Know-Tay Shins

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It made me wonder how they come with all of it. So I dug this article up...

12 Excellent Narrative Essay Topics for You

If you are looking for great narrative essay topics and ideas for students, look no further! No matter what age your students are, they’ll love exploring their creativity through the lens of a narrative essay.

This powerful form of creative writing is virtually boundless.

You see…

To be considered a narrative essay, it must tell a story, sure yet…

Beyond that one simple requirement, the essay may take so many different forms. This flexibility gives a student plenty of room to run with his or her imagination and to craft a piece of writing that truly reflects who the student is as an individual.

Table of Contents
• What is a Narrative Essay?
• 12 Narrative Essay Topics for Students
• A Helpful List of Narrative Essay Themes
• Five Keys to Writing a Strong Narrative Essay
• Resources & Links

Ready to learn more about teaching narrative essay writing to your students this school year?

Let’s dive right in!

What is a Narrative Essay?

So… what exactly is a narrative essay?

At its core, a narrative essay must tell a story. It can draw from a single event or even several related events, but it should ultimately have a plot and a character or characters who are involved in the action.

Additionally, the narrative should revolve around a central theme or motif that illustrates why the author is sharing the narrative in the first place. Or in other words, the theme explains what the author took away from the event—and why that event was so meaningful to him or her.

In form, the narrative essay can be similar to a standard essay or a short story. It has a central point (similar to a thesis statement) just like a regular essay, and it includes characters, dialogue, and plot like a short story.

However, the inclusion of a motif is ultimately what sets the narrative essay apart from the short story.

However, the inclusion of a motif is ultimately what sets the narrative essay apart from the short story.

While many short stories do have important themes, they don’t require it—it’s okay for a short story to simply be based around the action of a plot or an exploration of a character.

A narrative essay, on the other hand, is a story that is told in order to explore an idea. And in that regard, its thematic significance is crucial.

Now see these…

12 Narrative Essay Topics for Students
Use these engaging narrative essay prompts to help students find creative, meaningful moments from their lives to share!

1. Write a narrative essay about a memorable “first” in your life (such as your first day at school, your first stuffed animal, your first heartbreak, etc.).

2. Write a narrative essay about a time when you faced a difficult decision.

3. Write about a day you experienced that was unlike any other.

4. Write a narrative essay in which an object takes on a greater symbolic meaning for your life.

5. Write about your experience with a hobby you love.

6. Write about a memorable summer vacation.

7. Write about something funny or scary that happened to you.

8. Write about someone who has played a major role in your life. Shape the narrative around a memorable experience you had with him or her.

9. Write about your experience growing up with the Internet.

10. Write a narrative essay describing how you got something important to you (such as your name, a nickname, a scar, or a beloved possession).

11. Write about an important memory you share with your parents.

12. Write about a time when you felt really confident in yourself.

I hope you enjoyed these Narrative Essay Topics. It’s time to check out…

A Helpful List of Narrative Essay Themes

Here’s the list of personal narrative essay topics and themes for high school students or college students.

• Coming-of-Age: This classic theme explores the protagonist’s journey from childhood to adulthood. It can involve a physical or emotional transformation, or both.

• Overcoming a Challenge: Everyone faces challenges in life. A narrative essay can explore how the protagonist overcomes a difficult obstacle, such as a physical disability, an illness, or a personal loss.

• Friendship: Friendships are an important part of life. A narrative essay can explore the power of friendship, the challenges of friendship, or the importance of a particular friend in the protagonist’s life.

• Identity: A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s search for identity. This could involve exploring their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or social class.

• Loss: Loss is a universal experience. A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s experience with loss, such as the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or the loss of a job.

• Discovery: A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s discovery of something new about themselves, the world, or others. This could be a physical discovery, an emotional discovery, or an intellectual discovery.

Family: Family is an important part of many people’s lives. A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s relationship with their family, the challenges of family life, or the importance of family.

• Culture: Culture shapes who we are. A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s experience with their culture, or the culture of someone else.

