Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  A Winning Essay Tells a Story, and It’s All About Epiphany

  It should have a main character—you, presumably—a setting, some sort of conflict, and suspense. And don’t forget the hero’s journey. Admissions people look for students who learn and grow, so your essay should show you learning and growing. Whether you write about your hook or your headache, don’t just brag or describe. Your essay should have a moment of revelation: What did you learn from your experience? How did it make you the thoughtful, sensitive, brave, strong person you are (or would like an admissions person to think you are) today? Show a process of learning and a moment of revelation.

  Make Yourself Good and Miserable

  George wrote more than thirty drafts, spending a summer writing whenever he wasn’t working at his job or hiking outdoors. It was one of the hardest things he had ever done, and it made him miserable. In other words, he felt just like a writer!

  George wrote about how he developed chronic headache syndrome at the beginning of seventh grade, when the family moved from New Mexico to Connecticut and he started at an urban high school. The syndrome is triggered by a virus, and in a type-A person it creates a sort of negative feedback loop: the headache causes stress, which makes the headache worse. George’s mother and I took him from one doctor to another. All of them prescribed drugs that would have turned him into a zombie. Finally we found a psychiatrist, Dr. Kravitz, who was an expert in biofeedback techniques. Dr. Kravitz hooked George up to a machine that measured his brain waves. It had a monitor that showed an array of red bars. George’s job was to turn them green.

  “How do I do that?” George asked.

  “You have to learn to accept your limitations,” Dr. Kravitz said. “Be able to let go of your struggles. You have to try not to try.”

  Being the goal-oriented type, George sits down at the machine and pushes his brain. “Uuuuggggh!” He’ll make those bars turn green. (Note how I switched to the present tense. That’s what George did. It makes the story seem more immediate. If you think you can handle this tricky tense, consider using it for your essay.)

  Persuasion Alert

  Here’s another instance of my switching tenses from the past to the present. It’s like the close-up shot in a movie, bringing the reader into the scene. A lot of teachers say you should stick to a single tense, but I believe that rule should be broken now and then.

  As George stares at the red bars, he thinks about himself—about the forty merit badges he earned on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout, about his love of competitive Nordic skiing, how he climbed the forty-eight tallest peaks in New Hampshire before he turned ten, how his whole identity has to do with meeting goals. I’ll let him tell the rest:

  I look up from the computer screen, and through my tears I see a picture on the wall. It’s painted with big, broad brushstrokes of soft green fields. An oak tree bends leafy branches over a shepherd’s old stone hut. A breeze strokes the stalks of grass.

  Something draws me back to the computer. One bar has turned green.

  How could I do that? I didn’t do anything. Nothing comes this easily. I spent two years in speech therapy just so people could understand me; I couldn’t tie my shoes until I was eight. How can that bar be green? The painting must be a key. I try to imagine putting myself under the tree. I see an awkward boy with thick, blond, cowlicked hair and hunched shoulders.

  I look back at the screen. All the bars are red. Why me? What did I do to deserve this?

  I think of Job, my dad’s favorite character from the Bible. God and all the angels, including Satan, meet in Heaven. God brags about Job, saying his servant was unreservedly faithful. “That’s because you’re kind to him,” Satan says. “Try being mean to him and he’ll curse your name.” So God challenges Job’s faith by giving Job boils all over his body, killing his family, and taking all his worldly goods. At first Job complains loudly, but in the end he accepts his fate. “I know that you can do all things.” God immediately puts everything back to rights, restoring possessions, family, and clear skin.

  What if I acted like Job? Would my life come back? Maybe this is what trying not to try is like. Instead of putting myself in the field, what if I simply let the field be the field?

  One bar goes green.

  Okay, one bar is green. I’m starting to get what the doctor is saying, but I don’t really like it. Will this be one of life’s limitations, spending the rest of my life trying not to try? Will I have to change who I am?

  The world has expanded for me and I am no longer the center. Sure: I can’t change everything. And there is the crux of the whole thing: I’ll always be hardheaded and stubborn. Still, as I look at the painting it comforts me. It’s perfect and peaceful without me. It’s beautiful all on its own. I don’t have to do anything. Accepting things that are beyond me, being comforted by something that exists regardless of what I do: is this what faith is?

