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

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Examples of tropes include metaphor (when one thing stands for another) and synecdoche (when a part represents the whole). In storytelling, tropes might be recurring or familiar ideas used to make a connection with audience members; examples might include characterizations like the comic sidekick or plot devices like long lost family members. What are some popular tropes in books, film, and TV? When you read/watch a comedy, what plot and/or character tropes do you expect to see? How about when you read/watch a drama?

Teaching Suggestion: In getting your students to think about persuasion, this exercise may help them to reflect upon the common persuasive strategies deployed in their own everyday life. One of Heinrichs’ main themes in Thank You for Arguing is that Rhetoric Is Morally Ambiguous; however, when a persuader is trying to convince someone of their point, they often will deploy tropes in particular ways worth noting. For example, persuaders using tropes will often use individual characteristics to define entire groups. Group discussion of this short-answer question may help students to better understand how tropes in comedies versus dramas (versus horror and other genres) have “persuasive” effects in that they quickly telegraph to the audience a symbolic message about the kind of story they are about to read/see.