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Asking The Right Questions (11th Edition)

Used in a variety of courses in various disciplines, Asking the Right Questions helps students bridge the gap between simply memorizing or blindly accepting information, and the greater challenge of critical analysis and synthesis.  Specifically, this concise text teaches students to think critically by exploring the components of arguments--issues, conclusions, reasons, evidence, assumptions, language--and on how to spot fallacies and manipulations and obstacles to critical thinking in both written and visual communication.  It teaches them to respond to alternative points of view and develop a solid foundation for making personal choices about what to accept and what to reject. 

Paperback: 192 pages

Publisher: Pearson; 11 edition (January 6, 2014)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0321907957

ISBN-13: 978-0321907950

Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 8.9 inches

Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #8,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #24 in Books > Reference > Words, Language & Grammar > Rhetoric #35 in Books > Literature & Fiction > History & Criticism > Criticism & Theory #39 in Books > Textbooks > Humanities > Literature > Creative Writing & Composition

I purchased this book because it was a required text for school, but I haven't been especially impressed. There is some good content here, but I think the writing style falls short of connecting with the most appropriate target audience, and it contains a number of logical flaws -- a pretty serious problem in a book about reasoning.From the start, the authors begin with the assumption that the reader will CARE about applying critical thinking to his life. This is probably a safe assumption for a book that is picked up off the shelf by the average reader, it may or may not be a reasonable assumption for a book that is used primarily as a required text. (They do give a nod to this discrepancy about halfway through the book, but it would have been more effective, in my opinion, to have solidly argued the benefits of critical thinking in the very beginning.)I tend to think pretty critically by nature, and I still found much of this book hard to follow. The examples use a weird "stream of consciousness" style to show the expected thought processes, rather than simply showing the argument as it's presented and the elements of the argument properly broken down. This whole approach, as well as the general presentation style in many of the sections, imparts a sort of "fuzziness" to the whole thing -- at least for me -- that stands in stark contrast to well-defined logic/critical thought.Worse still, the authors' own logic fails at a number of points. I didn't make note of all the instances as I went along. Most were fairly minor. But the very first example given in the section about identifying logical fallacies incorporates an egregious fallacy.

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