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Rhetorical Strategies In Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics

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Throughout all of history, people have always tried to persuade someone to see their point of view. People from all kinds of backgrounds have engaged in such behavior, whether they realize it or not, in order to convince someone else that their opinion is correct. There have been many who have made themselves known by their opinion and power to persuade others such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whose words were able to inspire a nation to have a change of heart. Authors, however, make up one of the larger portions of people trying to persuade others to agree with them on a topic. An author such as George Orwell writes in order to persuade others towards the kind of world they should want to be living in, and he crafts his writings in a way that achieves this purpose. In Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics, they utilize the rhetorical strategies of tone, comparison and contrast as …show more content…

The way they introduce each of the topics they wish to discuss are with hypothetical or economical questions which they eventually answer as they continue through their discussion. As one example, they ask “why is there so much crime in modern society?” which they then oppose with the question “why isn’t there a lot more crime?” At which point the authors then follow up the questions with a list of statistics that show the decreased number of homicides in Europe to illustrate how the crime rate from there has changed dramatically over the past couple of centuries (20). The authors often refer to different economic studies that cover issues ranging from the rate of crime to protecting endangered owls. They mention the opportunity costs that come with certain decisions like whether to save a certain breed of owls in a wooded area which would mean that logging companies would lose billions of dollars in output for the sake of an already dying out breed of

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Dear Prof. Ulibarri, As I was sitting in the library writing this paper, I was glad that we had gone so in depth into all the rhetorical strategies in class. I started by memorizing what each rhetorical strategy was and how it was used to persuade the reader I then looked up examples of each one so it would be easier for me to locate them in the text of Freakonomics. I then re-read the chapter I chose and highlighted the rhetorical strategies I found. From there I found quotes in the text to back it up and identified how the authors, Levitt and Dubner used them to persuade readers. After that I took a look at the index of templates in They Say I Say to choose which templates I would use to begin the sentences of every beginning paragraph

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The book Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner talks about many different things, including cheating teachers and sumo wrestlers, how abortion lowered crime rates, how a street crack gang works, and whether the way parents raise their children even matter. These topics seem to have nothing in common, but all of these topics were identified in the same way: an economist (Levitt) looked at school test scores, crime data, and all sorts of other information, looking at them in unconventional ways. Because of that, he has come to many interesting and unique conclusions that make complete sense. These findings were based on some simple ideas: the power of incentives, conventional wisdom is not always right, things may not have obvious causes, and experts often serve their own interests instead of the interests of others. Perhaps the most important idea in the book is, as Levitt and Dubner state, “Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so” (14).

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