Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  How did he describe himself? With all his good points and bad. His not-so-flattering side forms the best parts of his essays. He cheerfully admits to being a lazy student. “If one book does not please me, I take another,” he says. He adds that he never reads at all “until I’m tired of doing nothing.” This is quite an admission for a man fluent in Latin.

  Montaigne is using a tool I introduced in Chapter 6: the tactical flaw. You gain the audience’s sympathy through your own imperfection. In a speech, your own obvious nervousness can suffice for the flaw. A great way to reveal your flaw in an essay is to use self-deprecating humor; Montaigne’s most charming moments have to do with his own quirks. One culprit that keeps Montaigne from his studies is his dog. He writes that he is not afraid to confess that “the tenderness of my nature is so childish that I cannot well refuse to play with my dog” when it asks him, no matter how bad the creature’s timing.

  But he doesn’t offer this confession just to seem like a regular person. He also shows how many traits he shares with other people. After talking about his dog in an essay titled “Of Cruelty,” he follows up with a list of the ways other cultures have coddled animals. The Turks have hospitals for beasts, he says. Roman citizens paid taxes to feed geese. The Athenians had a temple where mules got all the food they wanted. The ancient Egyptians gave animals decent burials and mourned their death. In other words, being an animal lover was nothing unique to Montaigne or his time. His flaw is our flaw. He’s like the comedian who jokes about all the failed diets she tried, getting a knowing laugh from all us failed dieters in the audience. We frogs have all the same innards.

  Try This in Your Essay

  Don’t let a good analogy go unrepeated. Having earlier compared Montaigne’s “assays” with laboratory frogs, I bring up the frogs again, this time metaphorically frogifying humanity. Repeating the analogy reinforces it while maybe raising a smile in your audience.

  It can be hard to talk about yourself in less than flattering terms, in a way that avoids humblebragging. (“I’m such a geek I get straight A’s!”) But with telling detail and a generous sense of humor, you can pull off the biggest ethos trick of all, decorum. You make your audience think you are one of them. If the noble winemaker/diplomat Michel de Montaigne can do it, so can you.

  Useful Figure

  Remember the argumentum a fortiori, the argument from strength? If this hard thing is possible, an easier thing must be. A rich nobleman makes himself into regular people. Surely commoners like us can too.

  Every month, I try to follow Montaigne’s lead in a regular three-hundred-word personal essay I write for a magazine. Each essay gently attempts to persuade the reader about something; I use the tactical flaw to sweeten the message. Though I’ve written more than 150 of these essays, I still find plenty of material, having no lack of flaws to draw upon.

  Here’s one such essay I wrote about the importance of thanking the people around you. I could have sermonized: “The world would be a better place if we made an effort to say thanks to each other more often.” But where’s the ethos in that? Instead I describe myself (truthfully) as a thankless spouse trying to keep up with his better half. Note the details about dishes and laundry, a bone of contention in almost every marriage. By describing my flaws, I’m describing at least half of humanity.

  Gratitude has been getting a lot of attention these days. Many people have come to consider it a form of self-help. Sure, counting your blessings does do you good. But my wife, Dorothy, takes gratitude to a new level. She uses it to manipulate her husband.

  It started when she returned to a salaried career after 20 years of raising children. I was home writing a book (on persuasion, ironically) and began doing household chores. The first night she came home, Dorothy said, “Thanks for doing the laundry.”

  It occurred to me that I had never thanked her for doing that. So I committed myself to the laundry operation.

  Then there were the dishes. Personally I prefer letting them stack over a day or two, for efficiency’s sake. But knowing her strong preference for an empty sink, I bowed to her wish. She thanked me the first time, and so I became master of dishes.

  I came to realize she had been thanking me all along: for reading to the children every night, for being kind to her relatives, for sometimes doing yard work. And every time she had thanked me for something, I did more of it.

  Two can play at this game, I figured. I began thanking her for earning a paycheck, for cooking occasionally, for building a fire in the fireplace, for letting me buy the latest electronic gadget without her getting sarcastic.

  It wasn’t exactly a gratitude arms race. I believe she was genuinely grateful when she thanked me. For my part, as I tried to keep up with her, I began noticing more of the many things she does for me.

  This spring we celebrate 35 years of marriage, and I find I can’t thank her enough.

  A few pointers that I’ve picked up from writing essays like that:

  Set your topic right off the bat. Every essay explores a point. Your reader will get frustrated and leave you if she can’t figure out that point from the get-go. You especially need to introduce your approach in a short essay, which offers no room to mess around. Get your topic down in the first or second sentence.

  Give your theme a twist. Thankfulness is good. Uh-huh. Thanks for sharing; now go needlepoint it on an ugly pillow. Every essay, even the most political, humanity-is-in-peril essay, has to entertain. A boring point that people have heard since time immemorial may earn the praise of your mother, but you’ll lose your reader. My essay starts with the assertion that gratitude is a thing these days, but then it spins off into gratitude as a form of persuasion. (Having read this book so far, you may not be surprised by this veer into persuasion, but most other audiences won’t expect it.) My hope is that my reader will want to see how this whole cynical-thanks affair turns out.

