"Where Rhetoric Meets the Road"

     The underlying statement in Edward P.J. Corbett and Rosa A. Eberly’s, "Becoming a Citizen Critic" as well as Donald Lazere’s, "Avoiding Oversimplification and Recognizing Complexity" is that fallacious logic can be difficult to avoid in rhetoric. A variety of these inconsistencies in logic are laid out and explained thoroughly.

     Corbett and Eberly's piece on citizen critics details how to improve one's editorial writing. Within that realm, they explain numerous "diversions of reasoning." The first of the extensive logical paradox list is overgeneralizing--this, above all of the rest of their points, compares best with Lazere's text about oversimplification.

     Corbett and Eberly describe overgeneralization as "generalizing without looking at enough cases to support a sweeping conclusion." They go on to hyperbolically and ironically state that "everyone does this" as a means of creating a clear-cut example (124). Similarly, Lazere implies that a fitting definition of overgeneralization would be the "literal-minded mentality that absorbs only what appears on the surface of things" (245).

     While Lazere's chapter goes into great detail regarding the idea of oversimplification, Corbett amd Eberly--in a matter of two paragraphs--sum up the idea and conclude with a simple solution: "rather than saying all Xs are Y when you have not seen most Xs, qualify the claim." Continuing in a humorous tone as they so often do in the text, Corbett and Eberly submit the jocular example, "[t]he Tom Hanks movies I've seen have been stupid, but I've only seen two" (124). The latter italicized portion of course is the suggested qualifying amendment to correct the error in logic created by the first clause of the sentence.

     As the citizen critics text delves into other mistakes in reason, Lazere's oversimplification piece expounds upon several types of irony, which can altogether be oversimplified by the quotation, 

[d]rawing attention to a discrepancy, disparity, or opposition: between appearance and reality, or between what certain people preach and what they practice, between what is expected or intended and what results, between what we want and what we get, between apparent opposites that converge or reverse roles, and so on (248).

     Specifically exemplifying his phrase, "what certain people preach and what they practice," Lazere characterizes numerous politicians who preached about the sanctity of marriage while showing in practice an acceptance of divorce. Most notable among these politicians are Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and senator Bob Barr--author of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of the mid-1990s--divorced one, two and three times respectively (252). Fittingly, in making a political statement publicly, Lazere himself conforms to Corbett and Eberly's definition of a citizen critic, the unrestricted democratic evaluator. This isn't to say the rest of Lazere's text does not comply with the citizen critic role; political statements simply tend to be more obviously relevant.

     These text compare to showcase how the mind can err when working with rhetoric--often accidentally, though sometimes purposefully as well. Corbett and Eberly's detailing of various acts of fallacious reasoning and definition of the citizen critic help form an informed editorial writer. Likewise, Lazere's text on oversimplification gives an in-depth description of one of the most common logical fallacies, breaking it down into smaller parts of the whole.

Works Cited:

Corbett, Edward P.M., and Rosa A. Eberly. “Becoming a Citizen Critic: Where Rhetoric Meets the Road.” In The Elements of Reasoning, 2^nd Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000. Web. March 21, 2013.

Lazare, Donald. “Avoiding Oversimplification and Recognizing Complexity” In Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizen’s Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2005. Web. March 21, 2013.