  All the bars turn green.

  That essay has all the elements of a story: a character, a conflict (type-A kid struggling against his type-A-ness in type-A fashion), suspense (will he make his headache go away?), and an epiphany (his discovery of the nature of faith). He revealed a thoughtful person capable of growth. He revealed flaws. And he told the story with grace and humor, conveying just the kind of intelligent, maturing soul admissions officers love. (Hey, cut me some slack. I’m his dad.)

  George’s essay helped get him into his highly selective first-choice school, Middlebury College. His work was among ten out of a class of 850 read in front of the campus at Convocation. “The one they read before mine was by a Palestinian who wrote about shielding his little brother as an Israeli bomb hit their house,” George told me later. “ ‘Oh, great,’ I thought. ‘Now they’re going to read about my headache.’ ”

  I couldn’t have been prouder. Now just think what you can do with your own struggles.

  The Tools

  To a rhetorician, everything is rhetoric. Naturally I believe that rhetoricians are right about this. Arguably, every expression makes an argument of some sort—to “please, instruct, or delight” an audience, as Cicero put it; or to convince admissions officers that you’re an ideal student. As Montaigne proved, though, the personal essay makes the greatest persuasion through the argument you make to yourself. When you write an essay, you turn embarrassments into stories, your flaws into common elements of humanity, personal lessons into sharable morals. A good essay binds you to your fellow beings. As hard as it is to write a good one, I’ve found the act to be a great comfort.

  Tactical flaw. Endear yourself to the reader by revealing your imperfection.

  Theme twist. Make the audience believe you’re just restating the boring common wisdom; then apply a bit of contrarian attitude. Gratitude is good for you, but my wife uses it to manipulate me.

  Epiphany. Instead of lecturing the reader, show yourself making the discovery you want your readers to make with you.

  Narrative arc. This storytelling outline has the hero leaving her comfort zone, committing to a quest, facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and triumphing in a climactic moment. As a tool of persuasion, you make the audience root for your success.

  28. Use the Right Tools

  THE BRAD PITT FACTOR

  The instruments for every occasion

  A great ox stands on my tongue. —AESCHYLUS

  You are well on your way to becoming an argument adept, with a whole slew of persuasive tools. Now the problem is, which tools do you use on which occasions? This chapter will help you by walking through several situations that have to do with landing a promotion, selling ideas, and dealing with an obnoxious person.

  Having seen the many techniques rhetoric has to offer, you might feel like the beginning skier who gets too much advice: “Bend your knees, hold your hands above your w
aist, lean into the uphill ski, press with your toes, and remember to keep your shoulders perpendicular to your skis at all times!” You could suffer the same vertiginous feeling in an argument. Quick, should you use code grooming or a redefinition strategy first? Do you emphasize character or emotion? What are the right commonplaces to use?

  Argument Tool

  EDDIE HASKELL PLOY: When it seems that a decision won’t go your way, endorse it as proof of your disinterest and virtue. Short of open bribery, it’s the greatest sucking-up tool ever invented.

  One way to get a feel for the tools is to watch the arguments around you and try to determine the techniques people use—or fail to. Dorothy Sr. loves to come home and tell me about the rhetoric she heard on NPR.

  DOROTHY SR.: The attorney general pulled off a perfect Eddie Haskell ploy, and the interviewer didn’t even call him on it!

  Unlike Dorothy, of course, you haven’t been learning the art with me for twenty-odd years. (Thank your lucky stars.) You may not have the Eddie Haskell ploy on the tip of your tongue. Don’t worry about it. Even if you can’t think of the names for the tools, you will find yourself spotting the persuasion.

  To help, let’s slot the hundred-plus tools in this book into a few memorable groups:

  Goals

  Ethos

  Pathos

  Logos

  Kairos

  The appendices contain a cheat sheet with the tools organized into these areas. But you probably already know how to conduct a basic rhetorical analysis on the fly, even without cribbing. When you hear an argument, ask yourself:

  Goals. What does the persuader want to get out of the argument? Is she trying to change the audience’s mood or mind, or does she want it to do something? Is she fixing blame, bringing a tribe together with values speech, or talking about a decision?

