Chapter 16

Chapter 16 of Everything's an Argument was about the various types of evidence you could use when making an argument. It discusses that the kind of evidence that is most effective is dependent on what subject your paper is about. For example, in a scientific field, the most effective kind of evidence would be one that is quantitative, whereas in another kind of field, it would be not as effective or even impossible to find. It goes on and talks about specific types of evidence and when they could be used.

The type of evidence that caught my attention the most was personal evidence. It could be really powerful evidence, but the book says that it should be used when there is other evidence to back up your claim since if there was only personal experience in an argument, it usually will not hold much ground. However, it can be really interesting, so it could likely be used to draw in an audience.

The reason I found this interesting is because in my cultural anthropology classes, most of the required reading are books about field work. They usually take place in a different country and just talk about what sort of cultural aspects they see over a span of a year or two. Personal experience is the basically the only type of evidence given, yet, from my experience of the few books I have read, their claims are really compelling. I suppose it really depends on the anthropologist's ethos on whether it is effective or not though since for their evidence to have any weight whatsoever, you must really trust the author. It also depends on how he conducts research as well. If he just looks at the people from a distance, it would not be as effective as one that actually takes part in the culture's festivities. So, I guess the effectiveness of your evidence is really dependent on what you are talking about.

Chapter 13: Style in Arguments

In this chapter, how style is applied in arguments and suggestions on how to improve your style in an argument is discussed. First, to understand how to improve your style, you must have a general understanding of the style you are going to use in your argument. The three basic styles of communication are high, very formal language such as what is used when developing a bill or talking about an issue to the government; middle, common language used around people such as coworkers or people you don't know very well; and low, which is used among friends or on sites like Facebook. Once you know your basic style, you could apply the appropriate word choice, sentence structure, and punctuation.

Everyday we make these sort of judgements and determine what sort of speech (high, middle, or low) is appropriate in a given situation. Granted, sometimes we make a wrong decision, like how when I was in junior high, I used to curse around my parents, and I would be punished for doing so. That sort of language was not appropriate around my parents, and should have been used only around my friends if I chose to use it at all, but once you know your basic style of communication, you can find better ways to get your point across. Such as in a middle style, which is what I should have used around my parents, you could use euphemisms to express your anger with a situation. 

The part that takes the most amount of time in this chapter is how different types of figurative language could help you make your message clear, such as using inverted word order (where the parts of a sentence are not in the usual subject-verb-object order) to make your arguments more memorable. It goes on about other uses  for different figurative language as well, such as metaphors and similes, analogies, hyperboles, irony, et cetera. I found this to be the most important part of the reading since it is easier to improve on things such as your sentence structure and punctuation the more you write, but figurative language can be hard to really difficult to effectively use for anyone. In other words, even if they are good at developing analogies between things, some comparisons are just too hard to understand. For example, I could go on and on about how my life is like a 5 foot frog dancing next to a tow truck in the rain, but that might just confuse you more than actually giving you a clearer understanding of my life.