Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 22, No. 3 (2025)

Review of The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World

Alex (Oleksiy) Ostaltsev
University of Texas at Austin
oostaltsev@utexas.edu

Girshin, Thomas. The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World. Hackett Publishing Company, Indiana: Indianapolis, 2024. 376 pages.

In modern academic studies, the concept of rhetoric is no longer associated only with the organization of written speech. Instead, the word “rhetoric” today denotes a socially conditioned mode of presenting ideas and concepts that includes verbal and non-verbal means of communication. In this context, Thomas Girshin’s book The Creative Argument: Rhetoric in the Real World, appears to be a bold appeal to the origins of rhetoric as a discipline, i.e., to the methods of expressing thoughts in writing. At the same time, such an “Aristotelian” approach in Girshin’s book is correlated with the broader requirements of modern academy.

Classicism, first of all, manifests itself in The Creative Argument in the clear structure of each chapter that opens with an example of a rhetorically organized text and continues with its analysis, in which the author helps student readers identify certain rhetorical concepts in the given text. To facilitate the mastering of these concepts, Girshin places a small glossary of terms at the beginning of each chapter. As a result, in the seventeen chapters of the book, the reader becomes familiar with almost one hundred concepts of modern and classical rhetoric developed by Aristotle that survived to this day: claims and evidence, syllogism, warrant, attack and defense, truth value and emotional appeal, cause and effect, rhetorical strategy, etc. Using examples of resonant publications for proper understanding of these concepts, Girshin demonstrates the effectiveness of rhetorical models and strategies in the modern “real world.”

Among the aforementioned concepts, the notion of argument is the key one;: Girshin organizes a major part of diverse illustrative material of the book around it. The middle part of The Creative Argument—from the ninth to the thirteenth chapters—demonstrates the main strategies of rhetorical argumentation: constructing a public message on valid examples, comparisons, and cause-and-effect relationships; strengthening argumentation with anecdotes and common reasoning, developing the argument on the basis of formal and informal logic, etc. Across the book, Girshin pays attention to the mechanics of argumentation, explaining in detail how a “complex argument” is formed from a series of simple statements grouped around a “contradiction.”

Girshin explains the nature of the rhetorical argument and its dialectic and development strategies using a rather motley list of texts from different genres, many of which are quite famous. This illustrative material demonstrates a noticeable degree of tendentiousness: the author prefers to work with examples of modern rhetoric , namely political speeches, journalistic articles, and essays. Of the big classical texts, the book presents only two: the encomium in defense of Helen of Troy by Gorgias and Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” accompanied by laconic speeches of women orators (Elizabeth I’s address to the troops and Mary Stuart’s lecture on slavery from 1832). The rest are public messages from American presidents and other social leaders, essays by Girshin’s academic “partners in crime,” and famous articles of ideologists and even propagandists. The desire to immerse the student reader in a modern, primarily American, social context is the main principle and pedagogical guideline of The Creative Argument. On the one hand, this feature inevitably creates a sense of isolation and even demonstrates cultural limitations of the material; on the other hand, it shows how utilitarian rather than abstract rhetoric can be as a discipline. If efficiency and practicality are accepted as a prerogative, then the narrowness of the cultural horizon will not be an obstacle when working with Girshin’s book.

In general, in The Creative Argument, the reader might notice two layers of illustrative materials that hardly intersect: publications and nominal examples. Before discussing publications that demonstrate developed rhetorical models and concepts, students are asked to work out the details using more mundane everyday examples. For instance, students need to consider the rhetorical structure of a discussion about plans for the night, about the possibility of life on other planets, etc. Only after understanding how rhetoric “works” in the everyday sphere are students invited to start the analysis of the resonant publications written or delivered by professional orators, i.e. writers, journalists, and public figures. The two-tiered distribution of illustrative materials reveals what Girshin defined in the preface as “student-centered learning” (ix). This approach is especially evident in the persistent “you” addressed to the student reader and found on virtually every page of The Creative Argument. The frequent use of this pronoun may seem like a deliberate violation of the rhetorical purity of the usually impersonal academic narrative. However, for Girshin, it is a way to shorten, through style, the distance between the professorial chair and the readers. The informal “you” address, coupled with associative examples from the life of a modern student, should, according to Girshin, facilitate the assimilation of the basics of rhetorical argumentation. The professor seemingly builds rhetoric “from below,” explaining the nuances of thought development not only on “heavy” texts of real rhetoric, but, as noted above, using “easier” examples of everyday rhetoric from social media, Tarantino films, or the memoirs of a recent student. Girshin is not alone in such an approach: modern American academy generally gravitates toward building its narratives “from below,” adapting the material to the level of the average student, and not vice versa, pulling yesterday’s schoolchild up to the Cicerones of modernity or the past. Contemporary scientific discourse, not only rhetorical, is also “student-centered.” In this sense, Girshin keeps up with the times, not only ideologically, but also pedagogically.

Sometimes the author supplements his two-level sequence of materials with diagrams and charts that summarize the conclusions and present rhetorical devices, as they say, in the dry residue. Thus, Girshin explains and illustrates the rhetorical concepts in three ways, each of which is designed for a different level of preparation of student readers–samples, situations, summaries. In this, The Creative Argument demonstrates a high degree of versatility as a potential teaching aid for classroom work. Having mastered the basic concepts of rhetoric, with support from sample publications, summarizing graphics, and question-answer blocks, the student, according to Girshin’s plan, is able to construct a rhetorically complete statement from previously learned simple elements. This kind of craft-like approach to rhetoric, resembling playing Lego, fits as well into the Aristotelian concept of this discipline as into the procrustean bed of modern college writing courses. Being a Lego-like textbook itself, The Creative Argument is quite flexible, allowing students to lean either on “classical” methodology or illustrative material that can be selective and variable. The practicality of such an approach is an undoubted value for any rhetoric professional.