Logic: Generalizations

Vague generalizations give comfort to the non-thinker, or to the thinker who feels fatigued, bored, or indecisive. Misuse of evidence sometimes helps generalizations do their work of oversimplifying. Good writers recognize that they will sometimes, because they are human, feel tired and lazy. 

They take breaks in order to gain new perspective on their words, seeking out the most persuasive aspects of arguments. Thinking of writing as persuasion helps a writer test for generalizations, prejudice, and empty rhetoric.

A. Either/Or

Either/or is the most common generalization, our heritage, in part, from elections where Candidate X and Candidate Y blitz each other into false extremes ("Either you vote for me or the entire country will go to hell in a handbasket").

In inaccurate either/or thinking, a specific first statement is attached to a huge and unwieldy second statement:

If you support the reporter's protection of sources, newspapers will become hostages to organized crime.
If professors start requiring more papers in their courses, everybody will start having nervous breakdowns.

Or the world is seen as offering only two choices:

America: Love It or Leave It.

B. Prejudice

Prejudice makes unfair generalizations about other people, prejudging their worth on the basis of false or irrational evidence. Prejudice refuses to recognize complexity and diversity. A common sign of prejudiced thinking is the argument ad hominem (at the man). This argument can support or undermine an issue by misusing the personality behind it:

Pat Snodgrass is the perfect candidate for President; he's good-looking, he used to play football, he makes good speeches, and he's a real family man.
Pat Snodgrass would make a terrible President; she's divorced, she speaks with that funny accent, and she's got support from some real weirdos.

"Get rid of prejudice" is not as useful a directive as "find out why you think this way." Prejudice is a sign of misused emotion in writing, but that doesn't mean all strong feeling is bad. A quote from Black Elk, an Oglala Sioux Indian who witnessed the wars for the Black Hills, illustrates how strong feeling, even so-called "partisan" feeling, can make writing beautiful and moving:

When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud....A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream....the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
(Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee)

C. Gas-bag Words

Certain words or phrases sometimes encourage you to oversimplify. They are signs of impatience, making you see the world in extremes, giving you false and facile choices, selling you a half-truth disguised as a fact:

The truth of the matter is...
What it all comes down to is...
The issue is clear...
In a nutshell... (what really goes in a nutshell?)
That's what the establishment says. (which establishment?)
Only a fool (commie, hippie, fascist, extremist, bigot) would believe...

...And "advertising copy" words which emphasize power, strength, freedom, totality, perfection, or exclusiveness:

Only Hotshot batteries give you continual power and total quality high-tech performance every day of your car's life.
Smilefast has more strength to kill pain faster. (more than what? faster than what?)

D. Useful Questions

1. Test your ideas with relative words.

A book, a trunk, or a door is either open or shut, but a criminal case, an election, or a mind is often a bit of both. English has lots of relative words which can make an absolute statement more accurate: sometimes, some, few, most, occasionally, often, seldom help show that the relationships you discuss in writing have complex histories or multiple meanings. Try inserting these words in your most general statements, when appropriate, to argue more accurately. The statements which result might encourage you to think more deeply.

2. Find out what your thesis is and ask if you really believe it.

When writers turn out papers quickly, working either to please an outside authority or simply to get the assignment done, they often say what they don't mean. From forced sincerity or artificial arguing flow the illogical examples illustrated above. Merely correcting a random sentence by making its absolute claims sound relative is not enough. A good writer asks, sometimes uncomfortably, what she believes and why. Asking that question may make writing a paper more work, but it will lead to clearer thinking and stronger writing.

3. Deliberately draft a bad argument.

Sometimes writers work better when they deliberately take time to exorcise the demons of false reasoning before writing a serious and convincing argument. Writing a parody of your own best argument can show you what won't support it: slippery statistics, hasty inferences, puffy quotes from big shots, mad leapies, innuendoes and outright lies. Having "argued" that Edgar A. Guest is a better poet than Shakespeare, that Emily Dickinson was the illegitimate son of Charles Dickens; having "demonstrated" that the world began on October 31, 1144 B.C. at 4:30 p.m., or that all Siberian violinists are schizophrenics, you now have a standard of comparison. Nonsense can lead to good sense.

   Misuse Of Evidence
   Generalizations