How to Argue

We all know how to argue but there are many different strategies when it comes to arguing. You can start of with an analogy like our President, Barack Obama does. When he says in his speech in 2012 that "our destiny is stitched together like those 50 stars" he uses the symbol of the American flag to invoke a sense of patriotism with the listeners of those speech. Classification is also a way to be used in arguing and is when you sort things together into certain categories by a defining characteristics. An example of this would be apples and their different types like Macintosh, Gala, Granny Smith etc. There is also comparing and contrasting where you can compare the similarities of a certain book series like Game of Thrones to another fantasy series such as Lord of the Rings. You can use the block method where you compare within a paragraph or you could do point by point like David Sedaris commonly does and just explain things sentence by sentence.

You need to be clear when you define within your analysis when it's a term that isn't commonly known- use your common sense with this. You also need to be good at describing things like Terry Tempest Williams does because she goes into details and uses imagery to help the reader understand what happened. You also can use pathos, which I've talked about before, and appeal to the audience by talking of things that tug at the heartstrings. For example when Steve Jobs talks about his cancer he says how he has to get his affairs in order and running out of time with the people you love. Everyone has people you love and care for and it hurts to think of yourself doing that- adding credibility to what Steve Jobs had to go through.


Humor can be used but you need to know WHEN to use it and how. Satire isn't easy to do properly. The Onion does a great job of it and on page 319. Here they are making a satire out of how important sports are to certain colleges, making the academics come second. When you use a problem/solution you start off with a proposal that is first openly addressed and then is made more apparent and goes into a deeper discussion. Finally the last thing I want to address is quite possibly the most well known speech anyone would ever know. The "I Have A Dream Speech" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is known so well because of the repetition that everyone knows Dr. King has a dream and it's that he envisions equality among his children. With the use of repetition, everyone knows it and it's become so well known because of this.