Rhetorical Strategies In Stephen Dubner's Freakonomics

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

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