Acting for Themselves

When one thinks of a fallacy, they often think of a lie— an untruth. Sometimes it may be a blatant lie and other times it just may be that its something that hasn’t been proven to be true yet. In writing oftentimes a common logical fallacy is to state their own personal opinion instead.

In Roy Beck’s article What a Jobs-Focused State-of-Union Ought to Say About Immigration he oftentimes makes the mistake of telling the audience what to think. He says “The President should tell the Members of Congress that if they aren’t willing to gather their unemployed voters, look them in the eye and explain why illegal aliens and new foreign workers have precedence over the 500,000 unemployed in every district” (par. 29). Instead of giving the facts and letting the readers decide what they should do, he tells the what course of action they should take. Even at the very beginning of the article when he says “be sure to send this fax to President Obama with State of the Union suggestions” (par. 1), he’s telling his readers how they should behave instead of letting them figure out for themselves what they should do.