A reliable diagnostic procedure is:
1. State the conclusion separately: what exactly is being claimed of what subject?
2. Check the truth and qualifications of each premise.
3. Identify the middle term; compare its sense, relation, and scope across premises.
4. Test the productive conditions of the figure and locate any negations.
5. Separate what is genuinely entailed from any additional claim that was not established.
The purpose is not merely to name a fallacy; it is to identify where the inference fails and how the defect could be repaired.