35 pages • 1 hour read
Craig GroeschelWinning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Illustrations
Groeschel uses anecdotes to make his advice personable to readers. His anecdotes come in two main forms: personal and references to imagery. As a pastor, Groeschel tends to provide an illustration for every point he makes. His personal anecdotes color almost every chapter. He typically opens a new section with a story from his life, often at length. Groeschel chooses stories that are confessional and self-effacing.
Groeschel also weaves imagery throughout the book. He regularly returns to the imagery of a battlefield, with several associated images: inner transformation as a fight, negative ideas as strongholds, and prayer and praise serving as weapons. Other illustrations provide imagery for a minor point, such as comparing the Christian discipline of meditation to a cow chewing its cud or the analogy of trying to chop down a tree by pruning a branch here or a branch there.
Repetition
Groeschel’s use of repetition is atypical. In formal writing, it is usually considered better practice to vary one’s word choice within a passage of text. The repetition of the same word several times tends to be flagged as poor writing, unless it happens to be a technical term for which no replacement is appropriate. Groeschel, however, delights in repeating words multiple times in a single sentence. He will often go even further, setting whole sentences and phrases into parallel structures, rendering a rhetorical effect that is almost poetic in its repetition. Groeschel is not aiming to meet a formal writing standard. Rather, his tone is conversational, and the repetition of terms and phrases helps achieve that effect.
Groeschel’s use of repetition is likely a conscious stylistic choice. It also fits with his personal background. By training and practice, he is a public speaker, and while repetition is not considered a standard device in formal writing, it is a core practice of homiletics, the field of rhetoric concerned with preaching. Preachers repeat words and phrases in close proximity to add rhythm to their address, as well as to create memorable turns of phrase. This rhetorical strategy is evident in Groeschel’s stylistic choices, showing how his professional training shapes the literary character of his book.
Short Sentences
Groeschel tends to use short sentences, often without supporting clauses. This, along with his frequent repetitions, gives his prose a conversational style. He often couples short sentences with the use of direct address, speaking to his audience in the second person. This is an uncommon style in a book which deals with neuroscience. As in the case with repetition, the use of short, punchy sentences is more commonly a feature of public speaking and likely reflects his rhetorical background as a preacher.
Informal Style
Grammatical structures also give the book an informal style. Groeschel’s text teems with stylistic choices which are generally regarded as inappropriate in writing, but which are common in everyday conversation. This includes practices like starting sentences with conjunctions, leaving dangling prepositions at the end of a phrase, and using incomplete sentences for emphasis.
Direct Address
In a nonfiction book, it’s most common for the prose to be written in the third person, along with first person sections if the author relates personal anecdotes or experiences. Winning the War in Your Mind, like some other self-help books, adds extended sections written in the second person. This allows the author to address their readership in a direct and personal way. Groeschel uses this form of direct address at many different points throughout his book. When applying biblical wisdom and neurological insights, he often slides back and forth between writing in the first-person plural—using pronouns such as “our”—and the second person.
The way Groeschel uses the first-person plural suggests his homiletical techniques in preaching. He includes himself in the first-person plural and commonly uses this mode when writing about a failing: “Our runaway negative thoughts can spiral out of control and lead our lives in the wrong direction” (153). This statement might sound accusatory if it were set in the second person—“your runaway negative thoughts.” Groeschel softens the tone by including himself and making it sound like a collective experience. When he chooses to write in the second person, it is often in the form of encouragement or an uplifting exhortation: “Your circumstances may be bad, but your God is still good” (183). This is a common method used in preaching, whereby speakers use the first- person plural when they want to avoid sounding accusatory, and the second person when they want to uplift, encourage, or exhort.
