Personal Notes

If you have paid attention to the way that Heinrichs relates life experiences to the importance of argument, you should be able to make references to some of your own experiences over the past weeks in which you saw argument happening. Explain some scenarios in which you made arguments, witnessed arguments, or detected fouls. Tell me about how some of the things you noticed relate to Heinrichs’s writing.

Think back to the way Heinrichs describes his pets, or even inanimate objects, making arguments. Wherever possible, use your newfound terminology to describe elements of the arguments that you share with me. Were these arguments forensic, demonstrative, or deliberative? Were they effective? Were they logical? Did they avoid fallacies? What are some specific emotions that they appealed to?

To perform well on this task, you should give me enough information that I can understand each scenario, and you should write a paragraph for each one that you write about (minimum 3). Ideally, each argument is unique and relates to elements of Heinrichs's book that your other examples do not repeat. Feel free to take some chances with the terminology--good writing about rhetoric focuses on explaining why something is effective more than it does on choosing exact literary or rhetorical labels.