• Travel: Travel can be a transformative experience. A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s journey to a new place, and how it changed them.

• Secrets: Everyone has secrets. A narrative essay can explore the protagonist’s secret, and the impact it has on their life.

Additional themes that could be used as personal narratives and personal experiences in your writing lessons/assignments include:

• Pets, First Pet, Special animal
• Random act of kindness
• Childhood memories (aka favorite teacher, best friend, family vacation…)
• Personal passion, personal growth, resilience
• Self-discovery moments in our own lives
• A time of great adversity
• Self-care
• Adventure encounter, tales of reflection, perspective…
• Forgiveness
• A social media post that affect you deeply or the impact of technology on you and your life
• Cultural difference and/or cultural heritage

Ok, take a peek at these…

Five Keys to Writing a Strong Narrative Essay
Once your students understand the general premise of a narrative essay and how it differs from other forms, use the following tips to help them begin writing. Each of these steps serves as a key part of crafting a truly thought-provoking narrative essay.

1. Include a Strong Sense of Character

A true narrative essay must tell a story—and as such, that story must include one or more characters who undergo something in the narrative. Students can choose narratives where they are the sole characters, or they may tell stories that include family or friends.

Because the narrative essay is more heavily focused on the plot and theme, it’s important to define characters as succinctly as possible. Help students craft one or two sentences that showcase a character’s personality (or that define the character’s role) without having to spend too much time explaining who each person is. This will help kids stay focused on the narrative at hand.

2. Spice Things Up with Compelling Dialogue

Many short stories include dialogue and a narrative essay is no different.

In a narrative essay, dialogue can serve several key purposes:

• Builds character effectively
• Moves the plot along
• Creates a dynamic pace

Of course, dialogue that is done poorly is sometimes worse than simply not including dialogue at all—so you should encourage your students to practice writing realistic dialogue that sounds similar to how people actually talk. Have students read their dialogue aloud as a test to see how natural it sounds.

3. Add Conflict to Create Tension

Like any good story, a narrative essay must also include conflict and tension. Adding conflict to the narrative creates stakes—for the characters in the story and for the readers who have become invested in what happens.

Generally speaking, there are six accepted types of conflict used in literature. Your students can use any of these to drive tension in their narrative essays:

• Man Vs. Self: an internal conflict between a character and his or her own desires or ideals

• Man Vs. Man: a conflict between two characters

• Man Vs. Society: a conflict between a character and an outside force such as someone rebelling against a government or a teenager fighting against adult expectations

• Man Vs. Nature: a conflict between a character and a natural force like a giant storm, animal, or apocalyptic event

• Man Vs. Technology: a conflict between a character and a problem born of modern science such as a robot or struggle that requires a yet-to-be-invented solution

• Man Vs. Fate: a conflict between a character and an unseen or supernatural force

4. Incorporate A Prevailing Theme

As we mentioned previously, a narrative essay must also include a central theme or motif. This idea should be presented early on in the essay so that the reader may keep it in mind as he or she reads.

Throughout the essay, the narrative should occasionally hearken back to the theme or subtly point toward it in order to keep the reader’s mind engaged with the meaning of the narrative. In the end, the narrative essay should conclude with the author summarizing or alluding to the theme again in some way.

Though it doesn’t have to be as overt as the summary of a typical essay, the ending should nicely wrap up the topic in some way that leaves the reader with something to reflect upon.

5. Tell the Emotional Truth

Narrative essays are generally works of non-fiction, but students do have some license to be creative with the details. In a narrative essay, the writer should be more concerned with telling the “emotional truth” of an event rather than sticking solely to the exact facts of what happened.

What does that mean, practically speaking? Well, for starters, it’s okay if a student doesn’t remember exactly what someone said or the specific sequence of events in a story. This isn’t a report or a news article, so the details don’t have to be completely accurate.

Instead, students should focus on the meaning they wish to impart through their essay—and as such, should choose the most relevant and significant details to include in their work.

Alrighty…

That’s all for now.

