How does the fallacy of division wrongly transfer a property of a whole to its parts?

The fallacy of division is a logical error that occurs when one incorrectly assumes that what is true of a collective whole must also be true of its individual parts.1

This error arises from a confusion between the collective and distributive uses of a term. In a collective sense, a term refers to a group as a single, unitary entity (e.g., "the crowd was compressed into a city block"). In a distributive sense, the term refers to the individual elements that make up that aggregate (e.g., "the crowd were filing through the turnstile").1

The fallacy of division wrongly transfers a property belonging to the group as a whole to the members within it. For example, if one argues that because a speech is long-winded (the whole), every individual sentence within that speech must also be long-winded (the parts), they are committing this fallacy. Ultimately, this is a form of ambiguity where the shift in how a word is applied invalidates the logical conclusion.1