How does Stephen Fry set out to persuade his audience that history is important?

        He has had to write it to the interest of a particular audience and he has caught this audience and by the long words such as “pernicious” and “exponential” and the complex sentences, his audience is those aged twenty five and over.

        He points out another fault in modern day history by saying that people in today’s society look no further than what meets the eye in architecture and what meets the eye is modern “plastic signage”.   He questions what history really is and if it is useful nowadays only as a politically correct lesson and this gets the audience thinking for themselves rather than just reading the article.  

        He uses the word “we” to express shared values and to familiarize himself with the audience and repeats the use of a rhetorical question to keep the audience always on his side and always thinking.  He disarms the other side of the argument by saying that history still continues to surpass expectations.

        In the next paragraph Stephen Fry uses an anecdote from personal experience in which he points out the usefulness for others of him being on the BBC’ Who do you think you are? programme and how many people learnt history just by watching it.  

        He uses lots of adjectives to describe history such as “thrilling” and “fascinating” to persuade the audience that it is still important and calls the audience “you” to make himself acquainted with the audience.

        He then disarms another argument that he brought up earlier in the article.  This argument being about that it is not the political correctness that “dogs” history but the rejection to imagine our ancestors.  He goes on to uses a third rhetorical question and concludes by indicating that history is actually what it was like to be in our ancestors shoes.