About a year ago I decided to undertake an ambitious creative project: I would illustrate the informal fallacies using a snail motif. What led me to such pedantic subject matter? Let me start with definitions. Informal fallacies refer to arguments that are unsound for reasons other than their formal logical structure. Check my links for a more detailed explanation. Many fallacies have latin names that I always meant to translate after hearing them tossed about on the news, such as post hoc or ad hominem . Others have more intuitive names, such as the slippery slope fallacy or argument from ridicule. Fallacies--I vaguely recall my college philosophy course brushing past them, but my real understanding of them arrived when I taught Introduction to Academic Writing at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. There I was employed to teach freshmen how to write that amorphous animal, The Academic Essay, in a way applicable to their individual fields of study. My lesson topics ranged, often...