Causal Argument Assignment 3 10-22-14

Savannah Ballard

Eng 101

Hem Paudel

After reading the two papers, I found “Marriage shows the way out of poverty” to be more persuasive. This article had statistics to back up each of its reasons on why marriage will help people get out of poverty. This article also came at the topic from several angles, not only did he mention that marriage will help poverty, he mentions how having children after being married, getting a job and graduating high school all make a person more likely to not live in poverty. The second article “When roommates were random” is not very persuasive. This article only mentions marriage as a small side note at the end of the paper in a few sentences. Unlike the first paper, this article doesn’t contain any facts or statistics to draw in the reader.

I believe the writer of “Marriage shows the way out of poverty” does have a few fallacies. Not mentioning the opposing view that marriage isn’t for everyone is a big problem. Some people just don’t get along well with others and don’t want to be married, or they are so tied up with their career that they haven’t had time to meet a potential marriage partner; these people can still be just as successful or more than someone who is married. The lack of opposing view in this article doesn’t bring down the persuasiveness of what is written, but including it would increase the overall strength of the paper. The second paper, “When roommates were random” has some larger problems. Not mentioning marriage until the last few sentences is a very big problem, as it doesn’t allow the reader to know what the actual point of the paper is. The second problem with this paper is that they don’t use any statistics or facts to prove that they are right; this really effects the persuasiveness in my opinion.