This is a short course that helps ESL students learn the way the English language can be manipulated to persuade people. In this class you will learn just a few sentence patterns. But, they are important because they contain power.
The power is this: they create the illusion that an argument is correct and therefore you should believe the speaker.
Seeing and understanding these sentence patterns is part of critical thinking. These sentences are a kind of tool to help you think for yourself.
I hope you enjoy this class.
Critical Thinking Lessons
- 1: Arguments
- 2: Fallacies of Relevance
- 3: Fallacies of Insufficient Evidence
- 4: Analogies and Review
- 5: Case Study
- 6: Critical Thinking Test
This Week’s Lesson
Today we begin a series of lessons that will help you think and speak more clearly, logically and precisely.
This is the beginning of our lesson on critical thinking.
- The first step in that learning is to understand arguments.
- The second step for today is to understand the difference between facts and inferences.
Inference and Facts
Here is a quick exercise to understand inferences. Look at this photo.
Read these statements and mark, true, false or can’t answer.
- This is graduation day for the Thomas family.
- The father is proud of his son.
- The sister looks up to her brother.
- This is a prosperous family.
- The son has just graduated from law school.
Videos for Critical Thinking Lesson 2 are here.