In a two-day seminar this past week, I trained 21 practitioners from across Oregon in designing argument visualizations of factual and legal arguments for litigation. The Path argument schema and visual language is optimum, in my opinion, for this process. And Rationale™ software is indispensable for doing it quickly, efficiently, and with rigor.

Those of you who use Rationale™ relying upon a Pyramid (building blocks) metaphor and visual grammar may be surprised by this fact. Rationale™ is fundamentally, however, a superb generic argument visualization software program. While it may have been designed with the Pyramid metaphor and visual language in mind, it is a “box-edge-letter” software program that is optimized for almost any visual language of argument visualization.

Unfortunately, there is no current compilation of the visual grammar for using Rationale™ for constructing Path maps. To rectify this problem and enable Path mappers to be able to take advantage of the amazing power of Rationale™, I have created a simple Rationale/Path Grammar. http://inferencepath.edublogs.org/rationale/