American Westland; Fallacies

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American Wasteland; Fallacies

A fallacy is a mistake of reasoning or belief that writers often make. Various fallacies exist in academic writing, such as rhetorical fallacies and statistical fallacies, and many more.

In the book, statistical fallacy appears on page 120. You can see this whereby the author assumes that the larger a restaurant is, the more waste it is likely to produced and vice versa. The officials at the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection hired a New Hampshire firm to do research and come up with the right information, as the author affirms. The selected firm came up with the formula of multiplying the number of employees in a restaurant by 3,000 pounds per employee per year to know the amount of waste produced. The writer has the right formula approved to determine the amount of waste produced, but he ignores it and concludes with his wrong conclusion. The writer gets confused by the statistical findings and ends up making the wrong argument. All this eventually renders his decision on the topic false.

On page 24 of the book, one can identify the straw man argument. Straw man argument means misrepresenting a particular conclusion so that it can fit into your view. Miner says that today’s restaurants are better at avoiding food waste and try to keep their waste at about 2 to 3 percent of the total sales. The writer continues by saying that this is a more significant percentage of their food inventory. As one can see, this is a false interpretation. The truth is that the amount wasted is a small percentage of food inventory and not as the author puts it. The writer has the right information and formula but makes a wrong conclusion to fit the point that he wants to pass across to the readers.