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What Is An Argumentative Passage Analysis

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What is an argumentative passage analysis?
In a passage analysis, you take some piece of written prose which contains an argument and extract the argument from it. In order to do this, you must identify the conclusion of the argument, as well as any premises that support the conclusion, and structure them in such a way that the argument is clearly valid (if indeed it is valid in the passage).
Here is an example of an argumentative passage:
Socrates is a man, and all men are mortal. As such, Socrates is mortal.
Properly analysed, this passage could be put into premise-conclusion form as follows:
Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
∴ Socrates is mortal.
That was an easy example. Sometimes it’s more difficult to tell which claim is the conclusion and which are the premises. Consider:
But of course, this argument is terribly misguided. After all, by any reasonable definition of the word “human,” an unborn child of any age is as much a human as you or me. That is why abortion is never permissible. The aforementioned argument is right to say that it is never permissible to kill humans, but wrong to say that fetuses are not humans.
This passage is much more difficult to formalize. The first problem we encounter is that it’s not clear which sentence contains the thesis. We may be tempted to look towards the first and last sentences for a clue, but it seems unlikely that either of these is the main point being argued by the author. At the very least, those do not seem to be the

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