More Praise for Thank You for Arguing
“Heinrichs is a clever, passionate and erudite advocate for rhetoric, the 3,000-year-old art of persuasion, and his user-friendly primer brims with anecdotes, historical and popular-culture references, sidebars, tips and definitions.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Cross Cicero with David Letterman and you get Jay Heinrichs, whose new book is simultaneously an analysis of how to argue effectively and a hilarious commentary on the reasons we have lost the art so completely.”
—Joseph Ellis, author of American Sphinx and Founding Brothers
“A lot of people think of rhetoric as a dirty word, but a long time ago—think ancient Greece—it was perhaps the noblest of arts. Jay Heinrichs’s book is a timely, valuable, and entertaining contribution to its much-needed rehabilitation.”
—Ben Yagoda, author of About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made and The Sound on the Page: Great Writers Talk About Style and Voice in Writing
“Who knew that a rhetorician could be a seducer, a swashbuckler, and a stand-up comic? In this inspiring and original study, Jay Heinrichs illuminates the ways in which we understand, enjoy, and infuriate each other, all the while instructing us on ways to make certain everyone will be on our side. Heinrichs’s prose is not only engaging, it’s hysterically funny. Aristotle would have loved him; so too John Adams, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln; E. B. White would have become his agent. Rhetoric doesn’t get any better than this.”
—Regina Barreca, editor of The Signet Book of American Humor
“Knowing how to use the proper words is an art; knowing how to intersperse them with savvy pauses is a mystery. Words are treacherous: they either explain or conceal. And silence is all the more dangerous: speak too much and you’ve become redundant; speak too little and you’re ignored. But speak in just the right way and then be quiet and you’ll be revered and esteemed. Jay Heinrichs’s superb modern manual on rhetoric shows the extent to which we are what we say—and how. Ah, the mysteries of the tongue!”
—Ilan Stavans, author of Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion
“A rhetorical cocktail party where the guest list includes Cicero, Britney Spears, St. Augustine, and Queen Victoria. From MTV to Aristotle, Heinrichs entertains, enlightens, and even teaches us a little Greek, persuading us that the big battles and daily combats of work, love, and life can be won. If argument is the cradle of thought, Thank You for Arguing can make us all better thinkers. So listen up!”
—Sarah McGinty, author of Power Talk: Using Language to Build Authority and Influence
“Reading Thank You for Arguing is like having a lively talk with the author about the very backbone of real talk, the willingness of people to change each other’s—and their own—ideas through constructive argument. Writing with vividness and rigor, Jay Heinrichs maps this territory so you’ll always know where you are. You’ll scratch your head, grit your teeth, smack your forehead, and laugh out loud as he guides you through the landscape of differing with a difference.”
—Margaret Shepherd, author of The Art of Civilized Conversation: A Guide to Expressing Yourself with Grace and Style
Copyright © 2007, 2013, 2017, 2020 by Jay Heinrichs
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
BROADWAY BOOKS and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Earlier editions of this work originally published in paperback in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2007, 2013, and 2017.
ISBN 9780593237380
Ebook ISBN 9780593237397
randomhousebooks.com
Cover design: Elena Giavaldi
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Preface to the New Edition
Epigraph
Introduction
1. Open Your Eyes: The Invisible Argument
Offense
2. Set Your Goals: Cicero’s Lightbulb
3. Control the Tense: Orphan Annie’s Law
4. Soften Them Up: Character, Logic, Emotion
5. Get Them to Like You: Eminem’s Rules of Decorum
6. Make Them Listen: The Lincoln Gambit
7. Use Your Craft: The Belushi Paradigm
8. Show You Care: Quintilian’s Useful Doubt
9. Control the Mood: The Aquinas Maneuver
10. Turn the Volume Down: The Scientist’s Lie
11. Gain the High Ground: Aristotle’s Favorite Topic
12. Persuade on Your Terms: The Sister Frame
13. Control the Argument: Homer Simpson’s Canons of Logic
14. Make a Connection: The Chandler Bing Adjustment
Defense
15. Spot Fallacies: The Seven Deadly Logical Sins
16. Call a Foul: Nixon’s Trick
17. Know Whom to Trust: Persuasion Detectors
18. Find the Sweet Spot: More Persuasion Detectors
19. Deal with a Bully: Socrates’ Smile
Advanced Offense
20. Get Instant Cleverness: Monty Python’s Treasury of Wit
21. Change Reality: Bag Full of Eyeballs
22. Recover from a Screw-Up: Apple’s Fall
23. Seize the Occasion: Stalin’s Timing Secret
24. Use the Right Medium: The Jumbotron Blunder
Advanced Agreement
25. Give a Persuasive Talk: The Oldest Invention
26. Capture Your Audience: The Trump Period
27. Write a Persuasive Essay: The French Experiment
28. Use the Right Tools: The Brad Pitt Factor
29. Run an Agreeable Country: Rhetoric’s Revival
Appendices
Appendix I: Argument Lab
Appendix II: The Tools
Appendix III: Glossary
Appendix IV: Chronology
Appendix V: Further Reading
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Also by Jay Heinrichs
About the Author
PREFACE
Few people can say that John Quincy Adams changed their lives. Those who can are wise to keep it to themselves. Friends tell me I should also avoid writing about my passion for rhetoric, the three-thousand-year-old art of persuasion.
