Analysis Paper
Write a 500-word analysis paper.
• Directions: Below you will find links to two articles on a controversial moral issue. Select one of these articles and write a critical analysis of the author’s reasoning. Use terms from the readings and the knowledge gleaned from tellwalter.com from Modules 2-7.
Read both of the following articles and select one to analyze:
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▪ James Martin, Why gun control is a religious issue
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=5250
▪ Marko Kloos, The Gun is Civilization
http://www.beaufortobserver.net/hc.e.257862.lasso
• Using the methods of creative and critical thinking developed in this course, carefully analyze and criticize the article you have selected. Discuss whether the author of the article proves his/her conclusion by the reasoning he/she uses to back it up. This involves the following analytical activities:
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o Checking for fallacies in the author’s premises,
▪ Exposing mistaken assumptions,
▪ Suggesting a creative solution to the main problem you find with the author’s view.
▪ Checking for accuracy of factual claims,
▪ Showing that there are objections to the author’s argument that the author fails to address,
▪ Determining whether the evidence provided is sufficient to establish the conclusion
▪ Suggesting a creative solution to the main problem you find with the author’s view.
• You are free to use belief-scan for checking for fallacies. However, you should be discrete in the fallacies you identify using this tool. As some findings may be less significant than others, you should be selective in what you use from your belief-scan analysis. (identifying one or two major fallacies which you carefully examine and discuss is far better than pointing to many trivial or relatively insignificant ones). Remember that this is an essay and not merely a list of fallacies that were picked up in scanning the article.
• Since this assignment is to criticize the view taken by an author in one of the articles given above, it is preferable to choose a selection that you think can be most successfully be criticized–that is, most readily shown to have a weak argument for its conclusion. Note however that you can agree with an author’s conclusion while not necessarily agreeing with the reasoning by which the author arrived at that conclusion. e.g., many people believe that abortion should not be illegal but that doesn’t mean they would agree with a pro-choice proponent who thought that abortion should be legal because a fetus was merely a cluster of cells.
