Public Thinking: Strength

A strength of Thompson’s throughout his argument is that he uses a lot of personal stories and experiences from multiple people that helps to persuade readers.  Throughout the chapter, after making a claim, Thompson will end up using the personal experience of a person who has a perfect piece of evidence for his claim. For example, after Thompson makes the claim that writing helps to clarify our thinking, he immediately follows it with a quote from a poet named Cecil Day-Lewis that states, “if it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it …. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand,” (51).  This is an example of him using someone else’s personal experience to strengthen his argument because once people see that others have been through it, and what he claims actually ends up helping them, then they are persuaded to believe the argument even more. Another example of Thompson using personal experiences to strengthen his argument is right at the beginning of the chapter when he brings up the story of Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan-born law student fell in love with the idea of online conversation. She posted often and gained a following of readers of her blogs.  She talked about many political issues in Kenya, and even experienced first-hand the idea of the audience effect, where she became very disciplined with what she said since she was self-conscious of these people reading her blogs. This story strengthens Thompson’s argument because it shows how much public writing increased due to the Internet. Ory Okolloh experienced this increase of public writing on the Internet first-hand, which makes Thompson’s argument more relatable since it shows someone’s personal experience with it. Thompson uses personal stories and experiences to his advantage to help persuade the readers to his argument and show how it has affected other people in our society.  This is a great strength of Thompson throughout this chapter.