Introduction The art of influence and wit, rhetoric, utilizes many different skills to make it successful. Aristotle had a lot of say about rhetoric. His three main points about being a credible leader, and thus being successful at rhetoric, are virtue, disinterest and practical wisdom. Cicero was another famous philosopher who spoke on rhetoric, coming up with an effective way for constructing a speech-invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Rhetoric is most effective when in the future tense. The future has to do with making choices, and making a choice is generally the only way to end an argument. Another way to end an argument is to come to a consensus, which “represents an audience’s commonplace thinking” (Heinrichs 9). Rhetoric boils down to two main parts: how to successfully argue a position and to win over an audience.
Offense
Working on the offense of an argument means making the goals the speaker has for an argument appear to match those the audience holds. In an argument, the goal isn’t to beat an opponent; it is to make the audience choose the position of the speaker. That is the point of deliberative arguments: making choices. This why …show more content…
A fallacy is a flaw in logic. The ability to spot fallacies also has practical use, but in rhetoric, they pinpoint the soft spots in an opponent’s case. There are “seven deadly sins” in logical fallacies and those are the false comparison, the bad example, ignorance as proof, tautology (or repeating the premise, essentially reaching no conclusion), the false choice, the red herring (or a distraction from the matter at hand), and the wrong ending. Fallacies are allowed in arguments as long as they effective. This why rhetoric is different from logic because in arguments, “there are no right and wrong decisions…only likely and unlikely” (Heinrichs 166). Due to this rhetoric cannot “argue the inarguable” (Heinrichs
Offense
Working on the offense of an argument means making the goals the speaker has for an argument appear to match those the audience holds. In an argument, the goal isn’t to beat an opponent; it is to make the audience choose the position of the speaker. That is the point of deliberative arguments: making choices. This why …show more content…
A fallacy is a flaw in logic. The ability to spot fallacies also has practical use, but in rhetoric, they pinpoint the soft spots in an opponent’s case. There are “seven deadly sins” in logical fallacies and those are the false comparison, the bad example, ignorance as proof, tautology (or repeating the premise, essentially reaching no conclusion), the false choice, the red herring (or a distraction from the matter at hand), and the wrong ending. Fallacies are allowed in arguments as long as they effective. This why rhetoric is different from logic because in arguments, “there are no right and wrong decisions…only likely and unlikely” (Heinrichs 166). Due to this rhetoric cannot “argue the inarguable” (Heinrichs