Making Generalizations

We make generalizations every day about groups of people or things. It is important when making generalizations that we have a good sample. If I was doing a survey on the necessity of shaving and only interviewed girls I shouldn’t generalize and say that everyone thinks shaving is important. Because I did not survey any males in my study my outcome is inaccurate. Another important aspect of generalizing is to make sure my sample is representative. On top of interviewing both sexes I should also search for people of different cultures and ages. I should try and make sure that I have a large sized group of randomly selected people that I interview as well. Lastly I should have made sure my sample was studied well. I should make sure the people I am interviewing fit the criteria of my study. For example I wouldn’t interview my 6 year old cousin about shaving because she is too young t shave.

What i have learned

Over the course of this semester I have not only increased my knowledge of argumentative and reasoning skills but I have also learned a lot about myself. One of the most interesting concepts I learned were all the different types of appeals. People use all different types of appeals such as sympathy and fear to convince others to join their cause or support them and I never realized how gullible I was to most of them. I realized that I am easily convinced by advertisements specifically those that use the appeal to sympathy. Overall I think I have learned how to strengthen the claims I make from exercises about repairing and analyzing arguments. The examples in the book about these helped me realize common mistake I make all the time in my arguments and I learned ways to repair them and make them stronger. Another important concept I learned was how much being clear and concise in an argument makes a difference. In the group facilitation study a lot of the arguments the people made were vague and did not offer much support. I realize that the people who spoke and gave strong reasons with lots of support were often the ones who had an impact on the decision of the group.

My likes and dislikes

I have never taken an online class before so I was kind of excited to not have to go to class and just complete the work on my own. I really like working on the group projects. Although sometimes it was stressful it really helped me improve my communication skills and learn to work with people even if you cannot always meet in person. One thing I didn’t like about the class was having to post blogs 12 hours apart. I completely understand the point of having time restrictions and it definitely helped me from slacking off and waiting till 9 pm on Saturday night to finish them all. However sometimes I would get really busy and do all my blogs on one day earlier in the week but then forget to post them later so I would have to wake up at odd times in the night to make sure I could get them all in twelve hours apart.