Govier's special concern is with the great number of arguments in natural language - social, political, and moral ones predominate - for which formal methods of analysis provide no purchase. She combats attempts to reduce arguments by analogy and conductive arguments to deductive ones for assessment purposes. But she will not count all arguments of certain types among the informally fallacious, as her careful discussion of tu quoque and slippery slope reveals.
   Starting  from the position that a populace skilled at argument is necessary for democracy to flourish, Govier debates feminist writers over the role of women. The claim that logic and argument are instruments of male domination is rejected, as is Andrea Nye's counsel that women should avoid logic, math, and computer science. Govier finds controversy important in the quest for a more adequate position, and denies that there is a distinctively femine, non-confrontational form of argument.
   How are arguments to be evaluated? According to Govier, arguments addressed to general audiences are not usefully modeled as dialogues. She finds serious problems with Ralph H. Johnson's attempt to evaluate them on a dialectical tier, not least with its tendency to generate ever more arguments.

 Considers the importance of skill at argument for democracy, the stands by different feminist writers on whether women should avoid argument or seek to master it, and how argument is to be evaluated.