Table of Contents
When intelligent people make terrible arguments, logical fallacies are usually the culprit. These systematic errors in reasoning logical fallacies in writing don’t just weaken individual debates. They’re destroying our capacity for productive conversation, and social media has turned the destruction into a spectator sport.
I run into these constantly, both in public discourse and in the manuscripts I ghostwrite. A client will build a brilliant argument for three chapters, then undermine it with a single fallacy they can’t see because it feels true. Feeling true and being true are different things, and the gap between them is where most bad thinking lives.
Here are the ten I see most often, with examples from the kind of arguments people actually make.
Ad Hominem: Attacking the Person Instead of the Argument
Someone proposes a policy. Instead of addressing whether the policy would work, the response targets their divorce, their weight, their past failures, or their motivations. The underlying logic: this person is flawed, therefore their argument is flawed. For more, see the anatomy of flawed political commentary.
This is satisfying because it’s easy. For more, see logical fallacies every writer should recognize. Engaging with a complex argument requires effort. Dismissing the person who made it requires a sentence. But personal attacks tell you nothing about whether an idea has merit. A terrible person can have a good idea. A wonderful person can have a terrible one.
I see this constantly in political commentary. Someone with legitimate policy concerns wraps them in personal insults, and the insults are all anyone remembers. The policy concerns disappear. The writer feels righteous. Nothing useful was accomplished.
The fix: Ask yourself whether the criticism would be valid regardless of who made the argument. If not, you’re attacking the person, not the idea.
Confirmation Bias: Cherry-Picking Reality
A company’s stock drops 14% and the headlines scream disaster. The same company has gained 800% over five years and nobody mentions it. A CEO makes one bad decision and it becomes proof of incompetence, while a decade of good decisions vanishes from the analysis.
This isn’t analysis. It’s intellectual hoarding. You collect the evidence that supports your conclusion and throw away everything that doesn’t. The result looks convincing because you’ve curated it to be convincing, not because it’s accurate.
Writers fall into this trap when researching nonfiction. They start with a thesis and then only gather supporting evidence. The book sounds authoritative until someone with a different collection of facts tears it apart in a review.
The fix: Before publishing any argument, ask yourself what evidence would change your mind. If you can’t think of anything, bias is driving your conclusion.
False Dilemma: Killing Nuance
“You’re either for government regulation or you want corporations to run everything.” “You either support the military or you hate the troops.” “You’re either with us or against us.”
False dilemmas force complex issues into binary choices that don’t exist. Most real-world problems have dozens of possible approaches, and the best solutions usually combine elements that the false dilemma presents as mutually exclusive.
You can support government oversight and believe some agencies waste money. You can respect the military and oppose a specific war. You can admire someone’s work in one area and criticize their work in another. These positions aren’t contradictory. They’re how adults think about complicated subjects.
The fix: Watch for “either/or” framing. If someone presents only two options on a complex issue, they’ve probably eliminated the most useful ones.
Appeal to Emotion: When Feelings Replace Evidence
Words like “toxic,” “disgusting,” “clown show,” “unacceptable,” and “nightmare” aren’t arguments. They’re emotional grenades designed to bypass your critical thinking and trigger a reaction.
Emotional language works because angry or disgusted brains don’t reason well. When your amygdala is firing, your prefrontal cortex takes a back seat. You feel certain, but the certainty comes from emotion, not evidence. It’s the intellectual equivalent of junk food: immediately satisfying and nutritionally empty.
This doesn’t mean emotions are irrelevant. Moral outrage about genuine injustice is appropriate. But the outrage should follow the evidence, not replace it. When someone leads with inflammatory language instead of facts, they’re asking you to feel your way to their conclusion instead of thinking your way there.
The fix: Replace emotional adjectives with specific descriptions. “This policy is a disaster” becomes “This policy has three specific consequences worth examining.” The second version is harder to write and more useful to read.
Hasty Generalization: One Data Point Becomes Universal Truth
“I hired a freelancer and the work was terrible, so freelancers are unreliable.” “My friend’s startup failed, so entrepreneurship is a scam.” “That restaurant gave me food poisoning, so all restaurants in that neighborhood are unsanitary.”
Hasty generalizations take limited observations and inflate them into sweeping conclusions. They feel logical because the initial observation is real. The food poisoning happened. The freelancer was terrible. But jumping from one experience to a universal rule ignores every other data point in existence.
This is the fallacy behind most stereotypes. A few examples become “all of them,” and suddenly you’ve written off an entire category based on a sample size of one or two.
The fix: Use qualifying language. “This suggests,” “this pattern indicates,” “in my experience.” If your argument requires words like “always,” “never,” or “everyone,” you’re probably overgeneralizing.
