Reading Standards for Informational Text
8. Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.
What I Want You to Know:
- I can trace an argument based upon the facts from the reading.
- I can examine carefully the author’s claims in the text.
- I can decide if the evidence from the reading is true and sufficient.
- I can identify statements that are false and misleading.
What Makes Good Art Good and Bad Art Bad?
http://www.goodart.org/faq.htm#GOODBAD
Read the paragraph and respond to items 1, 2 and 3.
The whole nature of evaluating the goodness or badness of something arises from how that thing relates to some purpose or goal. Is a rain storm good or bad? Well, that depends on whether you are a farmer hoping for a drought to break or a backpacker hoping to keep his sleeping bag dry.
1. Do the last two sentences state a "purpose or goal"?
2. From what you answered in number 1, is the writer's reasoning valid?
3. Why is the reasoning valid or not valid?
Read the next two paragraphs and respond to items 4 and 5.
How can you say bad things about Picasso, Pollock, and Rothko? They were great artistic geniuses!
I can say bad things about them because they were not geniuses and because they didn't create good art. In fact, they made their fortunes based on the idea of producing things that were not even close to being good art, or art at all. Instead, they one way or another produced poor or non-art and "got away with it". There are objective ways of measuring the value of art (as I outlined above) and none of these "geniuses" came close to creating good art. The fact that they were famous and that many people have said and written nice things about them is no proof that they were geniuses or even artists. Objective truth is the proper measure of genius, not fame.
4. The writer states the artists mentioned "were not geniuses and because they didn't create good art". Does he produce "relevant and sufficient" evidence to suppport this?
5. Why or why not?
