Logical Fallacies in Academic Writing

As you reach higher levels of academia, the requirements of academic writing including essays, assignments and papers gradually increase. While the word count and paragraphing may be the only two requirements for a high school essay, you will have to take care of plagiarism, citation, structure of each type of full essay help uk, language, tone and fallacies. Hence, this is the reason why teachers always warn in earlier stages about how difficult writing would become in future.

While you must be aware of all the requirements in quite detail, fallacies are highly neglected by students and are probably the most common reason of losing marks. Students usually include a mixture of logical, emotional and ethical fallacies in their writing and experts providing UK essay help claims that it affects the writers’ credibility and reliability. Following are some of the highly occurring fallacies in academic writing:

1)      Circular reasoning: The name has been evolved from old Latin ‘treadmill logic’ and this is a fallacy in which an argument does not move further but ends with a repetition of what has already been stated. A common practical example is when students mention things like this would not have been possible if so and so did not happened or if that character did not existed.

2)      Begging the question: While the name of this fallacy may force you to believe that this involves a question being asked continuously, begging the question is a fallacy in which writer persuades the readers to accept his point without any evidence or supporting data. In other words, he ‘begs’ the readers to accepthis argument.

3)      Authority worship: A very popular fallacy, authority worship involves the writer to unconditionally accept what someone says or claims. The fallacy is committed when instead of considering what is being said, the writer emphasizes more on who said it and unquestionably agrees to it.

4)      Bandwagon: Lying in the category of emotional fallacy, bandwagon is one in which the writer argues in favor of something based on its popularity. ‘If everyone has done something, you must also do it’ is a broad example of bandwagon.

5)      Longevity: If you claim something to be valid just because it existed for a long period of time, you are committing this fallacy. According to experts providing UK essay help, students commit this fallacy very often in their academic writing and lose marks.

6)      False Dilemma: False dilemma is a fallacy in which the writer makes twooptions available to choose from, assuming there is no other way to do it. An example is that students often include ‘Either he do this or he is dead’ in their writing which is regarded as a false dilemma.

7)      Hasty generalization: When writers come up with a conclusion having insufficient or no evidence at all, it is termed as hasty generalization. A good example could be of a writer mentioning that since two people disliked the movie, he did not go to watch it.

8)      False authority: Finally the most frequently occurring fallacy in academicwriting is the false authority. The writer will argue on the basis of unspecified authority using phrases like ‘surveys have shown’ and ‘many studies revealed’.

So keep these fallacies in mind and avoid including them in your writings to avoid losing marks unnecessarily.

Author bio: Simons Robert is the head of English Language department at a state college in US. He published several papers on the rules and forms of academic writing and holds an MA in English. You can follow us on Google+