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

This is one of those books, maybe the only book, which, many years after reading it I continue to recommend to people like me- those who are too into logos to notice that isn't how people work and there are two other central components to rhetoric! For a while it definitely positively affected my interactions with others- but I often now find myself slipping back into bad arguing habits. Probably due for a re-read!

I stretched this one out quite a while because I would pick it up, read a few sections and put it down for something else. It's a nice conversational read, full of great explanations, strategies, tips, told with not a few anecdotes (which ordinarily would drive me nuts, but weren't so bad taken a bit at a time). Recommended.

While the author is to be commended for trying to make a potentially dry subject - rhetoric - interesting, the result in this book is a rather glib and facile attempt to explain rhetoric and its uses to a 'lay audience'. While there are lots of examples, and terminology, not much of it is particularly useful unless you have never previously bothered having an argument or expressing your point of view.

The chapters follow a scheme of organisation, but it is quite disjointed rather than naturally flowing. The side boxes are distracting from the main text (this seems to be a technique used in a lot of self-help and management books, as though the reader will get bored if they are expected to just read paragraphs of text. I would prefer to show more read blocks of text rather than jump about the page). And the layout is bad in sections.

The real life examples used in the book are humourous, which makes the ideas more approachable, but the author is often very sexist, and boorish.

Overall, if you are interested in how to construct an argument, read Weston's 'A Rulebook for Arugments', if you are interested in public speaking, there are a multitude of better books on the subject out there. show less

As a teacher of high school rhetoric I found this a great book that explains the classical art of persuasion. He uses many great examples from history, his personal experience, politics, television and other things in our culture. He has a funny sense of humor and gets his point across well. It is well organized and he uses sideboards to give other facts or definitions which were helpful. I will recommend this to those who know nothing about rhetoric and also to my students.

A great primer on argumentation. It has a nice conversational style and doesn't get too hung-up on rhetorical figures or argumentation styles. It gives a usable overview of the major argument "voices" then gives salient examples. This is a very workable place to start a study on rhetoric before moving on to Corbett and Connors.

A interesting rhetoric primer disguised as a self-help book. However despite handy end of chapter summaries it suffers from fragmentation and disorganisation.

I love this book! Rhetoric has always been one of those things that I've gone "hunh???" over. This makes rhetoric fun and funny! His examples really do include Aristotle to Homer Simpson, along with his teen son and his preschool daughter. Funny, funny, funny!!