Fallacies are often unavoidable and can be used to make your writing more interesting to the reader, but that doesn't mean you should purposefully use them. Fallacies like Card-Stacking or Word Choice are ones many of us use in our writing without noticing, but like the fallacy Ad Populum, just because everyone else is doing it doesn't mean you should. Many times fallacies are unethical, bring up false information to make the argument seem more valid or lies about the opposing argument. Sometimes the fallacy can assume things of the reader, that they know about a certain topic or that they associate with a certain group.
A fallacy I believe should be avoided at all cost is Red Herring. Red Herring is directing your audience's attention to a different topic that has little to no relation to the original topic. The original use of the word comes from the use of dragging a fish through the trail of an escaping prisoner to make their path untraceable, making it more likely they would get away. When an author uses Red Herring, they are doing exactly that. When I come across the use of Red Herring, I can't help but question the validity of the author. I find often that it is used when the author is not educated enough on the original matter or they do not really care to begin with. In the Matt Walsh blog post that we read, he used Red Herring. His article was on immigration, but all of a sudden he throws in references to abortion. This made me feel as if he didn't really know what he was talking about and ran out of better arguments to make.
Fallacies can be hard to avoid, but it is important that we aren't turning to them because we don't have any better evidence to validate our stances.
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