Identification and analysis of common errors in reasoning and argumentation. These articles help readers recognize flawed logic in debates, media, and everyday discourse, improving critical thinking and the ability to construct sound arguments.
Across 54+ ghostwritten books, mostly nonfiction, I have had to catch logical fallacies the authors never saw, and that is no insult to them. They are experts in their fields; expertise and watertight reasoning simply are not the same thing. Here is exactly what your ghostwriter should be catching in business books, memoirs, and thought leadership.
In academic writing a logical fallacy is an error to correct. In fiction it is a gift, because flawed reasoning that feels airtight to the character is exactly what drives conflict, dialogue, and plot. This overview opens a series on using fallacies and cognitive biases as deliberate craft tools rather than mistakes to scrub out.
When a character’s argument is built on a fallacy, readers feel it even when they cannot name it, the speech rings hollow, the nonfiction loses credibility, the character starts to sound manipulative. Spotting fallacies makes you better in both directions: cutting them from your own work and deploying them on purpose. Here are 14 every writer should recognize.
Smart people make terrible arguments all the time, and the culprit is usually a logical fallacy, a reasoning error that feels airtight from inside. These do not just lose debates; they are eroding our ability to talk to each other at all, with social media turning the wreckage into sport. Here are ten of the worst, from cherry-picking to strawmen, with examples to make each one easy to catch.
This is about reasoning, not partisanship. A widely shared op-ed by a Democratic strategist makes for a clean case study, confident, persuasive on the surface, and built on a stack of logical fallacies and cognitive bias. Picking it apart teaches more than agreeing or disagreeing ever could. Here is the anatomy of flawed political commentary, and what better looks like.
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