Friday, June 10, 2022

The Tyranny of Public Discourse: Abraham Lincoln's Six-Element Antidote for Meaningful and Persuasive Writing by David Hirsch - Book Review


Book Review - Five Stars 

The Tyranny of Public Discourse: Abraham Lincoln's Six-Element Antidote for Meaningful and Persuasive Writing by David Hirsch

This short intensely intellectually powerful tome evolved out of the great minds of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln who wrote and edited America’s bedrock founding documents. I loved the book’s focused mindset that strictly applied the extraordinary rigid guidance essential to the presentation of these great communications.

EXCERPTS:

Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln light a road to the persuasive structure of the six elements of a proposition. Lincoln put the goal succinctly: “I do not seek applause, nor to amuse the people, I want to convince them.”2 Abraham Lincoln used the logical structure of a six-element proposition to draft the Gettysburg Address.3 Thomas Jefferson used the same structure to draft the American Declaration of Independence.4 The elements are 1) Enunciation (contains a given and a sought); 2) Exposition; 3) Specification; 4) Construction; 5) Proof; and 6) Conclusion. Each element is a structural concept with a one-sentence definition. Proclus preserved the six one-sentence definitions.

Thomas Jefferson was among America’s best educated individuals.8 Abraham Lincoln’s “defective” formal education was less than one year.

September 18, 1858, Lincoln responded to the Douglas personal attack on Trumbull: Why, sir, there is not a word in Trumbull’s speech that depends on Trumbull’s veracity at all. He has only arrayed the evidence [the Construction] and told you what follows as a matter of reasoning [the Proof]. There is not a statement in the whole speech that depends on Trumbull’s word. If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that by a course of reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now, if you undertake to disprove that proposition, and to show that it is erroneous, would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar?


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