Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  What’s the motivation of a high school student? That depends on the situation, of course, but the near-universal motive of an adolescent is independence. He stands on the verge of adulthood while still leading a child’s life, under the control of parents and school administrators. To get a young adult excited, go for the patriotism ploy, showing how that generation has been belittled.

  Suppose you yourself are an adolescent, and you have been asked to speak to a roomful of Boomers like me. What motivates us? Where’s our hook? This can be tricky. As with any group you plan to generalize, you can get in trouble when your generalization is off the mark. You can think about Boomers as selfish, overly emotional, unfit losers, and you probably won’t find the hook for a group of retired Marine Corps officers. Or the aging board of directors of an environmental group.

  Still, one thing every Boomer has in common: We’re all in our sixties and seventies. Most of us are still active in work and our communities. We’ve had experience, and made a number of dumb mistakes that today’s sixteen-year-old would take decades to equal.

  Which does not necessarily make us any wiser than any other generation. But then, you’re not looking for wisdom in a persuadable audience. We’re looking for a hook. Most millennials are motivated by a need to be respected—not despite our age but because of it. We want to be asked advice. (That’s why so many mansplainers are Boomers.) Nothing drives a Boomer more crazy than to be youthsplained about the Internet. Dude, we invented the Internet. And if we don’t know all the ins and outs of TikTok and blockchain, it could be because many of us saw the Next Big Thing come and go.

  If you happen to be under forty, you might be thinking: OK, Boomer. The same goes for us! We want to be respected for our opinions. We don’t want to be splained. No doubt. Rhetoric teaches us not to offer anything the audience doesn’t want, including an explanation of something they already know. But avoiding turning off your audience isn’t the same thing as finding The Hook. A Boomer who’s trying to persuade a millennial audience needs to find what motivates that audience, not just what offends it.

  So what about millennials? What motivates them? Market research of Americans under thirty-five (including the “We” generation, or whatever we’re going to call the post-millennials) shows that younger consumers are big on ethos. Having grown up with social media and all its anonymity, fakery, posing, and alternative facts, young adults are big into trustworthiness and authenticity—or at least the appearance of them. They’re also more socially oriented than the Boomer generation; say the word “community” and you’ll have the attention of many of them. And no ethos appeals work better than virtue and disinterest. Show you represent a cause larger than yourself and that you’re not just in it for yourself, and you have a good generational hook.

  That’s how Adam Neumann built WeWork into one of the most anticipated IPOs, or stock sales, in history. Neumann’s business model, renting office space, was hardly revolutionary. He just shined up that model with a big old virtue wax job. “Success is not just about making money,” he crooned to his adoring audiences (while making oodles of money himself). “Success is fulfillment. It’s the ability to give.” And: “How do you change the world? By bringing people together.” Just where might one bring people together? “In the work environment.”

  Ooh! A company with a cause, to bring together diverse sets of founders and disrupters, sit them in front of kombucha and microbrew, and have them change the world together!

  Unfortunately, a bit of logos would have helped the early investors. When the company had to open its books for inspection for the IPO, they discovered that WeWork had burned up to nine hundred million dollars in the first half of 2019. It lost some four-fifths of its privately assessed value within weeks, sinking from a peak of forty-seven million to twelve million. Which arguably means that Neumann’s rhetoric was worth thirty-five million dollars, for a short time. As for “not me, We” Neumann, his board of directors kicked him out of the company, with a severance package worth in excess of a billion dollars. Shortly after, four thousand WeWork employees lost their jobs just in time for the holidays. Nice ethos, if you can sell it.

  Grade A Persuading

  Most of the time, you probably won’t be founding a giant company. You will be persuading a few people, or just one at a time. Generalizing one person is especially dangerous. Everyone is a living exception to at least one rule. So, do not start with an individual’s gender or age or looks. Instead, go with the person’s situation: their occupation and their reason for communicating with you in the first place.

  Imagine your audience is an English teacher, and the situation is an assigned essay. Is there any persuasion here? Well, sure, if the assignment is to write a persuasive essay. But remember, you want to make sure you can identify the real audience. Even if the assignment is to persuade an imaginary Congress to pass an imaginary bill, the real persuasion is between you and the teacher. Usually, he is looking for pure logos, a formal structure with an introduction, topic sentences, and a set of proofs for every point. Here your homework has little to do with studying the teacher. You craft the points you want to make. Then you gather the proofs for each point. Aristotle listed two kinds of proofs: story (he called it “parable”) and example (we call it a fact).

  If you’re writing an essay persuading an imaginary audience that slavery of African Americans continues on a widespread basis, you research the topic and list your points:

  African Americans get imprisoned at a much higher rate than other Americans.

  Slavery is legal. The Constitution says so.

