There is a quote that has been passed down many years and is most recently accounted to P.T. Barnum, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Are you that sucker? If you were, would you like to be “reborn?” The goal of this book is to help you through that “birthing” process. Critical thinking and standing up for your ideas and making decisions are important in both your personal and professional life. How good are we at making the decision to marry? According to the Centers for Disease Control, there is one divorce in America every 36 seconds. That is nearly 2,400 every day. And professionally, the Wall Street Journal predicts the average person will have 7 careers in their lifetime. Critical thinking skills are crucial.

How Arguments Work takes students through the techniques they will need to respond to readings and make sophisticated arguments in any college class. This is a practical guide to argumentation with strategies and templates for the kinds of assignments students will commonly encounter. It covers rhetorical concepts in everyday language and explores how arguments can build trust and move readers.

Emphasizes the logical means of supporting claims in argumentative essays, thesis statements and reasoning. Includes logic, style and research.

This project was funded by a grant from the Higher Education Coordinating Commission in Oregon, a grant that ran from July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017. The text of the book is complete (though, in the way of these things, still evolving), but moving it online is still in progress. The chapters available here are ready to be used or copied; additional chapters will be added during July as the conversion and final copyedits are completed.

Microwave and RF Design: Modules focuses on the design of systems based on microwave modules. The use of modules has become increasingly important in RF and microwave engineering for rapidly realizing high performance microwave systems. When integration is ultimately to be used, building a system up using modules provides a rapid means of prototyping and testing system concepts. A wide variety of RF modules including amplifiers, local oscillators, switches, circulators, isolators, phase detectors, frequency multipliers and dividers, phase-locked loops, and direct digital synthesizers are considered. Detailed design strategies for synthesizing filters based on parallel coupled lines are presented. The reader will gain an appreciation of design by synthesis. This book is suitable as both an undergraduate and graduate textbook, as well as a career-long reference book.

Logic and Critical Thinking is primarily a philosophy textbook but it covers a number of topics that overlap with argumentation including deduction and induction, fallacies, proofs, and kinds of arguments. Due to licenses that apply to certain sections of this book, it is safest to presume this work as a whole to be under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

This course was developed as part of an Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant awarded to two faculty members at Valdosta State University. The course includes units on critical thinking, arguments, fallacies, symbolic logic, syllogisms, research, and law. It also includes an instructor’s guide and lesson planning.

We are pleased to release this digital edition of Ralph Johnson’s The Rise of Informal Logic as Volume 2 in the series Windsor Studies in Argumentation. This edition is a reprint of the previous Vale Press edition with some minor corrections.

We have decided to make this the second volume in the series because it is such a compelling account of the formation of informal logic as a discipline, written by one of the founders of the field. The book includes essential chapters on the history and development of informal logic. Other chapters are key reflections on the theoretical issues raised by the attempt to understand informal argument. Many of the papers were previously published in important journals. A number of them were co-authored with J. Anthony Blair. Three of them have appeared only in the present book.