Examples of straw man in the following topics:
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Representing Objections Fairly
- You may be tempted to weaken an objection to your argument by turning it into a "straw man," or a flimsy version of the original point.
- A straw man argument can make a point overly simplistic, describe an incomplete concept or take a point out of context.
- In truth, the straw man is a well-known tactic, and readers can detect it quite easily.
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Techniques for Acknowledging Opposing Views
- You may be tempted to weaken an objection to your argument by turning it into a straw man, or a flimsy version of the original point.
- A straw-man argument can make a point overly simplistic, describe an incomplete concept or take a point out of context.
- In truth, the straw man is a well-known tactic, and readers can detect it quite easily.
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Adjectives
- The phrase man eating shark refers to a man who is eating a shark.
- The phrase man-eating shark refers to a shark that eats men.
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Gender-Neutral Language
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Hyphens
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Semicolons
- Example: The people present were Jamie, who came from New Zealand; John, the milkman's son; and George, a gaunt kind of man.
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Italics
- I was at the coffee shop when a man approached me and said, “Como esta?”
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Introduction to Pronouns
- That man yelled at us to get off his lawn.
- The man who yelled at us to get off his lawn did not even own the property.
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Introduction to Commas
- Example: The man who scratched your car left a note on your windshield.
- The phrase "who scratched your car" is a restrictive modifier because it explains which man the sentence refers to, and because the sentence would be unclear without it.
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Evaluating Sources
- Though the example above might be helpful in a paper on 19th century science and the novel "Frankenstein," it not only comes from a non-academic source, but it is also lacks a reference, making the relationship it indicates speculative: "Mary Shelley is likely to have acquired some ideas for Frankenstein's character from Humphry Davy's book "Elements of Chemical Philosophy," in which he had written that "science has ... bestowed upon man powers which may be called creative; which have enabled him to change and modify the beings around him ...". " (source: Wikipedia, no reference added).