Chapter 12 Summary Developing Your Argument

Chapter 12 is about ways to support your thesis statement and develop your argument. It shows you effective ways of choosing reasons for various documents. For example, there is blog posts and academic essays. There are reports and articles. These are different types of documents with different types of readers or reasons. For blog posts and academic essays you would figure out what kind of observations would be most significant to your audience. For reports and articles you would basically do the same thing but think about who you are targeting. The next step is selecting evidence to support your reasons.  This is just the general information you have collected over the course of your assignment. Different documents require different evidence. Appealing to your readers is a easy way to convince them to believe what you're saying. The different ways of doing this that the chapter talks about would be appealing to authority, emotion, or the principles and values of your readers. This all depends on your target audience. Once you learn the different ways of appealing to your readers you can set out on persuading them through different reasoning. After you clearly draw out what your argument will be the next step is to look for your fallacies and make sure you don't fall into one of the categories that will hinder your argument.