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This article discusses the logical connection between reasoning inductively and writing \ compositions in college English classes.
When teachers of composition venture into the area of logic, many do so tentatively and with a sense of obligation. Inductive reasoning may be explained and offered as representing one type of reasoning, though instructors may secretly believe, as one colleague explained recently,"People don't really think that way."Worse, induction may be defined wrongly as a kind of paragraph in which the topic sentence comes last, as opposed to the "deductive" paragraph, in which the topic sentence is said to come first, or induction may be viewed as reasoning that moves from particular statements to conclusions that are generalizations, with deduction being defined simply as the opposite (see Lunsford and Connors 81-83; Horner,Webb, and Miller 196-298; Kirszner and Mandell 527-31; Adelstein and Pival 337).' What follows from such attitudes is frequently a perfunctory explanation, with logic taught as a kind of exercise or game that can be used to describe certain ways of thinking, though no attempt is made to show how important, indeed foundational, these ways of thinking really are. Consequently, teachers often provide no demonstration of any practical application to the written compositions they ask the students to write. In this discourse, we want to affirm that people do indeed "think that way." Furthermore, we want to suggest that with a more practical definition of induction, in particular, teachers across the curriculum can help students think more critically about their topics and consequently produce better writing.2 Induction, properly understood, is not merely a game, nor is it a gimmick, nor is it an artificial way of explaining an element of reasoning. Proper understanding of inductive reasoning-and the various types of reasoning that we term inductive-enables the student to evaluate critically other people's writing and enhances the composition process itself.
In approaching how induction affects the writing process, it is important to take special note of two ideas. First, while inductive reasoning can be used to formulate the entire structure of au essay, it is most helpful in selecting the content of individual paragraphs. Specifically, writers generally rely on inductive reasoning to provide the proper support for the topic sentence of a paragraph. second, there are several...