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Triage is a French word that is used by medical workers to assess who is the most severely injured and needs medical care first. Just as physicians need to make judgments about the stream of wounded or injured that enter their medical facilities, we need to make critical judgments about the validity of the persuasive messages with which we are bombarded-we call this skill information triage. Specifically, information triage is the skill of sorting out good ideas from bad ones.

One of the most important skills in being a consumer of persuasive messages is the ability to spot poorly constructed persuasive messages. Being able to ferret out illogical arguments is especially important. The following Website can raise the level of your skill of information triage by bolstering your ability to identify reasoning fallacies:

The Nizkor Project
This site includes over forty different types of fallacies, provides examples, and helps you identify good arguments as well as bad. Although we have introduced some of the most common reasoning fallacies in this chapter, you may want to further sharpen your skill by adding to your repertoire the reasoning fallacies you can detect.
Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies
Logical fallacies are errors of reasoning, errors which may be recognized and corrected by prudent thinkers. This site indexes and describes all known logical fallacies.
Fallacy Files
A collection of named fallacies and fallacious arguments.
Info-Pollution
A collection of fallacies with links and definitions.

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