Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  Style

  Having invented and arranged my thoughts, now is the time to decide what sort of words I want to express them with—the style I want to use. Rhetorical style has to do with the way we speak or write, much like our modern literary style. But where we moderns celebrate self-expression, rhetoric stresses the audience’s expression. Like Shakespeare’s Prospero, a persuader’s style “endows thy purposes with words that make them known.” In the modern sense of style, we want to stand out from the crowd; in the rhetorical sense, we want to fit in. The ancients came up with a set of virtues and vices for style, and they’ll work well for me at the town meeting.

  Meanings

  The word “style” comes from the Latin stilus, the sharp stick Romans used for writing. The word didn’t enter our lexicon until the Renaissance, when rhetoric became in part an effete art of letter writing.

  Virtue number one is proper language—words that suit the occasion and my audience. In my case, that means no foreign words or any other language that shows off. I want to follow the principle of eighteenth-century rhetorician Christoph Martin Wieland: “To be not as eloquent would be more eloquent.” Aristotle said that uneducated people speak more simply, “which makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.”

  WRONG: There are those among us who prefer the roar of internal combustion engines and the echo of their sound waves upon the surrounding hills. Then there are those who seek the quiet spaces to renew our spirit, much as Odysseus did when he set out upon the silent vastness of the sea.

  RIGHT: Some of us like to use our land for ATVs and snowmobiles, and others like to do things that are quieter.

  The second virtue, clarity, should be obvious. Alan Greenspan sounded like the Oracle of Delphi when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve, and that worked for him. It would not work for me.

  WRONG: The quasi-constitutional argument by my opponent contains an internal contradiction that comes to light when you apply the principle of stare decisis.

  RIGHT: Does the town have the right to restrict noise? Yes, it has that right.

  The third virtue, vividness, is a bit trickier, and cooler. It has to do with the speaker’s ability to create a rhetorical reality before the audience’s very eyes. The Greeks’ word for this is enargeia, which means “visibility.” Enargeia works best in the narration part of a speech, where you tell the story and give the facts.

  WRONG: People have been impacted by all the noise.

  RIGHT: Mrs. Read tells me when she goes to visit the beaver lodge down by the brook at her place, they sometimes don’t swim up to her. She walks all the way down, a half mile from her house—you know where it is—with an apple in each hand, and whistles. When it’s quiet, they come. Some of you have seen them eat out of Mrs. Read’s hand. But when the beavers hear the sound of an ATV, they smack their tails in the water and make a dive for their lodge.

  The fourth virtue is the most important: decorum, the art of fitting in. My accent is a bit too mid-Atlantic for Yankee ears, but I will not try to change it to talk about the loud “cahs” on the mountain road. An unsuccessful attempt to fit in may entertain the audience, but it won’t make you persuasive. Instead, I’ll talk about the same things the locals talk about.

  TRY THIS WITH A MEMO

  Apply a “style filter” to your writing, using Cicero’s checklist of style virtues: (1) Proper language: Is your prose just grammatical enough for the audience? (2) Clarity: Would the least informed reader understand it? (3) Vividness: Do your examples employ all the readers’ senses? (4) Decorum: Do the words fit the audience? Are there any anachronisms, sexist terms, or PC language that might mark you as an outsider? (5) Ornament: Does it sound good when you read it aloud?

  WRONG: I ain’t gonna tell you what you can and can’t do. No sir! Why, I cut a few trees myself and make a helluva racket doing it, too!

  RIGHT: I make noise, too. I felled and bucked seven cords of wood this past fall, running two chain saws in tandem, and I’m sure you could hear it all the way to Orange Pond.

  The fifth and final virtue, ornament, has to do with the rhythm of your voice and the cleverness of your words. In my case, unadorned works best, but maybe I could get away with a nice chiasmus toward the end:

  ME: It comes down to this: either we can control the noise, or we can let the noise control us.

  That might work. Tricky language can be hard to remember, though. The ancients had a solution for that, too.

  Memory

  Cicero called memory “the treasure-house of the ideas supplied by invention.” Like other rhetoricians, he had his own methods for creating an inventory of thoughts and ways of expressing them. The ancients had wild ideas about memory, employing pornography, classical architecture, primitive semiotics, abusive classroom techniques, and exercises that orators continued throughout their lives.

  It went like this: every rhetoric student would construct an imaginary house or scene in his head, with empty spaces to fill with ideas. One rhetorician was extremely specific about it:

  The backgrounds ought to be neither too bright nor too dim, so that the shadows may not obscure the images nor the lustre make them glitter. I believe that the intervals between backgrounds should be of moderate extent, approximately thirty feet; for, like the external eye, so the inner eye of thought is less powerful when you have moved the object of sight too near or too far away.

