Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion

3 Responses to Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion

1. Michael Vegis says:

   June 6, 2011 at 11:57 pm

   45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

   Keys to advertising and political campaigns, March 7, 2007

   By Michael Vegis –
     

   This review is from: Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (Paperback)

   The book not only shows how to argue, it also reveals the tricks behind advertising and political campaigns. Heinrichs walks us through the basic rhetorical principles, starting with “ethos, pathos and logos,” or character, emotion and logic. Character is the most important, he says, because your audience is much more likely to accept your point if it likes and trusts you. He shows how to construct the image of a leader to suit any audience–useful for anyone who manages people, or wants to.

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2. Gypsy Bachiller says:

   June 7, 2011 at 12:15 am

   39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

   This is an important book, March 7, 2007

   By Gypsy Bachiller –
     

   This review is from: Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (Paperback)

   Don’t let the humor and readable tone fool you. Heinrichs makes a great case for restoring some of the forgotten rhetorical principles behind the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. All the nation’s founders had at least some training in rhetoric, he says. Our ignorance of it keeps us from restoring civility and sense to our national dialogue. This book should be required reading in high school and college.

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3. rbnn says:

   June 7, 2011 at 1:12 am

   86 of 104 people found the following review helpful:

   Useful, some errors, November 20, 2009

   By rbnn (Berkeley, CA United States) –

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   This review is from: Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (Paperback)

   This is a useful, well-written book focusing on using the tools of rhetoric to persuade people of things. It’s different from most books on rhetoric by emphasizing contemporary, realistic examples – trying to get a promotion, win a client, make a sale, convince someone to vote a certain way – and by focusing on how people really decide things, not on idealistic versions of that. Thus, the author does a very good job of discussing why “decorum”, fitting in, is important, and how it is important to know what motivates the other person. And it’s different from books on psychology and people-skills, like How to Win Friends and Influence People, because it focuses mainly on rhetoric. The writing is anecdotal and personal, full of jokes, some of them funny, and references to pop culture. I felt the second half of the book became a bit disorganized – it was sometimes not precisely clear to me whether the author was discussing logos, pathos, or ethos, or exactly where a chapter fit into the big scheme of things. But it’s certainly well-written. And the book is unquestionably useful, both in identifying and in using rhetorical techniques. Frankly, I wish I’d had this book when I was younger: I used to think persuasion was based entirely on logic. There are many day-to-day interactions and even career decisions that would be greatly aided by knowing the material here. Although the book is entertaining, useful, even important, I nevertheless had a couple complaints. (1) There were a number of errors in the identification and naming of rhetorical figures. Although these errors were likely just due to sloppy editing, I felt they would substantially confuse most readers. For example, “metonymy” is defined on page 213 as something that “uses a part to describe the whole.” True, using a part for a whole can be a type of metonymy, but metonymy actually means using something associated with another thing to stand for that other thing. The glossary repeats the incorrect definition, but concedes that metonymy can mean using cause for effect. Again, that is a type of metonymy, not metonymy itself. Similarly, synecdoche is also misdefined as that “which swaps one thing for a collection.” (p. 213). Synecdoche is using a part for the whole. Saying “The White House denied the allegations” would be a metonymy, not a synecdoche as the author incorrectly claims, because “White House” is not a part of the presidential administration. The author also argues on page 210 that “every verse in the first book of Genesis” after the first starting with “And” is an example of anaphora. I think most people would say “chapter” not “book” of Genesis, but leaving that aside, I don’t think anaphora is the correct figure here, if anything it is polysyndeton. The “and”s are not emphasized, they are just connecting words. (This point is fairly clear when we think of the meaning of anaphora, which is to emphasize the repetition, but in the Hebrew it’s even clearer – the “And” comes from the Hebrew prefix vav- and isn’t even its own word, it’s just sort of a grammatical linking word. The author makes the same error on page 211, mischaracterizing an example from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as anaphora when it is better characterized as polysyndeton. On page 196 the author does correctly define polysyndeton, but the example next to it seems like an example of asyndeton. The editing is unclear but the treatment is at best confusing and at worst incorrect. The author claims that “a man who wants to sound like a Rat Packer uses a speak-around when he refers to woman as ‘broads’.” By “speak-around” the author means “circumlocution” or periphrasis, but using “broad” for “woman is not an example of this. It’s not even close, frankly, I’m not sure what the author was even getting at, since he correctly defines periphrasis. (p. 210). By the way, this also illustrates the author’s penchant for using his own pet terms for rhetorical terms of art, here “speak-around” for “periphrasis.” I find this annoying – jargon is there for a reason, so that people do not have to constantly redefine their terms and can look things up easily – but he does it a lot. (2) My general philosophical concern with the author’s approach is that he comes perilously close to confusing persuasiveness with correctness. It is true that the author’s repertoire of techniques are ultimately persuasive to most people, but that’s just because most people are not trained in statistical inference and logic and are thus subject to various kinds of cognitive fallacies. But this persuasiveness is not related to the actual correctness of the arguments. At one point the author mentions “formal logic” but does not seem to mean real logic, i.e. mathematical logic, by that; and the author does not generally seem to realize that only by quantitative analysis can…

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