Week 10 Post 3: Chapter 14

Something that I found from Chapter 14 interesting is about Generalizations. From the Epstein text means that we are to make a claim about an issue, such as for a group or population to generalize an argument. There are three different things to point out for generalizations: 1. The sample is representative 2. The sample is big enough 3. The sample is studied well. What I just listed are all the things for premises to be considered as a good generalization.  In other words, for generalizations to be accurate, we need to consider the population as a whole with enough data to prove the problem. There should also be a small error margin for the population. This also includes variation, because it gives the data different things to compare it with. If we were to just compare one issue by itself, there wouldn’t be a correct answer due to the fact that you are basing your answers with one type of generalization.

Week 10 Post 2: What I Learned

There were so many things that I have learned from this class. To begin with I wasn’t taking this class seriously, but as the semester went on, I found that a lot of the things that we learned in class is beneficial to our every day lives. The skills that I have obtained from the class consist of learning how to communicate effectively with people in general.  This skill was most used when we had to do our group presentations. We needed to learn how to communicate with each other effectively such as, set up times to meet up to discuss with group projects, how to divide up the work and how we should write the paper itself. I also learned how to visually see how people communicate from our last group project, the group facilitation project. I was able to spot who the leader is and how the group interacted throughout the meeting. I feel that learning this technique has bettered my communication skills.

Week 10 Post 1: Best, Least and Improved

My favorite part about the class is that I was able to do all the stuff online. This made it convenient for me to do it at the comfort of my own house. I also liked how the professor made it so easily to contact her and help me whenever I was in need. She is a quick responder and is willing to help to the full extent. My least favorite part about this class is that when we are to post up blogs, we have to wait a full 12 hours until we can post our new blog. I feel that it’s unnecessary and we should be able to post stuff regularly and whenever we feel like without the time constraint. I feel that this class is good the way it is. It is straight forward and easy to understand. To improve this class, I feel that if we just skipped the 12 hour limit would be more helpful and easier for students.

Week 9 Post 3: Chapter 15- Tracing the Cause Backwards

After I read Chapter 15, I found many topics in there interesting and fun to talk about. If I were to choose one thing to focus on, it would be about tracing the cause backwards. I thought the example in the Epstein text very funny brought up many situations that happened in the real world. In the text, it has an incident were Spot caused Dick to wake up. But did he really? An example that happens in the real world would be car accidents. One thing leads to another to cause something to happen. It usually has a lot that leads up to the accident, such as it was raining at night and Sam didn’t see the car in front of him stop abruptly. But the car in front may say that it was because there was a woman crossing the street when she wasn’t suppose to. The woman may say it was because she was late for dinner. This can lead to a very long and difficult story. But with tracing the cause backwards, we can see step by step to see what caused the problem.  

Week 9 Post 2: Mission Critical Website

I found the Mission Critical website easy to follow and understand. I liked the fact the there is everything you need to understand terms. Bullet points used in the website made it easy to locate and search for, especially difficult concepts. I thought that this website should be shown to everyone taking a Comm class because it is really useful. As I clicked in Appeal to Pity, a whole page of information came up about this topic. It gives great examples and definitions of the word that made me understand it better. I also like how it has review problems for fallacies. For me, fallacies were one of the difficult concepts to understand. Therefore having the fallacy exercises really helped. It also includes answers and examples of you are stuck on a problem or you don’t understand the question. Looking at this site, I tried to review other topics that I didn’t understand and I found this site to be very handy, I will definitely add to it my bookmarks. 

Week 9 Post 1: Cause and Effect Website

In my opinion, I thought that the Cause and Effect website very helpful and interesting. In the beginning as I was reading I thought it was kind of confusing due to the format of the website. It looks exactly like a textbook. But as I kept reading, I found it easy to understand because it had a lot of examples and the terms were easy to comprehend. I like how it lists out what is important on the site. Such as listing out what is needed in a causal argument, in other words, what to look for.

On the website it says that to be a causal argument it needs to fulfill 3 things:

1. how acceptable or demonstrable the implied comparison is

2. how likely the case for causation seems to be

3. how credible the “only significant difference” or “only significant commonality” claim is.

I felt that the examples that came after the 3 things listed were straight forward and helped me understand the whole concept. 

Week 8 Post 3: Casual Reasoning

There were a lot of things in this week’s reading that I found interesting. This includes all the different types of reasoning such as sign reasoning, reasoning by example, and the one that interested me the most casual reasoning. I think I was most attracted to causal reasoning because it’s the most basic. You don’t have to give a lot of in depth detail because it is based upon making it simple to understand. An example of causal reasoning would be, “ I need to find a dress for this weekend’s dinner dance. Therefore we should go shopping.” As you can see it is based on everyday life and it comes in and out of our daily conversations. After learning about this type of reasoning, it made me realize the little things when I talk to my mom or friends and how causal reasoning comes to be. Causal reasoning is one of the easy and simple reasoning’s to understand, but there are much more out there that can be made simple and fun to like.