Stress is like a balloon. When one inflates the balloon enough to stretch its membrane to the point at which it resembles a sphere, oval, or whatever shape it is designed to have, it loses that limpness which it originally possessed. This is stress. The same amount of pressure that it takes to inflate a paper bag would still demonstrate the existence of observable stress. The level of stress that is observed in an inflated paper bag or in an equally inflated balloon is actually a "good" type of stress. In the balloon example, even though the balloon is inflated, the rubber membrane has so...

This book begins by defining argumentation--not as emotional assertions or in other negative senses--but as a logical, rational approach to making good decisions based upon sound reasoning. The author relies on the contributions of Aristotle (plus Aristotle's teacher, Plato, and Plato's teacher, Socrates) rather than attempting to "reinvent the wheel" of argumentation. Aristotle's perspective on dialectic and rhetoric constitutes the ground on which rhetoricians in the ancient Roman world, and rhetorical theoreticians of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries have built. Contemporary...