My girlfriend is studying for the LSAT and I've been helping her a bit. It's been a great lesson in logical reasoning. (I'm definitely sending her this page.

My girlfriend is studying for the LSAT and I've been helping her a bit. It's been a great lesson in logical reasoning. (I'm definitely sending her this page. She'll love it.) She's not a native English speaker and she excels at logical reasoning (aced a couple classes at university.) Meanwhile, I (an English major in school) excel at parsing (English) language, but my logical skills, while proficient, are nevertheless lax. What I find illuminating in helping her is how much language works to obscure logic in argumentation. At the same time, I have discovered I have a tendency to often ignore key logical signals and just jump to whatever method suits me. As an English major, I have a particular weakness for analogies. For the record, I vote for the Fundamental Attribution Error (a bias rather than a fallacy) as the most interesting obstacle to consensus.