  Try an epiphany. Instead of banging your point home, show yourself discovering it. Just as a TED talk employs inductive reasoning (see Chapter 25), an effective essay can work the same way.

  Show your flaws. I failed to thank Dorothy, neglected to do the dishes promptly, and turned her gratitude into an arms race. But I hope the reader will see redemption in my discovering these flaws for myself and trying to improve.

  Ideally, by the end of the essay the reader should conclude that if gratitude can help this jerk stay married, maybe the rest of us can, too. Persuasion accomplished.

  Pathos: Spread the Love

  Pathos and ethos can be hard to distinguish in an essay. Both of them try to give you feelings about a character. And both of them make you sympathetic and empathetic about various elements of humanity, especially the more underappreciated members of our species. This is one reason I suspect that Aristotle described ethos as being a kind of pathos. Character has to do with how your audience feels about you.

  So here’s another persuasive essay I wrote in the past few months, for the same magazine. The underappreciated group I was ginning up sympathy for was men—heterosexual professional white men, to be precise. You might not think this branch of humanity needs affirmative action. But one of the purposes of my essays is to make people feel better about humanity in general. I was responding to the bad behavior of some white men during the 2016 election campaign, which made all of us white men look like jerks. So I wrote a pathetic true story to put people in the place of a white man under pressure.

  Plus, Dorothy’s and my thirty-fifth anniversary was coming up, and I was feeling that pressure all over again.

  Thirty-five years ago a single word changed my life forever.

  I didn’t deserve it. In fact the whole day had been a mess. It was just before Christmas when I took a woman downhill skiing for her first time. Once the chairlift got going she began to cry, and that’s when I noticed her terror of heights. Still, she brav
ely rode the lift and suffered a day of inching down the slopes.

  Back in my apartment that evening, I opened a bottle of rare Chilean wine, given several years earlier by my best friend. He had told me when to open it, and this was the night.

  We toasted, sipped the wine, and almost spat it out. Pure vinegar. Over the years of careless storage in a bachelor’s efficiency apartment, it had spoiled. Still I drank all of it, because it was special. Then I opened a bottle of Champagne.

  She unwrapped her present. Inside a small box was an enormous ring. A man’s ring, gold with a modest diamond set in the middle.

  At this point I was so far gone from the wine that I had to get up on one knee. Wishing I was sober and had rehearsed, I told her as articulately as possible that I had found the ring in a family safe deposit box and had planned to have it turned into an engagement ring but had waited too long and the goldsmith was too busy for the holidays and in any case it was a ring, which sort of counted, didn’t it, and would she marry me?

  “Yes,” she said.

  This essay uses a narrative arc to tell a story. (Obama used the arc in Chapter 26.) The narrative arc starts with a hero getting forced out of his comfort zone by a misfortune or a challenge. But, this being a short essay, I decided to create a bit of suspense by making a single word sound like some sort of magic spell. Which, in a way, it was.

  In the hero’s arc, the character meets a series of obstacles, commits to his goal, and in the climax wins the day. Given only three hundred words to tell the tale, I buzz through the arc quickly, with the climax being that single “yes” at the end. Still, the climax builds with a run-on sentence just before that “Yes.” Most teachers rightly tell students that run-on sentences usually are a bad idea. But in this case I wanted to convey a not-so-sober desperation to explain quickly why I had given my beloved a man’s ring. The awkward tone reflects the awkwardness of the occasion, all resolved by Dorothy’s “yes.”

  Um, what was I supposed to be persuading the reader into again? That men can be joyfully powerless, and that even when they act like idiots it may be with the best of intentions. In other words, we’re human. Just like Montaigne.

  Logos: Get Inside Their Heads

  Nothing says “It’s not about you” more than the tools of logos. When you want to talk a loved one or a customer into a choice, you say how your audience will benefit. You tell them that the choice you want is to their advantage, not yours. When you write a persuasive essay, your techniques may be more subtle. People rarely read essays in hopes of being persuaded. They’re probably not in a relationship with you, and they have no desire to buy anything. At best, they just want to be entertained. And so you will be trying to influence their minds, not their willingness to purchase your product or lend you their car. To change minds, to influence people, you want to work off your audience’s beliefs and expectations.

  If you want inspiration for this kind of mind-reading, read Montaigne’s essays. He wormed his way into the heads of ancient philosophers, kings and queens, thieves and murderers, children and women, even animals. Especially animals. “When I play with my cat,” he wrote, “who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?” Is she my pet, or am I hers? Remember, this was before cat videos and pet psychology. Starting with Montaigne, logos became an act of sympathy.

