How to Win an Argument: Surefire Strategies for Getting Your Point Across

by Michael A. Gilbert

Overview

How to Win an Argument is designed to provide you with the tools you need to improve your rhetorical and critical skills. Since we constantly argue at work, home, and even in casual conversation, improving that ability is extremely important. This book will enable you to choose your arguments carefully and prevent you from being misled by fallacies and empty rhetoric. It will increase your insight and perception of the positions presented to you, decrease your gullibility, and replace it with a healthy skepticism. The practical information in this guide will sharpen your ears and your mind, making it more likely that the right response will occur to you at the right moment, rather than hours later. The third edition contains a new chapter on emotion and additional examples for each chapter. Using this book will aid you in communicating effectively, avoiding conflict, and understanding the myriad arguments you are faced with every day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761840015
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	01/17/2008
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	174
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michael A. Gilbert is Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Coalescent Argumentation (1979), as well as two novels, and numerous scholarly articles.

Table of Contents

Part 1 Preface to the Third Edition
Part 2 I: The Art of the Argument
Chapter 3 What Are We Arguing About?
Chapter 4 Why Argue So Much?
Chapter 5 Kinds of Arguments
Chapter 6 Defensive vs. Offensive Argument
Chapter 7 Some Warnings
Chapter 8 Super-Rule I: Never Admit Defeat
Chapter 9 How Are Arguments Built?
Chapter 10 The Principle of Rationality
Chapter 11 Two More Principles
Chapter 12 Super-Rule II: Listen!
Chapter 13 Emotional Turmoil
Chapter 14 Scoring a Goal
Chapter 15 Zen and the Art of Argument
Chapter 16 Section 1 Review
Part 17 II: The Ways of Argument
Chapter 18 What's Going on Here?
Chapter 19 Ring Around the Argument
Chapter 20 What Were We Talking About?
Chapter 21 Everyone's Doin' It, Doin' It, Doin' It
Chapter 22 Well, If He Said So...
Chapter 23 The Refuge of Scoundrels
Chapter 24 The Straw-Man Argument
Chapter 25 The Slippery Slope
Chapter 26 Haste Makes Waste
Chapter 27 Three Sneaky Moves
Chapter 28 Section II Review
Part 29 III: The Arguments
Chapter 30 Pot Luck
Chapter 31 The Gay Life
Chapter 32 Equal Rights for Equal Arguments
Chapter 33 Why Get Married?
Chapter 34 Good-bye, Friends
Chapter 35 To See Or Not To See
Chapter 36 Essaying A Service
Chapter 37 To Therapy Or Not To Therapy
Chapter 38 Section III Review
Chapter 39 Going Further
Part 40 Index

What People are Saying About This

Frans H. van Eemeren

This is a HOW to book that makes sense. No doubt because it is based on a thorough understanding of the peculiarities and possibilities of argumentation.

Editorial Reviews

If argumentation is important, then this book will be of inestimable value.

St. Catherine's Standard

This is a HOW to book that makes sense. No doubt because it is based on a thorough understanding of the peculiarities and possibilities of argumentation.

Frans H. van Eemeren