The GOLDEN FORMULA of Persuasion Via Rhetoric in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People: A Case Study

Abstract   The genre, self-help books, has always attracted the attention of the public reader through its unique persuasive language and its creatively employed Rhetoric. Over the past four decades, self- help books industry greatly flourished and became the world's bestselling genre in a limited time. People are always searching for quick and efficient solutions for most of their life problems. Self-help books promise to provide solutions for probably most of our life problems—worry problems, relationship problems, failures in carriers, curing bad personal traits and even fail at love (Dolby, 2005, p.4). This study embarks on how some specific persuasive rhetorical devices when creatively employed in the self-help text type can generate an outstanding persuasive effect. Self-help text-type is loaded with a bundle of creatively employed rhetorical devices that largely participated in making the self-help book genre a lifetime bestseller. Hence, drawing on Cockcroft and Cockcroft’s (2005) taxonomy for schematic and syntactic rhetorical devices, and Mulholland’s (2005) taxonomy for rhetorical persuasive tactics, the current study investigates the common linguistic features in Dale Carnegie's bestselling self-help book How to win friends and influence people (2010), represented in both schematic and syntactic rhetorical devices. This investigation aims to show how the employed rhetorical devices succeeded in generating an outstanding persuasive effect through addressing the readers’ logical, ethical, and emotional appeal—i.e. the Aristotelian persuasion modes: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. The analysis of this study yields some significant findings, most important of which are the excessive implementation of some persuasive tactics like ‘Repetition’, ‘Questioning’ and ‘Rhetorical questions’, and ‘Antithesis’, and the merging of various rhetorical devices. In addition, the study reveals the creative narrative format of ‘Storytelling’ and provides novel academic naming for the specific types of ‘Rhetorical questions’, ‘Exemplification’ and ‘Storytelling’ employed in self-help text-type.