John Quincy Adams changed my life by introducing me to rhetoric.
Sorry.
Years ago, I was wandering through Dartmouth College’s library for no particular reason, flipping through books at random, and in a dim corner of the stacks I found a large section on rhetoric, the art of persuasion. A dusty, maroon-red volume attributed to Adams sat at eye level. I flipped it open and felt like an indoor Coronado. Here lay treasure.
The volume contained a set of rhetorical lectures that Adams taught to undergraduates at Harvard College from 1805 to 1809, when he was a United States senator commuting between Massachusetts and Washington. In his first class, the paunchy, balding thirty-eight-year-old ur
ged his goggling adolescents to “catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.” To me that sounded more like hypnosis than politics, which was sort of cool in a Manchurian Candidate way.
In the years since, while reading all I could of rhetoric, I came to realize something: Adams’s language sounded antique, but the powers he described are real. Rhetoric means more than grand oratory, more than “using words…to influence or persuade,” as Webster’s defines it. It teaches us to argue without anger. And it offers a chance to tap into a source of social power I never knew existed.
You could say that rhetoric talked me into itself.
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
Years ago, before I developed the persuasive habit of mind that this book teaches, I stood in a karaoke bar in South Bend, Indiana, and attempted to sing a cappella. I can’t remember what made me think this was a good idea, except that South Bend is a college town, college students love irony, and what’s more ironic than singing karaoke without accompanying music?
I realized my mistake the moment I started singing some song that had never made the Top 40. People just stared at me. The friends who had come with me turned away and pretended not to know me. When I finished, the bar went as profoundly silent as a saloon in an old western film when the outlaw barges in.
There’s a lesson there, a rhetorical lesson: Before you open your mouth, you need to know how to read the occasion. As you’ll see in Chapter 23, the ancient Romans thought reading the situation to be so important that they worshipped a god who specialized in this ability. They called him Occasio.
In the four years since I wrote the third edition of this book, our cultural occasion has changed, big-time. What seemed unobjectionable back then now raises hackles in readers. In previous editions, I had a scene where I mentioned the seductive aspects of the Food Channel and garden flowers. More important, I used the word seduction to describe persuasion that plays on the desires of an audience. The MeToo era has changed the connotation, making a term that seemed innocuous (or at least to me) downright creepy today.
And I don’t have to tell you how touchy our political discussions have become. What read like analysis four years ago can come across as propaganda.
So. You’ll find seduction taught a bit differently in this edition, with desire detached from bedroom activities, and less sexy food. The political discussion focuses more on the tools for talking politics, and less on the politics themselves.
And I’ve added material, such as how to fine-tune an argument for particular audiences, and how to change a person’s priorities. I’ve updated some pop-culture references. The book is a bit shorter than the last version, which I hope makes it easier to develop a rhetorical habit of mind. Most important, I’ve added some material about the persuasive power of love. Use it wisely.
I can credit many of these changes to the students whose classes I’ve video-chatted with a couple times a week for the past decade and more. Their teachers have been enormously helpful. All of them give me hope for the future. The older students are voting and persuading their peers to vote. They’re learning to parse the issues, extract the logic, argue when the facts aren’t trusted, and use the force of words for good.
This generation is creating new, interesting, uncomfortable occasions for argument. As a card-carrying Boomer, I’m tempted to decry all the political correctness, call for pure facts and logic, and tell it like it is. But I hope you can see in this book that this self-centered attitude is entirely unpersuasive. It’s just singing alone in a karaoke bar.
