Recent Discussions In Which I Have Been Charmingly Persuasive

Huh. Well of course I am drawing a complete blank here. I feel like I don't do a lot of arguing/persuading nowadays, though I am sure that my room mate would say otherwise. In reading the text, I probably use all of them, and probably more often than I think. I took a Critical thinking class with Alastair Moles a number of years ago (totally recommend that class) and I learned quite a bit about logic, as well has how to make more solid claims. But I think I am a lot better at unraveling other people's flawed logic, and pointing out fallacies in other people's words. Because, well, that kind of stuff tickles me.

If I had to narrow it down I would say that I probably use causal and analogical reasoning the most, and I tend to try to appeal to logos and pathos more often than not. I think they are what I respond to the most, and therefor I feel like they are more powerful tools for me personally. I like facts and statistics. I like information to be well sourced. When someone makes a claim but they can't back it up I usually don't pay attention to it. I think that appeals to pathos can be very strong, but that it is also very easy to manipulate people emotionally, so one needs to be careful in their appeals to pathos, and also be wary when someone uses your own emotions in order to sway your opinion. I like causal reasoning because I like If-Then statements, and they seem to follow the causal train of thought, though I suppose you can really do anything with If-Then statements. And i like analogical thinking because i can relate concepts to other concepts easily enough, which can make it easier to make my point to someone who perhaps relates to things differently than I do. All I have to do is find out what they geek out on and relate to that.

An Example being last night in my Tai Chi class. We had a new guy come in and the instructor was having me work with him for the class. After going over a few positions and movements, as well as addressing the gentleman's posture, my instructor stopped us and asked us to tell him what the differences were in three or four stances that he showed us, all from different martial arts styles. The guy starting saying that the hand placements were slightly different, and the feet had different angles to them, but I knew my teacher was asking a trick question. There were all the same stance. I said as much , and the new student was having a hard time wrapping his brain around that, as clearly the hands were in a different position in each of them, and yadda yadda yadda. After listening to my teacher try to explain the concept for a few minutes and not get anywhere, I said, "it like putting Monet, Picasso, and a woman in a red dress all in the same room. If you have Monet and Picasso paint the exact same woman, they will still come up with hugely different paintings. It's the same subject, but their styles are so incredibly different that you would wind up with two very distinct pieces of artwork." And that cleared it up right quick.