If you enjoyed these Narrative Essay Topics for Students, please share them on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Pinterest. I appreciate it!

Sincerely,

Jill

journalbuddies.com

creator and curator

On skills: 10, 100, 1000, 10000 hours

Blog: Tom Graves / Tetradian

10; 100; 1000; 10000. A lot of things those numbers could apply to, of course, but in this case they’re ballpark figures for the number of hours of learning-based practice that it takes to develop specific levels of skill.

(We perhaps need to emphasise that point about ‘learning-based practice’, because it’s entirely possible to spend 10,000 hours of practice having learnt nothing new in all of that time, and hence still remaining at the Trainee level. In practice, skills develop through a continued cyclical process of do, test, evaluate and adapt – challenging oneself to improve in the skill on every step of the way.)

The thousand-hour level is quite well-known – the point at which we recognise the skill as skill. It should be obvious that it’s part of a continuum: yet what’s not so obvious, perhaps, is how that continuum works and what each level means in practice.

Skill-levels in part determine how we deal with an unknown world, so it’s useful to compare skill-levels against the SCAN framework, mapping sensemaking-perspectives against complexity, and time-before-action:

..to which we can then also crossmap those periods of time needed to develop the respective level of skill:

..and where, via further cross-maps, we can also describe the typical ‘action-context‘ for the respective skill-level in terms of the focus for the action:

..and in terms of ‘knowable and discoverable‘ – about what is already known and seemingly-certain, versus what must be discovered about in unknown or unique:

..and in terms of ‘knowable and discoverable‘ – about what is already known and seemingly-certain, versus what must be discovered about in unknown or unique:

So, overall, in a bit more detail:

— 10 hours minimum:
Trainee: ‘learn by rote’, the typical outcome of a day’s-worth of training, or a weekend workshop – knowledge of at least the basic terminology of a skill, plus competence to at least do something useful in that context. Since there’s no real skill here – it’s just actions in response to given assumptions – this skill-level will always need to be supervised by someone or something that does have a higher skill-level, in order to ensure that what is done will actually work as intended in real-world practice. (That supervising ‘someone’ can be the same person, by the way – and often is, for real people in everyday business practice.)

▪︎action-context:
enact the repeatable, predictable, known

▪︎decision-making:
rule-based – rapid real-time decisions on simple basis of true/false or either/or

▪︎driver for development:
unconscious incompetence – the need for competent action

▪︎ISO–9000 layer:
work-instruction

▪︎emphasis on:
physical action

▪︎suited to:
machines or IT; real people can work at this level, but may become less reliable the more often the task is repeated

This skill-level solves a single defined problem by a single predefined method in response to a single set of narrowly-constrained assumptions. We use this level wherever conscious decision-making is either unnecessary or undesirable, or there’s no time to think about what to do: stick to the rules, ‘the law’, keep the focus only on the task at hand, just do it, and do it fast. This is the basis of all real-world action: everyone will have thousands of competencies of at least this level by the time they leave school, and many thousands more over a working lifetime, but will develop only selected competencies to higher levels of skill.

-100 hours and onward:
Apprentice: the typical outcome of a two-week training-course combined with real-world practice, or working one’s way through the whole of an instruction-book – there’s awareness of some or most of the key factors in the context, and what the trade-offs are between them. It describes and operates within an analytic ‘theory’ or interlinked set of predefined algorithms and assumptions about how some aspect of the world works.

It’s crucially important to understand, though, that this type of skill depends on its assumptions: it is reliable only where those assumptions are valid, but it has no means within itself to test the validity those assumptions. Typical business software application encapsulate this level of skill, but in practice is suitable only for easily repeatable processes – not for true complexity.

