Creative thinkers are unafraid to try new things even at the risk of failure.They own the ability to think about something in novel ways and to come up with unconventional solutions to problems.

There will be plenty of room to play, to be creative within the confines of the Critical Thinking model.  The best papers play, take risks, amalgamate the  creative with the critical.  Yes!  Mind-meld.  As stated above, we use our creative abilities to come up with many solutions and our critical abilities to determine which solution ends up in print.

The big question:  Do we defy the crowd or please the crowd? The big answer:  Why not both?

 Let's take a look at how we can balance the creative left brain and the critical right brain.                                    

Appeals: Logos, Pathos, Ethos, or How to Blend the Critical with the Creative.

Aristotle realized there were three kinds of Appeals in arguments:
Logos (logic), appeal to reason;                 
Pathos (compassion, the heart), appeal to emotion;
Ethos (character or ethics), appeal to character (Aristotle's favorite, by the way). 


We use these appeals to structure an argument, yet like a hot spice, we don't use too much of one over the other.  For example, we want our essay based on Logos or logic, but too much evidence and logic will cause the reader to fall asleep.  Let's face it: I don't care how smart you are, ten lines of statistics and you're counting sheep.  

So, here's where we get to play.  To shake it up a little, we add some pathos.  We might offer an interesting anecdote that appeals to the heart.  If I write that 74% of all hit-and-run accidents are caused by drunken drivers, I appeal to the Logos or reasoning part of the reader (the head, evidence, facts, statistics).   But when I add a personal story of an innocent boy who was sitting on his bicycle when a drunken English teacher in a 1984 Mustang careened down the road, hitting the boy, never bothering to stop, I will have appealed to the Pathos or the tenderness of the reader (the heart) to balance out the Logos.  


                                                                         
Ethos is the shade of appeal we need to keep things fair, offering both sides of the issue, doing the research needed to show a sense of integrity, veracity, and impartiality. Here, I might tell a little background research on the drunken driver, showing that her first born child passed away, so she turned to drink for relief. When you follow proper MLA format and citing, you're also showing your Ethos.  You've got character enough to get it right, to cite where needed, to stick to format, so your argument progresses in a logical manner. 

Side Note: If you think that "fact," not argument, rules intelligent thinking, consider that at one point, the great minds of Western Europe firmly believed the Earth was flat. They assumed this was simply an uncontroversial fact. We can disagree now because people who believed the flat-earth argument as faulty set out to make a better argument and proved it. 

---------------------------------------------------------

Click the picture below to download your ARGUMENT ESSAY PACKET