Naughty or Nice

A concept from the textbook that I think needs further discussion is the concept of Euphemism and Dysphemism. "Euphemism is a word or phrase that makes something sound better than a neutral description" and "dysohemism is a word or phrase that makes something sound worse than a neutral description" (O'hara 182). I feel that we use these two concepts more than we realize in life. Think about how many times when you are telling a story and something happened that you exaggerate it a little and use more dramatic words to make what happened seem more interesting or significant, that is using euphemism or dysphemism. Or when your trying to convince something it won't be so bad so you choose words that make it more or less of what it really is. When can see these concepts in our daily lives, our school lives, work lives and with our government. These concepts are always taking part in what we are doing.

Things I learned

When looking back over this semester and reflecting on what I have learned it kind of overwhelms me with how much I learned in such a short amount of time. What I think I benefited the most from and really sticks out in my mind is when making a claim or an argument how I form them. I now make sure I make good valid claims and arguments that are not too vague or misleading, because if they are misleading, vague or can even be considered a fallacy it does not make it easy to prove your point. Not to mention it does not speak well for your reputation. With my major being public relations I understand the importance of forming good arguments and claims to get your point across. I found this class to be a very practical class that I can use in my professional career and really enjoyed what I learned.

3 premises needed

When dealing with generalizations it is important to understand that you are still making an argument, it may not seem like you are but think about it you are making assumptions about a larger population or group based on your knowledge and information that you have gathered so you are arguing your point. So when you here generalizations you can examine them and evaluate them the same way you would any other argument claim made. You would examine and evaluate the generalization based on what we have learned over the semester such as is it too vague or does the premises followed by the conclusion, etc. Because generalizations are arguments it is important to know that there are three premises needed for a good generalization argument. These three premises that are need are the following: first, the sample has to be representative, second the sample has to be big enough, and third the sample has to be studied well.

Cause and Effect in Populations

I have noticed a trend that people use when making claims involving large populations and cause and effect…we generalize these claims. We make claims that if you do a then b will happen for example if you drive drunk then you will get a DUI and go to jail. Even though we know this is not necessarily true, there are plenty of cases when people drink and drive and don’t get caught. What we are doing when we make these generalized claims about a population is called cause in populations. The textbook says that “cause in populations is usually explained as meaning that given the cause, there’s a higher probability that the effect will follow than if there were not the cause” (Epstein, 320). The example the text provides is about smoking causes cancer. Like the DUI example this is not always true, but inevitably if you smoke long enough cancer will happen and if you drive enough times drunk you will get caught.

Mission Critical

I found the mission critical website to be useful for the amount of information it provided. It when in depth and detail all the key concepts from class this semester. I think I will be using this website as a study guide for the final. I also found the layout to be very convenient to navigate and go to the information that I wanted to read. Here is a little constructive criticism though, by making everything a hyperlink and that lighter blue and underlined it was not so easy to read at first (not reader friendly), everything kind of blended in together. Another part that I found I liked a lot is the interactive questions, you could click on the answer to the question you thought was right and find out if you were correct or not. If you got it wrong it explained why you might think that it was correct but also explain why it was not the correct choice. Always very helpful to explain why it was not correct instead of just saying that was the wrong answer.

Cause and Effect Website

The cause and effect website reading and exercises was useful for me because it helped me to really understand how cause and effect works in real life situations. By taking an example most everyone can relate to, because it is pretty safe to say that everyone has either ridden a bike, driven or at least rode in a car and seen or have been in an accident themselves. It is easy to come up with our own personal opinion on why the accident happened and what or who caused it, but to stop and think about the similarities between the different people involves reasoning is not something I do often. However, no I think I might start more often, because I think it can be a helpful way of forming a good argument by listening to what someone else is saying first. By listening to the other persons argument you may be able to pick up on something that you didn’t observe or a fact that you missed.

A Feel-Good Argument

We touched on feel good arguments in discussion question 2 of this week, but only by briefly answering a question about it. I thought it deserved a little more discussion. A feel good argument is defined by the text by Epstein as “one that appeals to our wanting to feel good about ourselves” (this argument is actually pretty self-explanatory in its name alone). Feeling good about our self’s includes physically, mentally and emotionally, so any argument that is appealing to how you feel about yourself in any of these ways is considered a feel-good argument. If you want to find examples of feel-good arguments a good place to look is cosmetic and beauty product advertisements or Victoria Secret’s ads. Arguments using this appeal are trying to get you to use their product or participate in their organization to make your self feel better. They often have a negative reputation, but these ads don’t always have to be a bad thing. Sometimes they can really help improve the way someone feels about himself or herself.