  It might take years to create a personal memory house or landscape, but the resulting mnemonic structure could last a lifetime. The student then created his own mental images to fill each space. Each image would stand for a concept, an ideal or commonplace, or a figure of speech. Imagine an indoor shopping mall with stores that hold figures, commonplaces, particular concepts, and argument strategies. Some of the stores never change their merchandise, while others supply ideas that can serve a particular speech. You arrange the stores according to the classic outline of an oration, with items useful to your introduction, narration and facts, division, proof, refutation, and conclusion. For example, the introduction section can have all the devices of ethos in them. One of them, the “doubt trick” (dubitatio)—the one where you pretend not to know where to begin—can be a mirror in the shape of a question mark. Another, the one where you seem to have come to your choice reluctantly, after considering all the opponent’s arguments, can be a painting with a picture on both sides of the canvas. Each picture can stand for an opposing argument. If we really wanted to follow the ancient practices, we would make the picture pornographic, and fill some of the stores with naked men or women doing very interesting things. Rhetoric teachers found that their students—all young males—tended to remember these images especially well.

  Classic Hits

  WE JUST THINK OF BASEBALL: The ancients could get a little crazy about their memory storage. One rhetorician said you could capture an entire legal case with a single image: “For example, the prosecutor has said that the defendant killed a man by poison, has charged that the motive for the crime was inheritance, and declared that there are many witnesses and accessories to this act….We shall picture the man in question as lying ill in bed…and we shall place the defendant at the bedside, holding in his right hand a cup, and in his left tablets, and on the fourth finger a ram’s testicles.” All this must have meant something to the Romans.

  Even if they didn’t have to give a speech, a Roman gentleman was supposed to visit his “memory villa” at least once a day, exploring each section and imprinting the images in his head. Then, when he did have to speak, the Roman could simply walk through the villa and visit the sections he needed. Instead of memorizing an outline and phrases, the way we might, he only had to remember the route for that particular speech, along with a few new images—stored in the appropriate places—that spoke to the particular issue.

&nb
sp; Strange as this may seem to us today, we do have parallels to this architectural memory. Take PowerPoint, for instance. Each slide often contains an image—a picture, chart, or graph—that conveys a particular concept. By looking at the slide along with the audience, the speaker can remember what to say. In my case, since my talk is only fifteen minutes long and I intend to speak plainly, I can do it without notes or rhetorical mnemonics. But the Romans had to speak for hours, and their audiences interrupted them constantly. In a pinch, they could always duck into their memory houses and pull out something, well, memorable.

  Delivery

  If I did my job properly with invention, arrangement, style, and memory, the fifth part should be a slam dunk. That’s delivery—actio, the Romans called it—the act of acting out the speech. Delivery has to do with body language, along with your voice, rhythms, and breathing.

  Classic Hits

  THE WONDER GIFT SHOP CAME LATER: After the discovery of the New World, elite families used rhetorical memory when they created “wonder rooms” filled with souvenirs (“memories”) of foreign lands. The rooms eventually became our modern museums. In ancient mythology, the Muses were the daughters of Memory.

  Meanings

  The ancient Greek word for delivery was hypokrisis. It shows history’s ambivalence toward persuasion; the word eventually became our hypocrisy.

  People were crazy about it during the Renaissance and early Enlightenment. I found a bestselling book from the era, John Bulwer’s Chironomia, in the Dartmouth College library stacks. It has engravings linking positions of the hands and fingers with facial expressions and rhetorical emotions, along with useful explanations. To express admiration, for instance, you were supposed to hold your hand out, palm up, fingers together. Now spread your fingers while cocking your wrist and turning your palm to face the audience. Admiration! Commoners studied books like this to imitate the gentry’s mannerisms. Act like gentlefolk, and you’re more likely to become gentlefolk. Thomas Jefferson did the opposite when he became president. He wore corduroy pants and rode horseback instead of taking a coach. He was making a rhetorical gesture, signaling the un-European common-man simplicity of America.

  But the original idea of delivery had to do with speeches, not political symbolism. Let’s start with voice. The ideal voice has volume, stability, and flexibility. Volume is the ability to project. Stability means endurance. For really long speeches, speak calmly during the introduction to save your voice, and avoid speaking shrilly. As for flexibility, you need to be able to vary your tone according to the occasion. The rhetoricians delineated a bunch of tones—the dignified, the explicative, the narrative, the facetious, tones for conversation, debate, and emphasis—but these days we speak almost entirely conversationally.

  Meanings

  What we call theatrical acting, seventeenth-century Elizabethans called “playing.” Acting was what orators did.

  Still, varying my voice can help me. I can punctuate my speech with softer tones—a great way to convey the enargeia of woodland quiet—and get louder toward the end. I should also speed up and slow down according to the thoughts and imagery I convey—again, slow in the woods, fast when I describe all-terrain vehicles.

  As for physical movement, rhetoricians tell me not to call attention to my gestures. To emphasize a point, I should lean my body a little from my shoulders, for example. But it’s better to avoid gestures altogether than to do the wrong ones. So I’ll focus on my facial expression—again following Cicero, who said, “The eyes are the window of the soul.” They make the most eloquent gestures of all, with the generous help of my rather bushy eyebrows.