Now: Cue the music.
Jay Heinrichs
January 2020
Concordia discors.
Harmony in discord.
—HORACE
INTRODUCTION
1. Open Your Eyes
THE INVISIBLE ARGUMENT
A personal tale of unresisted persuasion
Truth springs from argument among friends. —DAVID HUME
It is early in the morning and my seventeen-year-old son eats breakfast, giving me a narrow window to use our sole bathroom. I wrap a towel around my waist and approach the sink, avoiding the grim sight in the mirror; as a writer, I don’t have to shave every day. (Marketers despairingly call a consumer like me a “low self-monitor.”) I do have my standards, though, and hygiene is one. I grab toothbrush and toothpaste. The tube is empty. The nearest replacement sits on a shelf in our freezing basement, and I’m not dressed for the part.
TRY THIS IN A MEETING
Answer someone who expresses doubt about your idea with “Okay, let’s tweak it.” Now focus the argument on revising your idea as if the group had already accepted it. This move is a form of concession—rhetorical jujitsu that uses your opponent’s moves to your advantage.
“George!” I yell. “Who used all the toothpaste?”
A sarcastic voice answers from the other side of the door. “That’s not the point, is it, Dad?” George says. “The point is how we’re going to keep this from happening again.”
He has me. I have told him countless times how the most productive arguments use the future tense, the language of choices and decisions.
“You’re right,” I say. “You win. Now will you please get me some toothpaste?”
“Sure.” George retrieves a tube, happy that he beat his father at an argument.
Or did he? Who got what he wanted? In reality, by conceding his point, I persuaded him. If I had simply said, “Don’t be a jerk and get me some toothpaste,” George might have stood there arguing. Instead I made him feel triumphant, triumph made him benevolent, and that got me exactly what I wanted. I achieved the pinnacle of persuasion: not just an agreement, but one that gets an audience—a teenage one at that—to do my bidding.
No, George, I win.
The Matrix, Only Cooler
Useful Figure
SYNCRISIS: Reframes an argument by redefining it. “Not manipulation—instruction.” You’ll find a whole chapter on figures later on, as well as a glossary in the back.
What kind of father manipulates his own son? Oh, let’s not call it manipulation. Call it instruction. Any parent should consider rhetoric, the art of argument, one of the essential R’s. Rhetoric is the art of influence, friendship, and eloquence, of ready wit and irrefutable logic. And it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument.
Persuasion Alert
It’s only fair to show my rhetorical cards—to tell you when I use devices to persuade you. The Matrix analogy serves as more than a pop-culture reference; it also appeals to the reader’s acceptance of invisible wheels within wheels in modern existence, from computer software to quantum physics. Rhetoric calls this shared attitude a “commonplace”; as you shall see, it is one of the building blocks of persuasion.
Whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision, and goads you to buy things. Argument lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures, and guilt trips; it forms a real-life Matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade one another, the art of persuasion reveals the Matrix in all its manipulative glory.
Persuasion Alert
Here I yank you from Webster to Animal House, not just to encapsulate rhetoric’s decline but to make you unconsciously vote for my side of the argument. Whose side are you on, Webster’s or John Belushi’s? The technical term for this shotgun marriage of contrasting thoughts is antithesis, meaning “opposing idea.”
The ancients considered rhetoric the essential skill of leadership—knowledge so important that they placed it at the center of higher education. It taught them how to
speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on every occasion, and make people like them when they spoke. After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the world’s first democracies. It trained Roman orators such as Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero and gave the Bible its finest language. It even inspired William Shakespeare. Every one of America’s founders studied rhetoric, and they used its principles in writing the Constitution.
Rhetoric faded in academia during the 1800s, when social scientists dismissed the notion that an individual could stand up to the inexorable forces of history. Who wants to teach leadership when academia doesn’t believe in leaders? At the same time, English lit replaced the classics, and ancient thought fell out of vogue. Nonetheless, a few remarkable people continued to study the art. Daniel Webster picked up rhetoric at Dartmouth by joining a debating society, the United Fraternity, which had an impressive classical library and held weekly debates. Years later, the club changed its name to Alpha Delta and partied its way to immortality by inspiring the movie Animal House. To the brothers’ credit, they didn’t forget their classical heritage entirely; hence the toga party.
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