• 3-minute read
• 30th July 2016

How to Argue Badly: 4 Mistakes to Avoid when Writing an Essay

Part of academic writing is knowing how to construct a good argument. And a big part of constructing a good argument is avoiding the common mistakes that often pop up in essays.

These poor arguments are known as fallacies – arguments that sound convincing but contain hidden mistakes. In today’s blog post, we look at four of the most common.

1. Straw Man Arguments

Sadly, this has little to do with scarecrows. Instead, it implies constructing an idea that is easy to argue against, rather than engaging with the real issue.

Usually, this involves exaggerating or misrepresenting something to make it sound worse, like when some American politicians invented the idea of ‘death panels’ in the NHS to argue against federal healthcare.

There are, of course, no such thing as ‘death panels’ in the NHS, so the premise of the argument is wrong, making the argument itself invalid.

2. Circular Arguments/Begging the Question

This fallacy involves assuming the truth of what you are trying to prove as part of your argument. A classic example is appealing to the Bible to prove the infallibility of God:

Premise 1: The Bible is the word of God.

Premise 2: The Bible says the word of God is infallible.

Conclusion: The Bible is infallible because it is the word of God and the word of God is infallible because the Bible tells us so.

Here, we appeal to the infallibility of God to prove that the Bible is true, and to the truth of the Bible to prove that God is infallible. But this leads us in circles, as each premise only holds true if we accept the other one first.

3. Hasty/Sweeping Generalisations

One of the most common mistakes made in academic writing involves generalising from a small sample to a much larger population. We might say, for instance:

All ten people in my survey said they loved Marmite; therefore, everyone in the world loves Marmite.

But we are not justified to make this leap based on a sample of ten when there are more than seven billion people in the world. It would also undermine Marmite’s marketing strategy.

4. Correlation vs. Causation

Another classic error is to confuse correlation and causation. This occurs when we assume that two things occurring together means that one causes the other one. For example, we could argue that:

Atheism and helicopter ownership have both increased since 1800, so atheism must cause helicopter ownership.

This is clearly a ridiculous conclusion, since there is no reason to assume that atheism and helicopters are related. But such mistakes are common in statistical analysis, partly because a cause will always correlate with its effect (such as the correlation between smoking and cancer).

The problem is leaping to the conclusion that correlation implies causation without considering how one thing causes the other first.