Hence, as in the old fable of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, this is perhaps the most dangerous of skill-levels: just enough knowledge to give oneself the delusion of competence and ‘control’, but not enough awareness of its real-world limitations – enough knowledge to get into serious trouble but not enough to get back out of it – hence it’s essential for there to be ‘practice-fields’ where the inevitable mistakes may be safely made. Further skills-development should also be supported by some form of cyclical review-process such as the Deming/Shewhart ‘plan / do / check / act’ sequence – often including structured feedback such as the After Action Review – or, for skills embedded within ‘intelligent’ machines or IT-systems, an iterative ‘Agile’-style development process.

▪︎action-context:
evaluate the knowable – develop personal theory-of-practice to extend and improve skills

▪︎decision-making:
analytic – decision by ‘scientific’-type analysis using calculated algorithm or true/false comparison across many factors

▪︎driver for development:
conscious incompetence – realistic appraisal of current skill

▪︎ISO–9000 layer:
procedure

▪︎emphasis on:
calculation, analysis, thought

▪︎suited to:
IT systems and real people, also some types of machines with IT or algorithmic support

Over a working lifetime, most people will develop dozens or even hundreds of competencies at this level. Specialists will tend to collect competencies within a specific domain – system-developers, for example, will learn and use many different programming languages over time – whilst generalists will be more eclectic, often learning just sufficient about each skill to be able to converse meaningfully with the specialists yet build bridges between them.

- 1000 hours and onward:
Journeyman: the skills developed in a semester subject at university, a longer technical study, or just through routine practice over many months. By this stage there’s sufficient skill to work with the complexities of the real world – rather than only the abstract assumptions of IT-type logic – and to understand how to use guidelines and patterns, developing and testing hypotheses to interpret the inherent uncertainties and sheer messiness of most business practice. Unlike the ‘apprentice’ level, the ‘journeyman’ will be capable of doing unsupervised work – though there is still much to learn in terms of adaptability, ingenuity, precision and, especially, speed.

▪︎action-context:
experiment with the discoverable – learn how to work with ‘known-unknowns’, uniqueness, uncertainty, unpredictability

▪︎decision-making:
emergent – decisions based on experimentation, patterns and heuristics

▪︎driver for development:
conscious competence – the need to challenge and extend one’s skill

▪︎ISO–9000 layer:
policy

▪︎emphasis on:
relationships, interconnections

▪︎suited to:
real people, also certain (expensive) types of ‘semi-autonomous’ IT-systems, and specific ‘self-adjusting’ components in certain types of machines (e.g. governor in steam-engine); IT usually only in a decision-support role rather than decision-making role

Most people will develop a fair handful of these, as the secondary-level skills of working life: for example, the old office classics such as typing, shorthand and bookkeeping, or more updated versions such as spreadsheet design. As before, generalists will tend to collect more of these, across a broader, more eclectic scope; specialists will tend to keep their focus on a central skillset.

- 10000 hours and onward:
Master: the skills developed during the entire of a university course to pre-doctorate level, or of a full trade-apprenticeship – the latter traditionally ending with a skills-demonstration referred to formally as a ‘master-piece’. The knowledge and experience here is sufficient to know exactly how and when and why to bend or even break ‘the rules’, though this has now returned full-circle to working with the real world again in real-time. The classic description of this is the Chief Engineer in CS Forester’s novel The Ship: he stands on the deckplate, feet astride, hands behind his back, a still point in the centre of the action, silently watching everything going on, apparently doing nothing – yet takes action instantly when something crucial has been missed by others.

▪︎action-context:
explore and discover – identify and resolve ‘unknown-unknowns’ in real-time practice, ‘sensemaking within the void‘

▪︎decision-making:
principle-based – real-time decisions from intuitive grasp of the whole context

▪︎driver for development:
unconscious competence – the need to apply skill in real-time

▪︎ISO–9000 layer:
vision

▪︎emphasis on:
principles and overall purpose

▪︎suited to:
real people only

Some people never reach this stage for any skill; and whilst many may have more than one skill – reflecting a change in career, perhaps – the number of such depth-skills for each person will always be few. For generalists, the respective skill is that of ‘being a generalist’ – the ability to learn fast the basics of any skill and/or context, and link together all of those skills and contexts to support translation, coherence and unification across the whole.

