Engineering Rhetoric

I recently came across a great book - - Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion (2007) by Jay Heinrichs.  Very few engineers know the tools of persuasion from the very beginning - - ethos, logos, and pathos.  This is rather unfortunate.  A key skill set for engineers in the future will be persuading.  From Congress and the need for funding public infrastructure, to marketing global customers, to discussing the risks of increased extreme weather events, to getting your design points across to the project team - - the art of engineering rhetoric is going to be an increasingly important endeavor.

Heinrich writes the following:

"The ancients considered rhetoric the essential skill of leadership - knowledge so important that they placed it at the center of higher education.  It taught them how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on every occasion, and make people like them when they spoke.  After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the world's first democracies.  It trained Roman orators like Julius Caesar and Marcus Tillius Cicero and gave the Bible its finest language.  It even inspired William Shakespeare.  Every one of America's founders studied rhetoric, and they used its principles in writing the Constitution."

The next time you hear "Not only do we have this, but we also . . ." at a presentation, remember that the Romans were the first with "But wait, there's more" - - it was called dirimens copulatio.

Get the book - - a very practical guide for the bookcase!!