Criticizing Letters to Editor - by Saud

Criticizing Letters to Editor - by Saud 

This letter is about a citizen who observed a problem with some streets of his city and wrote letters to the editor suggesting solution for that problem. The problem the writer observed is that the overnight parking in some streets caused huge traffic in the rush hours. The solution he suggests is to prohibit the overnight parking and consider it as a violation of the traffic law.

The first problem that is obviously appeared in the first paragraph is when writer said “there are number of reasons why an intelligent citizen should agree”, in this sentence, the writer used the fallacy of poisoning the well, this style of writing will make the reader think about how to defend himself from being unintelligent “according the writer description” and at the same time give the writer chance to not defend his conclusion with relevant premises.

Another problem with the beginning of the second paragraph is when the writer said “for one thing”, the reader has no idea what is the “thing” that the writer is talking about. He should name it clearly specially this sentence came in the beginning of the paragraph which means there is new idea will be discussed. Also, there is an obvious fallacy in the paragraph which is “begging the question”; the writer had clearly repeated his idea without providing support to what he claimed. He claimed that parking overnight is illegal and it considered as having a garage in the city street which known by law as illegal action, the writer did not support his claims by identifying which law prohibit having carnage in the city street.

In paragraph six, the writer again repeated the fallacy of poisoning the well when he talked about the intelligent citizen should agree about the nearly elimination of accidents if the overnight parking is prohibited. He did not provide any support to his conclusion and at the same time he promoted the same idea which is “to be intelligent you should agree with this suggestion”.

In paragraph seven, the writer compared two irrelevant issues when he talked about the experiment made by the chief of Police. He compared the number of accidents on the period of the experiment with the number of accidents in the last year without specifying which period last year. This comparison is clearly a false cause fallacy.

On last problem with paragraph eight is that the writer used the style of “personal attack” when he described the opponents of his suggestion by “these people do not know what “safe” really means.  The writer attacked his opponents personally instead of discussing their argument.