In principle at least, there is also the 100000 hours level, representing fifty years’ full-time commitment to a single skill. Almost by definition, this would be relatively rare, but certainly does occur, especially amongst artists, musicians and scientists. One business example would be Peter Drucker, who spent a working lifetime of more than 70 years observing and commenting on the social structure of business organisations.

10, 100, 1000, 10000 hours; a couple of days, a couple of weeks, half a year, five years; trainee, apprentice, journeyman, master. A useful rule-of-thumb to describe four different and distinct layers of skill.

Wikipedia

Strongman

Strongman is someone who exhibits strength through strength athletics. Strength athletics, also known as strongman competitions, are composed of a variety of events in which competitors have to move the highest weights possible, the winner being the one having the highest tally across all events. In the 19th century, the term strongman referred to an exhibitor of strength or similar circus performers who performed feats of strength.

DESCRIPTION

In the first half of the 20th century, strongmen performed various feats of strength such as the bent press (not to be confused with the bench press, which did not exist at the time), supporting large amounts of weight held overhead at arm's length, steel bending, chain breaking, etc. They needed to have large amounts of wrist, hand, and tendon strength for these feats, as well as prodigious oblique strength.

In the late 20th century, the term strongman evolved to describe one who competes in strength athletics – a more modern eclectic strength competition in which competitors display their raw functional strength through exercises such as lifting rocks, toting refrigerators, pulling trains, towing an eighteen-wheel truck behind them, etc. The most famous competitions of this type are the World's Strongest Man, the Europe's Strongest Man, the Arnold Strongman Classic, the Strongman Champions League, the World's Ultimate Strongman, the Rogue Invitational and the Giants Live tour, and more than 20 countries also hold national-level competitions as well.

Many sports-specific training facilities have begun to incorporate movements associated with strongman competitions into their general training schemes, albeit with lighter weights used, e.g. tyre flips, sled drags, object loading or carrying, log pressing, farmer's walks and so on.

TRAINING

Training for strongman involves building overall strength in the gym and training with competition implements to gain familiarity. In the gym, it is necessary to train the entire body for strength, especially with variants of the squat, deadlift, and overhead press. Also important is explosive power, developed by weightlifting-style lifts, and cardiovascular conditioning. Grip strength must also be developed.

Although you can do general strength training, at a typical gym, training with a strongman regimen requires equipment not typically found in a gym. Some equipment used in a strongman competition would have to be found custom-made or at a strongman gym. Some of these equipment includes natural stones, tree trunk logs, farmers walk frames, yokes, kegs and various sorts of vehicles.

Another part of a strongman's training is its intense diet regime. The biggest strongman competitors would need to ingest around 8,000 - 10,000 calories a day.

EVENTS

Though competitive strongman events are ever changing, there are a number of staples that frequently appear on the international stage, including:

• Deadlift (and its variants: Elephant bar/ Hummer Tyre/ Silver Dollar/ Deficit/ Car/ Barrel)

• Squat (and its variants: Giant Barbell/ Barrel)

• Lifting stone (Atlas Stones/ Castle stones)

• Natural stones (Husafell Stone, Dinnie Stones, Inver Stones, Steinstossen etc.)

• Log Press/ Axle Press/ Viking press

• Circus/ Cyr/ Inch dumbbell

• Vehicle pull

• Super Yoke/ Bale Tote/ Frame carry

• Farmers Walk/ Timber carry

• Keg Toss/ Weight over bar

• Loading Medley

• Power stairs/ Duck walk

• Fingal's Fingers/ Norse Hammers

• Hercules hold/ Front hold/ Deadlift hold

• Conan's Wheel/ Basque circle

• Car flip/Tyre flip

• Bar bending

• Grip strength events

INCORRECT USAGE

Strongman is often incorrectly used to describe a person who does weightlifting or bodybuilding. Due to the circus and entertainment background, nineteenth-century bodybuilders were expected to mingle with the crowd during intermission and perform strength feats like card tearing, nail bending, etc. to demonstrate strength as well as symmetry and size. Also, many strongmen sold photos of themselves n**e or near-n**e, flexing and posing. Although, what they considered the epitome of male beauty was different from modern ideals – particularly the very low emphasis on chest size, and great emphasis on oblique size, and symmetry as evidenced by photos of Eugen Sandow.