  I was thinking of his attitude while drafting another three-hundred-word essay, this one on food. Parents—at least the obsessive kind who hold professional jobs and worry about whether their kid gets into the right college—seem to be growing positively neurotic about parenting. Parents have to be perfect, and the proof lies in their all-too-human offspring. If their kid fails to grow up to be perfect, that proves the parents failed.

  Personally, I figured that any kid who shared my genes wasn’t cut out to be perfect. But many parents seem to take literally that you are what you eat, which turns every meal into a test of character. While I was tempted to write, “Hey, lighten up! Have a martini and give the kid a cookie,” that wouldn’t convince your helicopter parent; I would only be writing about my beliefs. Instead I decided to start with a belief that I figured the guilty professional parent shared: the value of an independent woman. So I turned faulty cooking into an act of female independence.

  Someone once asked a poor Yankee widow how she managed to feed her ten children. She replied, “I make what they don’t like and give them as much as they want.”

  She reminds me of my mother, rest her soul. While neither poor nor a widow, Mom took the same pride in being a terrible cook.

  Mom was no radical. She said grace before dinner and wore gloves well into the sixties. Her one act of rebellion was cooking for her family of six. Mom’s hamburgers looked like they came out of a nuclear reactor. Her boiled vegetables forgot they had ever been alive.

  I once came home from third grade raving about the shepherd’s pie served in the cafeteria. None of the other kids liked the shepherd’s pie. When they saw me scarf my portion and beg my friends for their untouched plates, kids made fun of me. I told Mom and she laughed as if I had vindicated her. I was living proof that she was different from the too-perfect mothers on Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best.

  These days, food has become another thing for many parents to feel guilty about. Sure, nutrition is important, it’s nice to please your kid, and the noblest parents try hard to reconcile the two. But there’s something to be said for my mother’s attitude. A little imperfection in childhood can lead to a real appreciation for adulthood. I loved the food in college, and my mouth waters at the memory of every restaurant meal.

  While I inherited my mother’s lack of cooking zeal, though, my children got my wife’s culinary genes and grew up to be superb cooks. I almost feel sorry for my future grandchildren. They’ll be deprived of the low standards my mother bequeathed me.

  Thanks, Mom.

  Was this really an essay about my mother? Well, sure. But it was also an argument about motherhood in general. Perfect mothers enslave themselves to perfection. And slavery is bad.

  Put It Together in a College Essay

  The persuasive personal essay turns ethos, pathos, and logos into a song for our common humanity, by sparking recognition in the reader for another’s foibles, trials, and shared beliefs. And here you thought essays were just painful exercises. Granted, the examples I just showed you won’t make readers all quit their jobs to volunteer at food banks. But, speaking personally, I’ve found that essay writing has had an effect on me. My essays have made me feel better about humanity. And I suspect that Montaigne’s own writing made him even more of a mensch than when he started.

  Useful Figure

  You’ve seen the litotes (“won’t make readers all quit their jobs”) throughout this book, because it’s one of my favorite figures. It makes you sound reasonable by denying an extreme. You could call it the anti-hyperbole.

  But if you happen to be in high school or know someone who is, essay writing can have a more immediate, practical effect: it can help propel the writer into his ideal college. When George was in high school, he sought my essay-writing help. I agreed to advise him on two conditions: first, I would critique every draft but would not help him write it, and second, he should be prepared to write many, many drafts. I guaranteed him a painful summer, and so it was. But to this day he says the torture was worth it. He turned the experience into the best writing course he ever took. Here are the principles we started with, all of them thoroughly rhetorical.

  What’s Your Hook?

  While the top schools look for good writing, they’re more interested in character. Your College Board scores will tell them how smart you are, and your grades let them know you study hard. Admissions officers also look for a student who will add something to the campus. Ask them about the most recent crop of first-year students and you’ll see what I mean: “Our class inclu
des a published novelist, an Olympic luger, and an artist who made a monumental sculpture out of gummi bears.” That’s what I mean by “hook.” It’s a characteristic that suits your audience’s belief in a well-rounded campus filled with singularly accomplished individuals.

  Don’t stress out if you don’t really have a hook. George decided to write about a headache. (Yes, a headache.) But a great hook helps. My friend Alex has a second-degree black belt in judo. She was thinking about doing an essay on her beloved Calvin and Hobbes. Can you guess what my advice was? If you have a hook, write about the hook.

  Don’t Express Yourself

  A college essay is an act of persuasion. Your job is to talk the admissions office into accepting you. “I got really sick of reading about dead grandmothers,” one former officer told me. So the essay isn’t your opportunity to get feelings off your chest, or amuse yourself, or imitate your favorite writer. Your teachers have spent far too much time telling you to express yourself. To persuade someone, you should express your reader’s thoughts and desires, and show how you embody them. Think: if you were an admissions officer, what would you be looking for in, say, you?

  Oh, and another thing: relieve their boredom. Admissions officers read thousands of essays every year. Yours doesn’t have to be the most creative; it just has to be a good read. And how do you write such a marvel? By telling a story.