Analysis of arguments — Purpose, Content, language, structure / form

A friend tells you: “You should study logic, because it is a compulsory subject, and compulsory subjects always help in exams.” Is that a good reason to study logic? Before you can even answer, you have to break the sentence into its working parts — what is being claimed, what is offered as support, and whether the support actually holds the claim up. That is argument analysis.

In two minutes

To analyse an argument is to identify its purpose, separate its content (premises and conclusion) from the language it is dressed in, and examine its structure or form — because you can judge whether an argument is valid and sound only once you know what it claims and how that claim is supposed to follow.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Logic – I on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.