I appreciated Fulkerson's discussion of the uses (or lack thereof) of teaching either formal or informal logic in composition classes. I especially appreciated his point that "writing has little use for the certitudes of deductive reasoning" (326). I actually saw a student in the writing lab yesterday who used a syllogism in his paper! Overall, the paper was good, but it was actually weakened by his use of the syllogism. As Fulkerson says, "Logic and comp-logic are tools for criticizing arguments, not for generating them" (328). While they may, at times, be useful for helping our students to check whether their arguments are really valid, I think that they are limited in their usefulness for actually helping our students learn to write arguments.
I did think that he suggested a potential use of Toulmin that could be helpful in a composition classroom. On p. 332, he uses the Toulmin model to suggest 6 heuristic questions to evaluate their argument. In some ways, I think this could be used to help generate an argument. Often, it seems, students come into the writing lab without having decided an answer to the question "What is my claim?"--which is pretty essential! The other questions could likewise help the student to see what elements they may need to still develop in their papers. I'm still not sure about how useful this would be in English 1000, but I think it has some potential. What do you all think?
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I find the 6 Toulmin questions interesting as well. It seems that here Fulkerson acknowledges the problem that many comp. instructors dance around, whether or not the paper itself is an example of fine logic, or whether the use of fine logic lead to the creation of a fine paper. He is quite correct, I think, in suggesting in the next paragraph (through a quote from Winterowd) that Toulmin's model could provide a guide for pre-writing the essay. This is one of the most challenging things to get students to understand, because they just want to get in and start writing the paper so that it's over with as soon as possible, so they don't always comprehend that many of the strategies we suggest are actually intended as pre-writing strategies to generate ideas, not as models for how to structure the paper. This distinction is important to make when using logical theories, in particular.
The claim that "logic and comp-logic are tools for criticizing arguments, not for generating them" (328) seems odd to me. In criticizing an argument, we are always creating an argument -- actually a counterargument. One of the papers I plan to assign will require students to critique the logic of marketing language, and I feel that the introduction of a bit of logic (maybe just the humble, old syllogism) would be useful in getting them to consider the "joints" of arguments more self-consciously. Secretly, I'd love for them to understand that the world consists of innumerable claims about the world -- and that all of these competing claims are susceptible to logical analysis.
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