Teaching College Composition Allowed Me to Expand the Context of my Work on Fallacies

Though I thought the Top 25 Creationist Fallacies video illustrated and explained the fallacies well, I didn't want to add a layer of controversy to my teaching. I had a good portion of students who identified as Christian. I had to find another way to introduce fallacies.

In my Master's degree work, I focused mostly on college writing pedagogy. A lot of the pedagogy scholarship I read in Laura Micciche's Teaching College Writing course championed multimodal and multimedia composition. Despite her encouragement, I wanted to focus more on classical rhetoric that focused on writing.

Teaching First-Year Composition at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, Summer of 2013

Once I started doing research outside of creationism, I started to see how studying logical fallacies could help my students when they composed their rhetorical analyses and academic arguments.

I found so much information on fallacies in all of the different textbooks I used when I taught at Cincinnati State, Xavier, and University of Cincinnati. However, many of my students found the textbook prose confusing or overly technical. Visual aids such as "Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies" helped my students understand fallacies both on an intuitive and linguistic level. This link leads to a site where people can purchase the image I used along with other critical thinking aids. These infographics seem to help both me and my students understand fallacies on a basic level.

Like my students, I also learned about ethos, pathos, and logos, and fallacies from textbooks like The Essay Connection and Everything's an Argument helped me understand the fundamentals of classical rhetoric. Studying the fundamentals as a teacher made me want to do more research into Aristotle and his Rhetoric.

What I didn't know is that online resources and visual rhetoric would inform my later scholarship. Aristotle occupied most of my research focus.