As many who know me have heard by now, I harbor a somewhat strong dislike for marketing books. This aversion started around 1995, when I was first exposed to the genre, and has only softened occasionally since. (The most recent concession: Matt Mason's excellent The Pirate's Dilemma, after enjoying a speech by the author at a client event.)

That's not to say that I somehow believe such works don't have value. It's just that I prefer to obtain inspiration from other corners. Often, I hope that I can move forward by going back, "fishing where the fishermen ain't" as I've alluded to before.

I discovered the work of logician Stephen Toulmin from one of my college professors, Dr. Barry Eckhouse, who has built a career in part by applying the precepts of classical rhetoric to modern business. His book Competitive Communication, now in its third edition, is an essential tome.

(I should say at this point that I prefer the less-pejorative connotation of "rhetoric" as "the art and, to some degree, science of persuasion". Unfortunately, the term has been somewhat sullied, with most believing it to solely mean intellectually dishonest, jingoistic, podium-pounding oratory.)

While I haven't studied the art of rhetoric with sustained academic rigor, it occurs to me that many commonly taught models of argument — if any are taught at all — suffer from a fatal flaw: they don't anticipate that your audience might talk back!

This I find to be a strength of how Toulmin looks at argument — a far cry from the insular "Socrates is a man / All men are mortal / Socrates is a mortal" logic. Arguably, Toulmin appeared to have dissected some element of the Conversation Economy long before the Web or the modern computer, to say nothing of Web 2.0.

Toulmin's The Uses Of Argument (first printing: 1958) is a dense but rewarding read. The meat of the work is in Chapter III, which begins:

An argument is like an organism. it has both a gross, anatomical structure and a finer, as-it-were physiological one.

He next outlines a simple-yet-comprehensive framework for constructing an argument:

• Claim: What is it that you set out to prove?
• Data: What material supports this claim?
• Warrants: What makes the data at all true to the claim?
• Backing: What gives the warrant any authority at all?
• Rebuttal: What might the reasonable person counter with? How might you respond?

(I'm over-simplifying, of course.)

In all of the excitement around Crossing The Chasm, Unleashing Your IdeaVirus, Tipping, Blinking, Cluetraining, Groundswelling, Long-Tailing, or what-have-you, a fundamental truth is often forgotten: We're in the business of making a case, persuading an audience, and articulating a point of view.

QED.

Sure, one might say that reading these marketing books is my responsibility as a professional communicator. After all, one must keep up-to-date in one's field and be able to communicate in the latest metaphors that field's participants develop.

The fact is, though, that enough of you read these books and, in so doing, have become my "information processing nodes" for that content as you blog, discuss, Twitter, incorporate invoke, and reference such works. I hope, perhaps, that I've kept things in symbiotic balance by, in turn, processing a book you haven't read in some small way.

So, I'm saying this: By examining what makes for a truly persuasive argument in today's world, we can once again focus on mastering chess instead of trying to be the best at checkers. The basics are decades-to-centuries old. Perhaps in adapting them, we'll find new truths.