April 16, 2019, Jonathan Maloney

Intelligent Speculation

The Foundations of Logic

People have been participating in dialogues since the beginning of time. It is a wonderful tool that humans have developed over the millennia to communicate ideas in hopes of reaching an amicable and constructive conclusion. However, in my experience, individuals who partake in these discourses often fail to use logic. You will sometimes even encounter the saying “it's a matter of opinion.” Well, actually, it's not. You either have evidence to support your premise(s) (i.e., demonstrate the truth of your premise) or you don't. You can either structure a good argument following the rules of logic or your argument is bad and should be rejected. It's that simple.

But, how do we know that logic is right? Why should we trust it? Simply, it works. Time and time again, logic has led to correct answers. However, let's delve into the details of how we can consistently arrive at correct conclusions when we apply the rules of logic.

THE AXIOM

An axiom is anything we take as a self-evident truth that requires no proof or a universally accepted principle or rule. Essentially, the axiom is going to be the foundation of your theory from which everything else will follow. For example, the most commonly used foundational system for mathematics is called set theory. Within set theory, the axioms (sometimes referred to as postulates) from which all mathematics is built upon are known as the Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms [1]:

1) Axiom of Extensionality: If X and Y have the same elements, then X = Y.

Explanation: This is basically saying that if X and Y have the same parts, then they must be the same. For example, if X is composed of the natural numbers {1,2,3} and Y is also composed of the same natural numbers {1,2,3}, then clearly X = Y. Note, the natural numbers are composed of all the positive integers (i.e., 1,2,3,4,.....).

There are a total of nine axioms that compose the logical foundations for mathematics. However, they become increasingly more complex to the untrained eye, so we will stop here.

As another example, let's assay the branch of mathematics concerned with questions of:
▪︎shape,
▪︎size,
▪︎properties of space, etc.
Geometry, as with set theory, is also an axiomatic system (i.e., all theorems or true statements are derived from a small number of simple axioms). In particular, the type of geometry that you were first introduced to is what's known as Euclidean geometry. This particular type of geometry has the following axioms [2]:

1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.

2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.

3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.

4. All right angles (i.e., a 90 degree angle) are equal to one another.

5. If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.

Explanation: The first four axioms/postulates are self-explanatory. However, while the wording on the fifth is a bit confusing, in reality, it is something that you are already familiar with. This axiom is known as the parallel postulate, which is equivalent to what's known as the triangle postulate. This second postulate is the one you are already familiar with as you were taught, early on in school, that the sum of all the interior angles of a triangle must add up to 180 degrees. Interestingly, this axiom/postulate means that in non-Euclidean geometries (e.g., hyperbolic, elliptic, or even the Riemann geometry used in General Relativity) the sum of the interior angles of a triangle doesn't necessarily add to 180 degrees anymore.

Once more, axioms are the foundations from which everything else is built. As in mathematics, logic also has a set of axioms from which all else follows.

AXIOMS OF LOGIC

The axioms/rules for logic or “laws of thought” are [3]:

1. The Law of Identity:
Something is what it is and isn't what it is not. Something that exists has a specific nature.

2. Law of Non-Contradiction:
Something cannot be both true and false at the same time in the same sense.

3. The Law of Excluded Middle:
A statement is either true or false, without a middle ground.

4. The Law of Transitive Properties:
The properties of one premise must carry over to the other premises.

These can also be represented mathematically as:

1. A = A.

2. A != !A

3. Everything is either A or !A.

4. If A = B and B = C, then A = C.

Note, within the mathematical descriptions, the precedent “!” negates the object that follows. Thus, != reads “not equal to” and !A reads “not A.” Further, the fourth axiom isn't technically a part of the traditional laws of thought; only axioms 1-3 are. Nonetheless, I felt it was important enough to be included here.

