While reading this website about "casual arguments," I continuously looked back to the situation, where a bicycle swerves into traffic to avoid a truck, forcing a car to brake, which then got hit from behind. Even though the topic seems fairly easy to understand, this website was useful in showing me how complex and mind-boggling arguments can be devised.
The exercises saved the day for me, so they are the most useful part about this site. I was able to understand that comparing the situation argued about to other situations where an incident does not occur is part of making a strong casual argument. I recognize that the cause described in the argument has to be reasonable for the argument to be strong. I can also tell that there has to be just one significant difference or similarity from other situations for the argument to be strong. However, reading through the whole page made the information much more complex and harder to understand. Maybe it's just me, but the most useful part of this website was the very last section of the website, as well as the exercises. The rest was useful for giving me a headache.
I also find it quite interesting that while reading the page and the original example, and debating the argument over who the accident was caused by, I clearly recognized right off the bat that legally, the second driver is at fault for the accident. Drivers who do not leave enough distance between themselves and the car in front of them are at fault. Somehow I still remember that from driver's ed.
I totally agree with your comment about the amount of reading on the page made my head spin a little. I think this website could have benefitted from having some sort of diagram or picture to illustrate what happened. For me, it was very hard to visualize what was actually being written. I do like how they described causation through the use of what would have normally happened without the truck, but otherwise I had to read and re-read things to even somewhat grasp what they were saying. In the end, I was able to understand it but only with some trouble. The exercises were the most clear to me and I appreciated them.
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