On Freshman Composition and Logical Thinking

Abstract

LOGICAL THINKING in freshman composition continues to be an essential need, but the increasing emphasis in many composition programs on reading skills and expository writing has led to the sacrifice of essentials in logic. Admittedly, composition teachers, untrained or little acquainted with formal logic or even the informal fallacies, feel ill-equipped to present these effectively; many feel better equipped to teach exposition than the argumentative essay. But few if any will argue about the need for logical thinking. The question is not whether to teach logical thinking and the argumentative essay but rather how these can be taught successfully to students of varying backgrounds and reading ability. My concern in this essay is with some essentials in logic. My experience at an open-enrollment urban university has been that some but not all matters of logic can be taught, and certainly not as fully as the student will be taught them in the Philosophy Department. The complex forms of deductive reasoning are best reserved for the course in formal logic. However, the elements of deductive and inductive logic can be presented simply and effectively to all students, in the context of rhetorical ideas-specifically audience, purpose, modes of persuasion. More than this, certain matters of rhetoric can be introduced effectively through logical thinking, which offers a better way to distinguish main from subordinate ideas than the usual breakdown from main to subordinate topics and headings associated with the familiar sentence outline.