Strengthening our informal reasoning skills may be our best defense against the misinformation and disinformation permeating this new media landscape. However, designing theoretically-grounded instructional systems that mimic the unique constraints of real-world everyday reasoning is challenging. In a series of two experiments, we explore the viability of distracted reasoning as a paradigm for difficulty factors assessment in the informal reasoning space. Participants in both experiments saw performance improvements on both the detection and classification of informal reasoning errors. Importantly, the level of distraction affected the impact of theorized difficulty factors (such as argument plausibility and political alignment). These results suggest that a distracted reasoning paradigm may offer a reasonable analogue for the unique constraints of everyday informal reasoning.