EXAMPLES

Expounding upon the rules of logic described above, we have:

1) I am me. I am not you. I am not my dog. My dog is a dog. You are not my dog. You, my dog and I are all separate, as we are each composed of our own unique set of characteristics.

2) A cat is a cat. It has fur, two eyes, whiskers, claws and is alive. A rock is a rock. It is hard, generally roundish in nature, and is not alive. We cannot have the situation where a cat is also a rock (i.e., a cat-rock); it's verboten. Once we have assigned a label to a given object, then it cannot simultaneously assume the label of something else. If this were to happen, then we would arrive at the situation where something could simultaneously be both alive and not alive. Clearly, this makes no sense. What is more, this isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s fact.

A square is an object that is composed of four line segments and four right angles; which, when you add all of the interior angles add to 360 degrees. A triangle, as discussed before, is composed of three line segments and has interior angles that add to 180 degrees. Therefore, a square-triangle is something that cannot exist, just as you cannot have an object which simultaneously has interior angles that add up to both 180 and 360 degrees. It doesn't make any sense; it has to be one or the other. Again, this isn’t a matter of opinion. If we adhere to the axioms of geometry, this is fact.

3) You are either dead or alive; there is no middle ground in this case. Note, in everyday discourse (i.e., informal logic), this axiom can fail unless strict definitions are agreed upon by both parties. It is generally reserved for use in formal logic (i.e., symbolic logic).

4) Joe has less money than Ashley, Ashley has less money than Heather, and Heather has less money than Rob. Does Rob have more money than Joe? Now, before we answer this question, we can rearrange the premises into a syllogism:

• Joe has less money than Ashley.

• Ashley has less money than Heather.

• Heather has less money than Rob

• Therefore, Joe has less money than Rob.

As you can see, the property of money transitioned to each premise, which eventually allowed us to reach the conclusion that Rob has more money than Joe. Note, in order to structure a good argument using this axiom, it is imperative that the premises are true.

For example, if the premise that “Joe has less money than Ashley” was not true, than the conclusion that “Joe has less money than Rob” cannot be guaranteed. This results in a bad argument, which must then be rejected.

You apply logic in everyday life without even thinking about it. For example, consider the scenario where you notice your cell phone has low battery. You then choose to plug it in. Without giving it any serious thought, you went through the following syllogism in your head:

• The battery percentage display on my cellphone is designed to tell me how much battery is left.

• I know the battery display works.

• My cell phone is displaying that I am low on battery.

• Therefore, I must be low on battery.

This is a simple example of deductive logic in everyday life (I'm charging my phone right now and applied the same exact syllogism demonstrated here before I did so). If I were to dismiss this as a matter of opinion or simply choose to ignore it, my phone would eventually run out of battery and become useless. As you can clearly see here, the rules of logic are important and, when properly applied, give us the best possible chance of arriving at a correct answer.

CONCLUSION

As demonstrated above, logic, like everything else, has a starting point or foundation from which the rest is built. These axioms direct us towards crafting a cogent thought process, which allow us to reach true conclusions. Implicitly, this is something that all of use on a daily basis to make important decisions.

However, more often than not, I have observed people (myself included) failing to use logic when engaging in a discourse, which will result in an incorrect conclusion. Moreover, we are all entitled to have opinions, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that; but, this doesn't mean your opinion is tantamount to fact or the immutable rules of logic. Hence, if you find yourself presenting your opinion when confronted with evidence, you are most certainly wrong and must re-evaluate your position. As a Critical Thinker, it is paramount that you have a thorough understanding of these rules and implement them regularly to ensure the course of your life is being directed by good arguments.

REFERENCES

[1] Weisstein, Eric W. "Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.

[2] Weisstein, Eric W. “Euclid's Postulates." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.

[3] "Laws of thought". Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Robert Audi, Editor, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. p. 489.