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Blog Post- Chapter 7


              In this chapter the author talks about the important of evidence in an argument. “evidence is the support for a claim that the arguer discovers from experience or outside authority. It usually takes the form of examples, statistics, and testimony. In this Blog post I am going to talk about statistics, specifically trends. Statistics are numerical summaries of examples. They provide a means of talking about a large number of examples without citing everyone.

              Statistical trends are defined as statistics used to compare a situation over time to discover a trend. The book provides the example of women ranging from ages 15 to 44 forgoing or putting motherhood has grown nearly 10% since 1990. It also explained that the one of the top reasons for this was the increase of professional options available to women.

              This leads me to the example of the Minnesota Youth Collective a non-profit and non-partisan organization on campus. Working to increase the youth turnout in the coming election. I am a part of MYC, it’s foundation lies on data that shows that youth is the most likely to vote in elections, which are based on statistical trends of the past years. MYC is using this data to understand the reason why youth is not voting and have developed tools to help them out. Statistical trend of the past elections have helped MYC understand the reasons why youth is less likely to vote, which includes reasons such as being uninformed about the candidates, not knowing how to register or where to vote and often thinking that their vote doesn’t matter. All this evidence has helped MYC to help students by canvasing on campus and near apartments to help them get registered and pledged to vote and also by making a voter guide on their campus that can help students to learn about the different candidates. MYC is also canvasing around campus with absentee ballots to help students know about this option to vote as well. MYC is an example of how evidence can be used to convince the youth to vote by learning the argument of why they don't vote.

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