Perspectives on Argument (5th Edition)

Think students shouldn't review textbooks? Why not? They're the ones who have to read them.

This book is surprisingly readable given the potential for boredom in a subject like argument. Unfortunately, there is a tendency towards memorizing new vocabulary without much in the way of applying the concepts.

The essays in the book, intended as examples, vary widely in quality. This would be okay, if the intention were to show examples of quality as opposed to examples of ARGUMENT.

I voluntarily used this book once, to brainstorm for an essay in another class. That's the only reason I didn't rate it lower.

The basics of academic writing are fairly straightforward. We need clear reasoning, hence a clear explanation of the basics of logic and of fallacies. We need to explain to students how to select research materials, how to distinguish trade books from academically kosher texts, and so on. And we also need an efficient writing guide that addresses these issues. This is not such a text.
Firstly, the text gives thin and often confusing advice on logic. Where Wood discusses critical thinking and fallacies, the explanations are very short (just five pages of a 750 page text concern fallacies, for example) and there are no real- world examples of the fallacies discussed. As such, the relevance of basic logic to the art of critical reading is not really obvious to the novice. This is bizarre, given that many of the (non- academic) reading examples in the text(such as Rush Limbaugh on 'femi-Nazis') are basically wall to wall fallacious, and much of the right wing conservative nonsense in the text's reading section is simply not diagnosed as such. Further, Wood's explanations of basic logical concepts are inexplicably confused- she gets inductive and deductive logic quite the wrong way around (p.201)- an error that would get any critical thinking tutor fired. This paucity of clarity is evident in some truly shocking advice given the student: advice that rather rejects the whole principle of research and cogent argumentation in the name of some muddled epistemic relativism that holds that everyone has a unique perspective that deserves respect. In particular, she advises authors to not clearly articulate their arguments for a given proposition because "a stated warrant [premise] negates the rich and varied perceptions and responses of the audience by providing only the author's interpretation and articulation of the warrant" (p.139). This emphasis on such irrelevant issues as 'establishing common ground'and 'establishing the rhetorical situation' makes much of the text worse than useless in trying to teach what college writing entails and requires. In suggesting that the misreadings of the reader are more important than clearly articulating one's own argument, Wood is, quite frankly, talking rubbish.
The text does include some solid examples of argumentative writing (such as Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter from Birmingham Jail") but there is no real explanation as to why such texts are persuasive without being fallacious. Further, many of the better essays in the text are far more sophisticated than the body text, making the overall work feel quite unbalanced.

Geoffrey Roche
Tokyo, Japan

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