  To keep from selectively enslaving African Americans, we need to stop imprisoning them more than we do other races and ethnicities. Or else America must pass a constitutional amendment that forbids all slavery.

  Now list your proofs for each point. Compare African American and other groups’ lockup rates. Maybe look up the history of imprisonment in the half-century after the Civil War. Tell a parable—sorry, a story—about one of the many companies or agricultural corporations that contracted convicts as cheap labor. Explain why all this was perfectly legal by quoting the Thirteenth Amendment. (Spoiler: It allows the unpaid forced employment of felony convicts.) Tell another story about a particular recent convict who was enslaved for many years. Or tell one about a modern corporation that uses convict labor without pay. Or both. Maybe throw in a fact about the economic value of unpaid convict labor; then point out how much the economy of the American South depended on slave labor (a much higher portion, I’m guessing, but hey, it’s your paper. Look it up.) Finish it up with the difficulty of passing a constitutional amendment, and the (less? more?) difficult task of racial equality in the justice system. Do it right, and you might get a good grade.

  But there are ways to give that grade a boost: persuade the teacher. If you’ve already taken a test or two in the class, or had your homework graded by this teacher, then you have a possible hook or two. Is she a stickler for perfect spelling? Then she probably also loves a perfectly used multisyllabic word. Is she a grammarian who goes crazy when you mistake subject for object in a sentence (“He gave it to him and I”)? Then she’s probably a great reader. Throw in a literary reference. Now drill even further. When she praises something you’ve written, what does she underline or circle? Try to suss out whether she goes for the perfect phrase, sentence, or paragraph.

  The novelist Barry Hannah taught a writing course I took in my first year of college; I quickly discovered that he was a phrase guy. So when writing about a love scene in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls—a scene where the ground moves beneath the couple—I worked hard on phrases that made fun of the scene (seismic lovemaking, tectonic relations, etc.). I wrote a dozen of them and then picked out a few to use in sentences. It worked. I doubt that my paper was more than mediocre, but he gave me an A-plus, circled the phrases, and wrote a single comment in red: “G
em-like.”

  Phrase people are easy. Sentence people, harder. Paragraph people, hardest. In each case, you write your paper the way you ordinarily would. Then you single out a couple phrases, a sentence or two, and a single paragraph to rewrite over and over until it’s, uh, gemlike.

  This same technique works in business. You’ll find phrase and sentence types among managers. And you can suss out similar preferences in PowerPoint decks. Some bosses love original graphics, some like pretty pictures, some like lavish clusters of bullet points. Do your best work, then hook ’em.

  Roll with the Audience

  In the ArgueLab section in the back of this book, you’ll find a Dice Game on page 409. Each time you roll, you sell a person something. Each time, you take the same steps:

  Suss out the person and situation.

  Find a need or desire (or, in the case of the teacher, just read the assignment).

  Attach the choice or action to the audience’s need or desire.

  Meanings

  Some rhetoricians call the situation the exigence. That basically means the persuasion occasion. What triggers a fictional character, causing her to take an action? In day-to-day persuasion, the exigence leads to The Hook. What’s the gap between your opinion and your opponent’s, or between what you want the audience to do and what they want?

  You roll the dice and find you have to sell a box of toothpicks to a security guard with a family. In playing this game with high school and college students, most of them focus on the audience’s status as a security guard. That’s fine. What does a security guard find missing in his box of tools or his ability to fight boredom and stay awake? Maybe suggest she could glue toothpicks vertically on her desk so she’d get stabbed awake each time she nodded off? Some students think of ways to turn toothpicks into security devices; insert one at the top of a door to see if anyone secretly enters it.

  But older players tend to look at the other side of the guard’s situation. He has a family. Security guards don’t make much money. How about showing the amazing crafts she could make for her family? And, given the free time she has at night, how about getting good enough to make crafts for sale?

  Roll the dice again, and you have to sell a baby goat to a foreign tourist visiting America for the first time. Whoop, this is difficult. I’m beginning to feel sorry for the goat.

  The first thing is to avoid any stereotype. The human brain is built to leap to conclusions based on past experience or knowledge. Some American brains might put together the words “foreign tourist” and “baby goat” and think, “Dinner.” A good rhetorician knows that stereotypes can only take you so far.

  So let’s complicate things still further. Remember the difference between the audience you speak to and the persuadable audience. If you play the dice game with a group, who are you really trying to persuade? The imaginary foreigner, or the person who’s running the game? Your goal isn’t to make money from a goat you don’t own in the first place. Your goal is to show off your mastery of persuasion.

