Megan Lynch 2/28

Last night we handed in our outlines for our research paper. With in those outlines we focused on what points we were actually trying to get across with our writing. Today, we discussed counter claims. We started off class by answering two questions. The first was what is a counter claim? As a class we said it was a claim that goes against your argument. This claim has to already exist in your argument as well. For example, for my research paper I'm arguing that a plant based diet is the ultimate diet for humans, if I were to say "every person can receive all the nutrients they need from plants" a counter argument could be that plants don't have vitamin d or as much protein as animals. The next question we had to answer was, how should you use a counter claim in your paper? It should be used to refute. Going back to my previous example, I could refute that by saying "humans do not need mass amounts of either of those nutrients, vitamin d can easily be gotten by 15 minutes in the sun, and mass amounts of protein is not healthy and can't always be easily digested, but there are plenty of plant foods, such as soy, with lots of protein in it." Next in class we referred back to "Bowling for Columbine" to get practice with counter claims. We looked at the argument made by the opposition, that Marilyn Manson through his music has created a violent culture and is the reason for school shootings. This argument got refuted with real evidence and logic, with the director of the movie and Marilyn Manson bringing u other issues going on during that time that would make more sense to effect violence. After this we began an assignment on logical fallacies. This assignment will be worked on Wednesday in class as well. Each group of tables got assigned a row of words from a website linked on the Google classroom. Together the groups defined these words in their own words on the assignment, and then separately picked one fallacy to relate to a counter claim and claim for their research paper.


An illustration representing a logical fallacy