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Reviews of
Brooke Noel Moore
Making Your Case:
Critical Thinking and the Argumentative Essay
Mayfield, 1995
Making Your Case is a relatively short critical
thinking text, and that is one of the reasons I chose it, having
come to it from Critical Thinking, by Moore and Parker, which I found
to be overkill for my purposes. As you might expect, there are a number of
similarities in the two texts, both good and bad. Both were
successful texts in a classroom setting but, in this case, I think shorter
is better. I used Making Your Case for two semesters (four classes
total), about my average for a critical thinking textbook.
Moore begins with two chapters on "basic" or "essential"
elements, followed by three chapters on argumentation, one on rhetoric,
and one on fallacies. The deductive reasoning chapter, incidentally, begins
with a rule-based analysis of syllogisms (never using paradigms), and then
goes on to conditional arguments, while I almost always treat them in reverse order.
The chapter on fallacies is also slightly limited, in order to keep the book
short, but the most common are covered. Critical thinking texts and courses that end with
fallacies often produce students who think everything is a fallacy,
and Moore deals with this by adding a chapter on "Good Habits." The book
concludes with a baker's dozen of short editorial and op-ed essays which
I never bothered to use at all.
Moore's prose is usually clear and precise, adopting a
slightly informal tone, without oversimplifying either the concepts or the
level of language. The layout of the book is unremarkable; the only distracting
features are shaded boxes of quotations and illustrative digressions (which
I ignore and, I suspect, the students do as well) and cartoons (which are
sometimes fun). Each chapter contains helpful examples, and has several
sections of exercises at the end.
I found some concepts in this text annoying, just as I
did in Moore's and Parker's Critical Thinking. One of these, in a
chapter on challenging arguments, is the notion of a "hidden agenda," which
seems to me to be a misguided validation of an ad hominem
attack. And, in the chapter on fallacies, some of the explanations seem weak
or confused. But these are not necessarily problems in class: though I drew
a large "X" through it in my copy, the discussion of that "hidden agenda"
section was often one of the best classes of the course.
San Jose State University
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