Strawman: Fighting an Argument Nobody Made
Someone argues that schools should update their curriculum. The response: “So you want to throw out everything that’s ever been taught?” Someone suggests a business could reduce costs. The response: “You want to fire everyone and destroy morale?”
Strawman arguments misrepresent the original position to make it easier to attack. Instead of engaging with what someone actually said, you construct a weaker, more extreme version and demolish that instead. It looks like you’ve won the argument. You haven’t. You’ve won an argument with yourself.
The opposite approach, the steel-man, is far more powerful. Present your opponent’s strongest possible argument before addressing it. If you can defeat the best version of their position, you’ve actually accomplished something. If you can only defeat a distorted caricature, you haven’t proven anything except your willingness to fight easy battles.
The fix: Before responding to any argument, restate it in the strongest possible terms. If the other person says “that’s not what I meant,” you were probably building a strawman.
Internal Contradiction: When Your Argument Eats Itself
Someone writes three paragraphs about how a public figure is incompetent and dangerous, then adds a line acknowledging their “impressive innovations that benefit humanity.” If they’re genuinely incompetent, how are they simultaneously producing innovations that help people? The argument contradicts itself.
Contradictions usually signal that emotion is driving the analysis rather than evidence. The writer feels something is wrong, works backward to justify that feeling, and doesn’t notice when the justifications conflict with each other.
I catch these in manuscripts all the time. A client will argue two incompatible positions in different chapters without realizing it. The fix is always the same: decide what you actually believe and build your argument from there, rather than collecting every criticism and hoping nobody notices they don’t fit together.
The fix: Read your argument as if you disagreed with it. Would the internal logic hold up?
Availability Heuristic: Mistaking Memorable for Representative
A plane crashes and suddenly flying feels dangerous, even though you’re statistically safer in a plane than in the car you drove to the airport. A company has one bad quarter and people forget about the ten good ones that preceded it. A public figure makes one mistake and their entire career gets reframed around that single moment.
Our brains overweight recent, dramatic, emotionally charged events and underweight gradual, boring, statistically significant patterns. We mistake “easy to remember” for “important” and “vivid” for “representative.”
This is why 24-hour news cycles distort our understanding of risk. The dramatic story gets airtime. The slow, boring trend that actually matters gets ignored.
The fix: Ask whether a data point is representative of a larger pattern or an outlier that sticks in your memory because it’s unusual.
Circular Reasoning: Using Your Conclusion as Your Evidence
“He makes bad decisions because he’s incompetent, and we know he’s incompetent because he makes bad decisions.” “This book is a classic because everyone reads it, and everyone reads it because it’s a classic.” “Trust me because I’m trustworthy.”
Circular reasoning feels logical because it’s internally consistent. The problem is that internal consistency has nothing to do with truth. You can build a perfectly circular argument about anything and it will sound airtight while proving nothing.
The fix: Trace your reasoning backward. If your evidence for a claim is just a restatement of the claim itself, you’re going in circles.
Appeal to Consequences: Deciding Truth Based on Preference
“If this policy doesn’t work, the consequences would be terrible, so it must work.” “If evolution were true, life would be meaningless, so it can’t be true.” “If our strategy is wrong, we’ve wasted two years, so our strategy must be right.”
The consequences of a belief don’t determine whether it’s true. Reality doesn’t rearrange itself based on what we’d prefer. A policy might have wonderful goals and still fail. A scientific theory might be uncomfortable and still be correct. The desirability of an outcome and the truth of a claim are independent questions.
The fix: Separate “Is this true?” from “Do I like the implications?”
What Better Arguments Look Like
The point of understanding fallacies isn’t to win debates. It’s to think more clearly about things that matter. When you strip the fallacies out of most arguments, what remains is usually more interesting than what you removed.
Here’s what better criticism looks like: specific rather than personal, contextual rather than absolute, precise rather than emotional, and internally consistent. “This policy’s rapid implementation raises questions about due process” is a real argument. “This policy is a clown show run by idiots” is noise.
Before you write or share anything argumentative, run it through three tests. The mirror test: would you accept this quality of reasoning if it supported a position you opposed? The steel-man test: can you present the strongest version of the opposing argument? The consistency test: do all parts of your argument support each other?
Our capacity for rational discourse is degrading in real time, and every fallacy-laden post that goes viral makes it worse. The challenges ahead, from technology to climate to governance, require the best of human reasoning. We’re not going to think our way through complex problems by screaming past each other with emotional grenades and strawman arguments.
We can do better. It starts with recognizing these fallacies the next time they try to hijack our thinking, especially when they’re our own.
People Also Ask
Related: