The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Making of Arguments, by J. H. Gardiner

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Title: The Making of Arguments

Author: J. H. Gardiner

Release Date: August 3, 2004 [EBook #13089]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE MAKING OF ARGUMENTS

J.H. GARDINER

FORMERLY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

1912

TO MY FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES ON THE STAFF OF ENGLISH A

PREFACE

The object of this book is to lay out a course in the writing of
arguments which shall be simple enough for classes which give only a
part of the year to the work, and yet comprehensive enough for special
classes in the subject. It is especially aimed at the interests and
needs of the student body as a whole, however, rather than at those of
students who are doing advanced work in argumentation. Though few men
have either the capacity or the need to become highly trained
specialists in the making of arguments, all men need some knowledge of
the art. Experience at Harvard has shown that pretty much the entire
freshman class will work with enthusiasm on a single argument; and they
get from this work a training in exact thought and a discipline that
they get from no other kind of writing.

Accordingly I have laid out this book in order to start students as soon
as possible on the same kind of arguments that they are likely to make
in practical life. I have striven throughout to keep in mind the
interests and needs of these average individuals, who in the aggregate
will tread such a variety of paths in their passage through the world.
Not many of them will get to Congress, there to make great orations on
the settlement of the tariff, and the large majority of them will not go
into the law; and even of the lawyers many will have little concern with
the elaborate piecing together of circumstantial evidence into the basis
for a verdict. But all of them will sooner or later need the power of
coming to close quarters with more or less complicated questions, in
which they must bring over to their views men of var