TOW #8 - How to Win Friends and Influence People (IRB)

How to Win Friends and Influence People is a book by Dale Carnegie, a writer and lecturer who focused a lot on self-help and social improvement. Many of his works focus around the idea that one can influence and change the behavior of others by changing your behavior towards them. After completing the text, I can only vouch for the effectiveness of the ideas Carnegie puts forth in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Whilst the content in the second half of the book is, of course, different from that of the first half, the rhetorical devices used to support it are by and large the same. Many anecdotes from successful people are used to back up each "strategy" that Carnegie propoese will help you to win friends and influence people. This is the same as any other form of endorsement in marketing or the likes. Having successful people's names and ideas in your work will make people connect said work to success. There is also a wry, subtle humor spread throughout the book. This humor is not too frequent, but appears just often enough to keep readers' attentions during some of the drier portions of the book. Both of these strategies appeal to ethos and pathos, without any logos. That is because this book is about people, and the interactions between them, two very intangible concepts that are nearly immeasurable, rendering any form of logos in a book like this moot. All Carnegie needs to do is keep you interested (Pathos) and make you trust that what he says for you to do will be good (Ethos). He achieves both of these very well, and in turn, writes a helpful and convincing book.