  Suppose the game runner is a teacher in a workshop or a class—a sympathetic, caring soul who drives a hybrid car with an I HEART THE EARTH bumper sticker. You don’t want to sell the goat to the tourist as an investment. “Fly the goat home and sell the milk!” Instead, maybe you could pitch the goat as a charity. Several organizations, such as Heifer International, let donors give money toward providing animals for people in developing nations. You still have a tough presentation; few citizens of other countries give to charities as much as Americans do. But one motive of many travelers to America is to learn the ins and outs of being American, to learn our culture. And fundamental to our culture is our generosity. “What better way to learn than to participate?” Boom, you win the meta-argument. And the class.

  The Love Offense

  Argument Tool

  EXPRESSED LOVE: Make yourself think that you love your audience. Let your eyes show it.

  We’ve seen the many ways to deploy The Hook. To connect a person’s motivation to a choice or action—buy this, do that, vote for her—you need to use your best persuasion tools. Think logos—fact and story. Think pathos—ramping up your audience’s patriotism, jacking up the oxytocin. And most of all, think ethos, making a connection, showing you know your stuff, that you share the audience’s values, and that you have the audience’s needs at heart. And use your very best decorum.

  And what if you don’t know enough about the audience to practice perfect decorum? Love them with your eyes.

  Let me explain. If you want your audience to know you love them, send love beams out of your eyes. Yeah, that sounds crazy. I’ve coached people to give business presentations, and gotten a distinct “Yeah, you’re crazy” look.

  Why should you want your audience to think you love them? It happens to be the single best decorum tool for when you don’t know the audience. Love beams show the opposite of defensiveness or uncertainty. They show you belong in the room if only for the reason that you truly appreciate the people there. Without even using words. Before you walk into the room, say to yourself, “I love these people.”

  This is more rhetorical than it sounds. Cicero noted that the eyes are the windows to the soul. While most public-speaking efforts tell you to seek out the sympathetic faces in the audience—the ones who smile, who laugh at your jokes—the pathos of persuasion is more complicated than that. That window to your soul? It’s open, not closed. When you tell yourself you love your audience, the love beams will start flowing. Plus, in less squirrelly terms, the rest of your body will convey the love. You’ll literally lean in toward them, your arms will extend from your sides in a welcome gesture (instead of a defensive posture like being folded across your chest), your eyes will open wider, and you’ll smile without faking it. You may be faking the love, mind you. At least at first. But then the audience will begin responding to you. The beams will come right back at you through that open window to your soul.

  Hey, no need to believe me. While I use the love-beam technique all the time, you’ll have to try it yourself. Think the love, and fake it till the audience makes it.

  This is the very essence of agreeability, the key to getting your audience to want you to persuade them. You now know the key tools of offense, when you need to let your voice make its way through the world. You know how to choose the goal of an argument, to prod a disagreement into deliberative argument by using the present tense, to make yourself likeable and trustworthy, to make people see you as a leader they want to follow. The one best catalyst for all these tools, turning them from a bunch of Greek words into the force of persuasion, is…love. It’s the best offense.

  Now let’s turn to defense.

  The Tools

  To get and hold your audience’s attention, you need to understand their needs and desires. The smaller the audience, the more you should be careful about generalizing those needs. Not sure about your audience? Listen before you argue. If you’re giving a speech or presentation, research who’s attending. Ask the organizer for help.

  The tools we talked about in this chapter fall under ethos (connecting to your audience) and pathos (attaching your persuasion to desire).

  The hook. Persuasion is not about what you want. It’s about what your audience needs and desires. First, try to suss out that need. Then structure your argument around solving that need through the decision or action you want.

  Expressed love. This doesn’t meant saying “I love you,” necessarily. That could get creepy. You need only think how much you love your audience. If your audience is hard to love—mansplaining, heckling, demeaning—then you have the right to say to yourself the best southern insult ever: “Bless their heart.”

  DEFENSE

  15. Spot Fallacies

  THE SEVEN DEADLY LOGICAL SINS

  Ways to use logic as
a shield

  Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?

  —JOHN MILTON

  HOMER: Lisa, would you like a doughnut?

  LISA: No, thanks. Do you have any fruit?

  HOMER: This has purple in it. Purple is a fruit. —THE SIMPSONS

  Not all fallacies are hard to spot. Homer’s is obvious—he mistakes a fruity color for the thing itself. It’s the same fallacy as this one:

  Elephants are animals. You’re an animal. That makes you an elephant.

  Persuasion Alert

  I committed a fallacy with “All logical fallacies come down to bad logic.” As you’ll see, that constitutes a tautology—repeating the same thing as if I’m proving something. Politicians love this trick.

  Actually, this is just stupid, and no one would fall for it. The most insidious fallacies, on the other hand, seem valid until you take them apart.

  There are dozens of logical fallacies; I collected the ones most common to daily life and organized them around seven logical sins. But while the sins will help you understand what we’re talking about, you don’t have to remember them—let alone the fallacies’ formal names—unless you want to impress (and annoy) your friends.