Using reason and emotion to persuade others is a daily part of every person’s life—private and public—and producing effective arguments is a vital skill in and out of school.

There are two arguments to be made here: (1) as an incentive, letter grades obscure whether true learning occurs, and (2) written evaluations are more valuable and useful than letter grades.

In this chapter we will consider conditionals and arguments—how they are related and how they differ—as we segue into the study of formal logic. A conditional is an IF-‐THEN statement.

Usually you’re expected to identify and analyze the arguments made in the readings you do for your course and assignments. In this video, we’ll give some tips on how you can do that …

Arguments allow us to communicate our ideas— and the reasons we have for our ideas— to other people. Arguments are the way that we work through big, complex ideas, and try to determine …

Argument: An argument is a collection of sentences that attempt to establish that some conclusion is true. It is trying to CONVINCE us of something, or PROVE something to us. It supplies …

Arguments and Proofs For the next section of this course, we will study PROOFS. A proof can be thought of as the formal representation of a process of reasoning. Proofs are comparable to …