an extreme advantage.  The individuals participating in our group who were more skilled at it than others stood out tremendously and seemed to me to be most likely to actually be in a position of power like we set up at a meeting, being able to decide who to hire and not hire.  I hope this skill in particular will take me far in whatever line of work I end up going into. 

Favorite and Least Favorite Things about the Class

My favorite thing about this class was learning how to blog.  Even though my grandparents like to joke about how my generation blogs and “tweets” about everything, I happen to very technologically challenged and I have never even seen a blog before, much less write one.  I was surprised how easy it was for even me to figure out, it actually did not detract from my learning at all like I thought it would.  My least favorite part of the course was sometimes the content seemed a little repetitive or obvious, and even though I liked the focus it had I would have preferred something either a little faster paced or a little bit harder to understand.  All in all this class was nice and was a good experience for my first online class, because the fact that it was online did not detract from my learning experience one bit. 

What I learned

In this class I have learned how to get my point across in the most educated, meaningful way possible.  Someone once told me that it doesn’t matter how smart you are and how many good ideas you may have if you do not have the skills to present them in a positive way to people.  The communication skills in this class are unique because they are not just tailored to getting you through speeches in college or other things that seemed to be a trend in other communication classes; they are applicable to everyday life and also going to be very applicable to everyday life in the work force in all of our futures.  Working in groups, knowing how to argue in the most understandable and convincing way, and being able to come to a conclusion by stating premises that help build your point are just some examples of the major ideas that we learned in this course that I learned that really stuck with me. 

Chapter 15

A concept in chapter 15 that I found interesting is the concept of tracing the cause backwards.  One of my biggest pet peeves is when a person cannot take responsibility for their actions and excuse themselves by blaming other people or things that happened.  A lot of the time this is done by tracing the cause backwards.  Like the book said- you could trace the cause backwards and keep moving the cause of an event backwards forever.  I find the best and most honest and respectable way to explain the cause of something is to put the responsibility on yourself, and then if asked further you could explain some of the other causes that may have triggered an event.  Looking back in time and trying to figure out the exact cause of everything that happened can be a waste of time, what happened is done no matter how it was caused.  So be careful when you are tracing a concept backwards and make sure to, at most, only go back a little bit.   

mission : critical

I really liked the mission critical website.  It covered almost every single idea we have learned in class so far, and it is very organized and designed in a way that makes it very easy to understand.  The first section covers what arguments are made of and the basic element you find in an argument.  For example, in the section called “premises, conclusions, and support”, it explains that an argument has one conclusion, and two premises.  Then, it goes on to describe the many different ways a premises can be supported. It does a great job explaining a difficult concept in a fast, simple way.  I also like how it has lots of examples and practice quizzes, especially once it gets to the next section called “Analysis of Arguments”.  The sections progress in difficulty, which makes most sense and also makes the information the most easy to understand and grasp.  This is a great website and I am going to use it to study.   

Casual Arguements

To be honest, the cause and effect website did not help me very much.  The way it was worded was very confusing and was not straightforward enough to explain a new point.  However, what made it manageable and what was the most helpful thing about this web page was that the tracked the same example throughout the entire page, and every time they introduced a new topic (ie. how acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is), afterward they show a snippet of exactly what part of their example argument they are referring to with their slightly confusing statements.  Also, I like how they progress the example they add new information to teach us how tracking the information and events is important to figuring out what caused what and eventually the whole concept of causal arguments.  I would not rank this high as a learning site though, it almost confused me more than it helped.

Reasoning by Analogy

I looked up reasoning by analogy.  Reasoning by criteria was actually more difficult for me but I could not find any other sort of information on it.  Anyways, the page that I read, from Stanford, explains that reasoning by analogy is simply comparing two different things in a logical way.  Through a very lengthy and rather obtuse example about comparing fruit, they explain that in order to compare things you need to look at each individual aspect of them and see how they relate to each other.  Finally, when enough connections are made, or more connections are made to one idea than another, you can reason by analogy that there is a relationship between them.  This particular example REALLY emphasizes the importance of comparing ALL the aspects of the things you are comparing, and that way you have the most accurate conclusion that you can come to by this form of reasoning.