Week 13 — Build It, Then Break It: Your Persuasive Argument, Mapped and Tested — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 12 of the term — map your own persuasive claim with Toulmin's model, write its case as a syllogism, test its causal and analogical steps, label and repair fallacies, catch a chatbot's mislabel, and explain to a friend how a confident argument can still be unsound.

This week you learned the four types of reasoning, how to write a syllogism, Toulmin's map of an argument with its claim, evidence, and warrant, and the fallacies this course names. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's example, explain each one, build and test the argument inside the persuasive speech you will really give, and explain the idea to someone who has never taken a speaking course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Speech Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 4's oral citation: this week that citation becomes the evidence in a full argument, and the warrant is what makes it count.

The task

This week's shared example is the running speech's persuasive claim, which is illustrative and attributed to no one; its oral citations come from the course's mini-source set. Chapter 13 takes it apart:

• its claim is "Our campus dining hall should run a two-week plate-waste audit before deciding whether to remove trays.";
• its Toulmin map holds 1 claim, 2 pieces of evidence (oral citations 1 and 2), 1 warrant ("a campus should measure a change's effect before adopting it when the best available study found no significant effect"), 2 qualifiers ("for a two-week trial" and "in dining halls like ours"), and 1 rebuttal ("unless the audit costs more than the trial");
• its case, written as a syllogism, has 2 premises and 1 conclusion;
• the week labels 2 fallacies from the opening meeting (a hasty generalization and a slippery slope) and 4 spot-the-fallacy items (campus security's response time, a new manager and rising sales, food in the library, and helmets and safety); and
• an illustrative chatbot, asked to label "Sales at the café went up the month the new manager started, so the new manager caused the rise.", called it a hasty generalization "because it draws a conclusion from limited evidence and assumes the manager caused the increase," and called the running speech's compost-bin scene an appeal-to-emotion fallacy. Checked against the definitions, that is 1 wrong label, 1 blended explanation, and 1 legitimate appeal called a fallacy.

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

1. The running speech's Toulmin map holds 1 claim, 2 pieces of evidence, 1 warrant, 2 qualifiers, and 1 rebuttal. How many statements does the map hold in all?
2. The week labels 2 fallacies from the opening meeting and 4 spot-the-fallacy items. How many fallacy examples are labelled in all?
3. The running speech's syllogism has 2 premises and 1 conclusion. How many statements does the syllogism hold?
4. The chatbot's answer holds 1 wrong label, 1 blended explanation, and 1 legitimate appeal called a fallacy. How many problems does checking against the definitions catch in all?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation, and use your own persuasive speech, on a topic from the course's roster, for the parts that ask for it:

• Problem 1: map one main point of your own persuasive speech in five labelled lines: claim, evidence written as a complete oral citation from a real source you found and checked (who, what, and when before the evidence), warrant, qualifier, and rebuttal. Then use the look-it-up test in one or two sentences to show which line is your evidence and which is your warrant.
• Problem 2: label all six of the week's fallacy examples, and for the new-manager item, explain with the sorting question why it is false cause and not hasty generalization. Then name the fallacy your own speech is most at risk of and rewrite the sentence where it could creep in.
• Problem 3: write your own claim's case as a syllogism with one general premise, one specific premise, and the conclusion. Then find one causal or analogical step in your speech and test it: does it show more than sequence or correlation, or are the two cases alike in the ways that matter?
• Problem 4: in the illustrative chatbot answer described above (you do not need to open any tool), name its three problems (a wrong label, a blended explanation, and a legitimate appeal called a fallacy) and the fix for each, and explain when an emotional appeal is legitimate and when it becomes a fallacy.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin will speak for two minutes at a neighborhood association meeting in favor of a community garden on a vacant lot, and plans to say: "Everyone on our block wants it, and since the garden across town opened, people there started shopping at the corner stores more, so a garden will help our street's shops." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, why "everyone wants it" is not a reason on its own; why the shopping line confuses something that happened after with something that was caused; what your cousin could say instead; and one limit, such as adding "on our block" or dropping the shopping claim unless a real source backs it. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who will ask at a staff meeting for a new break-room coffee machine and plans to say, "The office upstairs got one, and their sick days dropped the next month, so it'll keep us healthy." Model answer: "The coffee machine might be a good idea, but the sick-day line will lose the people who think it through. Their sick days dropping after the machine arrived doesn't mean the machine did it; a mild flu season could explain it. Ask for the machine for the reasons you can back up, like the time people spend walking to the café. If you mention the other office at all, say it as what happened there, not as proof."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every total and every label without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single piece of work containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
• your five-line map and look-it-up sentences, your six labels and rewritten sentence, your syllogism and tested step, and your critique of the chatbot answer; and
• your message to your cousin, explaining in everyday words why popularity is not a reason on its own, why the shopping line confuses sequence with cause, what to say instead, and one limit.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a spoken explanation recorded as audio or video of about three minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counting, the mapping, the labelling, the citing, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Problem 4 asks you to critique a described, illustrative answer; you do not need to open any tool to do it. Submitting AI-generated work as your own or copying another student's work is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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