People often feel torn when trying to apply what they have learned about fallacies in ordinary contexts. This is not a matter of being able to spot the fallacies in editorials, a newspaper's or magazine's letters to the editors, and so on: You will soon discover that you have no trouble finding and identifying such argumentative missteps.

The trick arises in conversational contexts. On the one hand, your knowledge of pseudoreasoning makes it tempting to call another person's statement "apple polishing" or "subjective fallacy." On the other hand, simply throwing out these labels is rude at best, not to mention confusing and weird. It doesn't help anyone's critical thinking to give a name to what someone just said.

Watching for fallacies therefore works best if you notice the category that a would-be argument falls into, and use that information to tell yourself that an emotion has been irrelevantly appealed to. If you then want to say something in the conversation, it is more useful to say, "That pity [or anger, vanity, concern for the opinions of others, and so on] is not relevant to the truth or falsity of what you're talking about."