  TRY THIS IN A LARGE ROOM

  When asked what was the single best advice to give a beginning actor, the drama coach at Dartmouth during the 1960s answered, “Speak louder.” It works especially when you’re nervous. Focus on speaking loudly—making sure the microphone is tuned in advance—and your voice will automatically take on a confident tone and rhythm.

  TRY THIS IN PUBLIC

  Ronald Reagan’s longtime speechwriter, Martin Anderson, said that his boss would stand erect, with hands slightly cupped and thumbs aligned with his pant seams. It feels uncomfortable, the president said, but it makes you look relaxed.

  Okay, I’m ready. I walk into the spare white room, and a floorboard creaks alarmingly underfoot. New Englanders don’t make the most encouraging audiences, but at least this one is attentive. I look out at the forty or fifty faces in the room, and my momentary terror is relieved by the ammunition I’m packing: the argument I invented, the right arrangement, a sense of the proper style and tone, an outline I remember because I use it for every speech (intro, narration, division, proof, refutation, conclusion), and the confidence that if I talk a bit loud, I’ll feel confident. Most of all, though, I have Cicero backing me. And not just his theory, either. Once, during an important trial in the Roman Forum, he stopped in terror, just frozen with stage fright. And then he ran away. The greatest orator in history, the man brave enough to defend the Republic against Julius Caesar himself, ran away. However embarrassing, it was one of his greatest contributions to rhetoric because ever since, a speaker can calm his butterflies with the knowledge that it happened to the best of us.

  Now that you’ve seen me give a speech, it’s time to take it to the main stage.

  Does it Work for TED?

  Oratory is far from dead. Just look at TED, the global organization that hosts orations lasting eighteen minutes. The name is an acronym for Technology, Education, and Design, but the topics have grown to cover just about everything you can imagine. TED got its start in 2006; six years later, it celebrated its online videos’ one-billionth view. Anyone with “an idea worth spreading,” as the TED honchos like to put it, wants to do a talk on its main stage—or, failing that, at one of the many TEDx franchised events around the world.

  How do you create a great TED talk? Follow the rules of oration in this chapter. Cicero would have killed at TED. He had what it took, from invention to delivery. But, having studied hundreds of TED talks, I’ve discovered a technique that nearly all the most popular ones use: make it a journey of discovery.

  While school taught us to make our point and then prove it, most TED talks work in reverse: they offer the proof, then the conclusion. In other words, our education teaches us to argue through deductive reasoning. TED uses inductive logic. (See Chapter 13 if you need a refresher.) By putting the proof before the conclusion, you turn an argument into a story while “discovering” your point along with the audience.

  For example, suppose you want to craft a TED talk that would show how manipulating people can be a good thing. You can get everyone’s attention by saying, “If you want peace on Earth, you need to learn the dark arts of manipulation.” But most people in the audience will think, “Wait. I hate manipulation. I don’t want this jerk to talk me into wanting to do this to people.” So much for deductive logic.

  Instead, you can try the inductive, let’s-find-clues approach. Start with a personal story about “educating” some poor ignorant soul about the need to care for the poor.

  YOU: I used the very best logic, showing how caring for the poor helps the economy, prevents the spread of disease, and is a moral good all its own. Yet this airtight argument got me absolutely nowhere. Why? Because my friend wasn’t against caring for the poor. She was just against using a single penny of her tax dollars to do it. She said welfare traps poor people into dependency and acts as an enabler of bad habits and laziness. I started yelling, accusing her of stereotyping poor people. I threw in statistics showing how poor people are no more lazy than the rest of us. Then both of us ended up yelling! Here I used true facts and flawless logic, and poor people didn’t exactly gain a sympathizer that day. By the time I was done, she was ready to take money from poor people.

  Now here you can hint at a conclusion.

  Y
OU: What if there is something else, a technique that would have convinced my friend? And what if it was something other than cold facts and logic?

  Then you use another example, telling how you tried to talk your aging father into giving up driving. You point out that he has become a danger to himself and others. Again, you fire your fact-and-logic missiles at him and they bounce right off. But during the conversation you hear him mention a phrase: “giving up.”

  YOU: He told me that giving up driving would mean giving up on life. And I suddenly realized that, to my dad, relying on ride sharing and friends for transportation would mean going gentle into that good night. It meant taking one passive step further toward death. And he’s not ready. This has nothing to do with facts and logic, I thought. It has to do with my father’s heart. He has set it on life, on battling decline as long as he can. And I thought, what if I could put not driving on the side of life? What if I could convince him that ride sharing would help him become more independent? I would change the terms of the argument, arguing from his beliefs and expectations, not my facts and logic. And that even meant throwing love into the mix, using it as a persuasive weapon. So I told him I loved him, that he was my hero because he never gave up. But using more modern ways of getting around—along with the friends and family who adore him—is far from giving up, I said. It’s showing the courage to tackle a new challenge. Instead of asking him to give up his driver’s license, I challenged him to spend a week taking Lyft and Uber. I helped him download the apps onto his smartphone and set up ridesharing accounts.