The Little Blue Reasoning Book

For Reasoning Aficionados From All Walks of Life!


This guidebook addresses one of the most critical yet seldom taught skills. Reasoning skills help us make sense of the world, including how to better make decisions, tackle opportunities, evaluate claims, and solve problems. Interwoven within the book’s five sections — Perception & Mindset, Decision Making, Creative Thinking, Analyzing Arguments, and Mastering Logic — reader’s will discover 50 reasoning tips that summarize the common themes behind classic reasoning problems and situations. Appendixes contain summaries of fallacious reasoning, analogies, trade-offs, and a review of critical reading skills. A wealth of examples, charts, and insightful problems makes The Little Blue Reasoning Book an invaluable guide for any individual wanting to further sharpen his or her thinking skills.


Enjoy the benefits of your own self-paced reasoning course:

*Gain insights into the four classic mindsets and how each influences one’s outlook.

*Make better decisions by framing problems with quantitative tools.

*Employ creative thinking to bypass “roadblocks” and unlock novel solutions.

*Evaluate claims by challenging the strength of key assumptions.

*Use logic to break down arguments in a clear, easy-to-understand manner.

*Review the 10 classic trade-offs to speed recognition of core issues.

*Read with added clarity, whether your goal involves pleasure or profit.


This book — a winner at the International Book Awards and gold medal winner at the President’s Book Awards — is suitable for high school, community college, or university students, as well as any individual wanting to improve his or her core essential reasoning and thinking skills.


Contents: Topics covered in this book include:

Preface; Introduction; Quiz;

Chapter 1 – Perception and Mindset (selective perception, the magic of coincidence, the four classic mindsets);

Chapter 2 – Creative Thinking (overview; lateral thinking, divergent vs. convergent thinking, mind maps, devil’s advocate technique, idea killers and idea growers, brainstorming, reframing problems, selling creative ideas);

Chapter 3 – Decision Making (overview, pros-and-cons analysis, matrixes, decision-event trees, probability trees, weighted ranking, utility analysis, sunk costs, hypothesis testing, prisoner’s dilemma);

Chapter 4 – Analyzing Arguments (overview, the ABCs of argument structure, evaluating arguments, the five common reasoning flaws, testing critical reasoning, putting it all together);

Chapter 5 – Mastering Logic (overview, “if … then” statements, “no-some-most-all” statements, mutual inclusivity and exclusively, statements of logical equivalency, testing logic-based reasoning);

Appendix I – Summary of Reasoning Tips 1 to 50;

Appendix II – Fallacious Reasoning;

Appendix III – Avoiding Improper Inferences;

Appendix IV – Analogies;

Appendix V – The 10 Classic Trade-offs;

Appendix VI – Critical Reading and Comprehension;

Appendix VII – Tips for Taking Reading Tests;

Answers and Explanations to Problems and Exercises; Answers to the Quiz; Selected Bibliography; Index.


Author's bio: Brandon Royal is an award-winning writer whose educational authorship includes The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Gold Grammar Book, and The Little Green Math Book. During his tenure working in Hong Kong for US-based Kaplan Educational Centers — a Washington Post subsidiary and the largest test-preparation organization in the world — Brandon honed his theories of teaching and education and developed a set of key learning “principles” to help define the basics of writing, grammar, math, and reasoning. A Canadian by birth and graduate of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, his interest in writing began after completing writing courses at Harvard University. Since then he has authored a dozen books and reviews of his books have appeared in Time Asia magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal of America, Midwest Book Review, The Asian Review of Books, Choice Reviews Online, Asia Times Online, and About.com. Brandon is a five-time winner of the International Book Awards, a seven-time gold medalist at the President’s Book Awards, as well as recipient of the “Educational Book of the Year” award as presented by the Book Publishers Association of Alberta. He has also been a winner or finalist at the Ben Franklin Book Awards, the Global eBook Awards, the Beverly Hills Book Awards, the IPPY Awards, the USA Book News “Best Book Awards,” and the Foreword magazine Book of the Year Awards. He continues to write and publish in the belief that there will always be a place for books that inspire, enlighten, and enrich.


“A wonderful work that shows how reasoning is challenging, yet engaging, rewarding and fun. Because reasoning involves people, it is an art as well as a science. And to remind ourselves just why it’s not always easy to mix the two, we owe a cheerful salute to Nobel prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann who observed: ‘Think how hard physics would be if particles could think.’” —Dr. William A. McEachern, author, award-winning teacher, and founding editor of The Teaching Economist