Short Writing Assignment 6: Fragmenting

I want you the fragment and analyze a text.  Please watched the accompanying PowerPoint where i explain what I have in mind and review the example I have provided that I have done this myself.  I want you to take the text I give you below and do the following:

1. Fragment the text into separate sentences breaking up conjunctions and deleting “window dressing” text.


2. Identify the Thesis Statement


3. The rest of the sentences are either premises, restatement of the thesis, or irrelevant


4. Draw Arrows as a Graphic as to which sentences are offered in support of which sentences. (e.g. A ---> B indicates that you think sentence A was offered as support for sentence B.


5. *Schematize Argument (Optional)


6. *Flow Chart It (Optional)

Links to an explanation of this assignment as well as a PowerPoint presentation on this assignment can be found on the lesson plan for this course ((10/7/19).

https://online.fiu.edu/videos/?vpvid=06047cb5-a6b6-4116-b0f7-e35f14ccebb5 (Links to an external site.)

Here is the text I want you to analyze for this assignment:

 Socrates makes the point in the Apology that it is silly and a sort of false wisdom to fear death.  If one thinks about the matter with due care, one will see that we really lack any rational grounds to fear death.  This is because it is only legitimate to fear something when one knows that it is in fact bad. But to know that death is bad, it is not enough to believe it.  One would have to have a justified belief that death is a bad thing.  Since no one who has died can tell whether death is a bad thing, we lack the justification to claim we “know” that it is a bad thing.  For all we know, it might be the greatest of all blessings.  Since we don’t know whether death is bad or not, we shouldn’t fear it and to fear death despite lacking true knowledge is to pretend to have knowledge one does not in fact have.