The last third, however,
is not to be slighted, for on it will largely depend your practical
results in moving your readers. Even a legal argument rarely goes to the
court on a written brief alone; and the average reader will never put
himself to the effort of reading through and grasping such a brief as we
have been planning here. Furthermore, if your complete argument is
merely a copying out of the brief into consecutive sentences and
paragraphs, you will get few readers. The making of the brief merely
completes what may be called the architectural part of your labors; the
writing of an argument will use all the skill you have in the choice of
words and putting them together.
We saw in Chapter I that argument has two kinds of appeal to its reader:
on the one hand, through its power of convincing it appeals to his
reason; on the other, through its persuasive power it appeals to his
feelings and his moral and practical interests. Of these two kinds of
appeal the convincing power is largely determined by the thoroughness of
the analysis and the efficiency of the arrangement, and therefore in
large part hangs on the work done in making the brief; the persuasive
power, on the other hand, though in part dependent on the line of
attack laid out in the brief and the choice of points to argue, is far
more dependent on the filling in of the argument in the finished form.
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