Friday, March 26, 2010
General Claims
From reading the first section of chapter 8, I can see that it focuses on making sure one does not generalize, or categorize everything in one way. For example, that statement I just made was a generalization. I was not suggesting categorizing every single thing when I wrote "everything," I was stating that everything in relation to the topic. Generalizing like this is confusing in conversation and argument making, and also makes your point less valid. When making a claim, you should be sure that you are phrasing it in a way that shows any exceptions, therefore not generalizing. Words such as "all" and "every" are strong indicators of generalization. These words work, if someone were to make a claim such as: "All blogs in this class are online." Yes, this is a generalization, yet a correct one. Still, for the most part, the use of these words make claims less valid.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think I wrote about general claims too but almost all of what I wrote was off the top of my head and vague and unhelpful probably. I don't really remember what I wrote about but I think some of it was probably about how people use general claims and how I was using them as well, but how all of my points were also vague generalizations so I never really learned my lesson. But I think I kinda got it when you said that generalizations make things less valid, even though the example of a generalization that you used was correct.
ReplyDelete