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Thank You For Arguing Essay

Decent Essays

Emily Long
Mrs. Ward
English 11AS
August 26, 2014
11 AS Summer Reading Project
Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion is a title written by the not-so-famous, (but extremely well-versed) Jay Heinrichs. Although the title is indeed a mouthful, it serves its purpose in drawing the reader in. Also; the extremely long title is a little hint of what Heinrichs entails in his book, an endless supply of information on how to correctly and influentially utilize rhetoric, the art of persuasion.
The book is divided into five sections, each one being subdivided into different strategies on how to use rhetoric to your advantage, in any given situation.
The first section, Offense, …show more content…

She interprets that the tape is actually of a murder, because of the way he refers to it, thus scaring her into a panic. Although this wasn’t the way he envisioned for her mood to alter, it still did.
The next section is titled Defense. It goes over logical fallacies, their downfalls, how to spot them, and much more. Such as, the “Seven Deadly Sins” of rhetoric, and the defensive tools of practical wisdom.
A fallacy, by definition, is an argument that uses poor reasoning. Before one uses a fallacy, it’s important to have full understanding or else you risk losing your whole ethos aspect of your argument. Heinrichs gives three important parts to detecting fallacies. “All you have to do is look for a bad proof, the wrong number of choices, or a disconnect between the proof and the conclusion.” (Heinrichs 146)
The following two sins are Tautology and False Choice. Tautology just repeats the premise, or principle of the argument. The example given was "Fan: The Cowboys are favored to win since they are the better team." (Heinrichs 155) Fundamentally, tautology is the same thing that gets repeated in different words. Next, we have False Choice. False choice is the many questions fallacy, in which two or more issues are mixed into one. "A related fallacy, the false dilemma, offers the audience two choices when more actually exist." (Heinrichs 163). The objective with this sin is to not

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