Thank You For Arguing By Jay Heinrichs

The Necessities for Rhetorical Appeals: An Argument and Audience Jay Heinrichs, the author of Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, had prior writing and persuading experience before writing this book. He was a journalist and worked in the publishing business until he began studying rhetoric. Heinrichs wrote this book to teach readers what persuasion is and how to use it and effectively explain the significant difference between an argument and fight, but this book should not be used in further years because the value does not outweigh the cons.

Heinrichs’s main purpose in his book is to teach his readers that persuasion is an art that requires skill and planning. Persuasion

This is valuable because a fight can’t create anything positive, only negative. An argument, on the other hand, can lead to an agreement. In order to persuade, an audience has to be won over in an argument, not forced in a fight. Heinrichs first defines the difference between a fight and argument in order to explain why an argument is always more effective than fighting, which only produces a winner and a loser (17). An argument is more beneficial if the right time, the right place, and the right skills are present. By explaining these things, he gives real world examples that demonstrate how his methods can be used successfully. For example, he uses a cop scenario to show that if “he leaves happy, [... then] so do you” (20). By conceding to the cop’s point, the citizen was successful because of the avoidance of a fight. Avoiding a fight puts the audience in a good place to be persuaded and leads ethos, pathos, and logos to be used in an effective way. This chapter is vitally important because it sets the reader up for the rest of the book. This is the most effective chapter in the whole book because it teaches the most useable rhetoric skill that anyone could use in any situation. Overall, this is the best chapter because it teaches a skill that can be easily used universally by anyone trying to