  Ethos, pathos, logos. Which appeal does she emphasize—character, emotion, or logic?

  Kairos. Is her timing right? Is she using the right medium?

  Selling uses the widest variety of these skills. I mean “selling” in the broadest sense: taking an idea, product, service, or your acceptable self and making your audience desire it badly enough to do something about it. If you happen to hold a job, or live with another person, or apply to colleges, or belong to the human race, then you have done your share of selling. The question is just how good you are at it, how comfortable with it, and whether you want to do it better.

  The Proper Way to Suck Up

  Let’s start by selling you. Suppose your immediate superior quits, and you want to make a bid for the position without arousing the jealousy of your peers. Your goal is easy: to get the top boss to give you the job. This is a deliberative argument, since it has to do with a choice. Values language may help your argument, and if you’re the walk-over-your-own-grandmother type, you could use some forensic language to smear the other potential candidates. But you want to speak mostly in the future tense, focusing on what you can do to benefit your company or organization.

  Now, which of Aristotle’s three appeals do you emphasize—ethos, pathos, or logos? You can eliminate pathos pretty quickly; the strongest persuasive emotions, such as anger and patriotism, work poorly in an office. Any emotion you do employ is best saved for the end, when the boss is ready to make a decision and you want him to commit to you.

  Persuasion Alert

  Do the tools really work in this situation? They did for Dorothy Sr. I wrote this scenario from a real-life experience. Little more than a year after she resumed her career, her boss resigned for health reasons. After a national search, her employer chose the internal candidate: Dorothy. They made her a VP. She credits rhetoric with helping her make her best pitch.

  Ethos or logos? Since the boss is evaluating you, character should be your main appeal. Logic can certainly help. You could write a bang-up memo telling how the job could be done better. But even that would serve to show off your character, by revealing an abundant supply of practical wisdom.

  Remember the three ethos traits? Cause, caring, craft? Virtue, disinterest, practical wisdom? You show virtue by aligning yourself with the organization’s values. Describe how you will save money or bring in business or members—whatever the company values most.

  As for disinterest, think of your audience, which in this case is just one person: the boss. One of the best “caring” lines to use on a superior is “What do you need?” As overly simple as this sounds, in all my years of managing people I rarely heard the expression from my direct reports. Dorothy Sr. says it’s the single best piece of advice I gave her when she went back to work. She asked me what she should keep in mind during her weekly one-on-one meetings with the boss. “When you’re done updating him on what you’re doing, ask him what he needs,” I said. She became indispensable within a couple of weeks. (She actually followed up on those needs, which is something I rarely got around to when I was employed.)

  How George H. W. Bush Became President

  Another ridiculously simple piece of goodwill advice: thank people in writing. Congratulate them in writing. Commiserate in writing. Write notes—emails, handwritten cards, whatever seems appropriate. George H. W. Bush was famous for his thoughtful letters, which he would peck out on his manual typewriter. An intern of mine, who was no fan of Republicans, once wrote an article that mentioned the president. He received a short note from Bush praising his writing (and disputing a point in the piece). The intern became one of his many personal fans. Bush made himself a paragon of caring by taking some of his precious time to write a note to a young stranger. Use this note-writing habit to manage up, down, and sideways at work.

  Assuming you are such a paragon yourself, you have already taken care of goodwill with your boss. All right, so then you write a detailed strategy memo to show off your practical wisdom and to prove you have more virtue (in the rhetorical sense) than any other candidate. This is where kairos comes in, by the way. To show that you can turn on a dime, write the memo as fast as you can without being sloppy, and send it ASAP.

  First, though, think how you want to present that memo. Should it be printed and bound with a clear plastic binder? Or emailed as an attachment? If the boss is no reader, would he let you give a PowerPoint presentation? Or email one to him? That’s kairos again—timing plus medium.

  While you wait for the boss to get back to you, what other ethos-boosting tool can help your chances? Decorum! If you don’t already dress at the level you aspire to, start now. Use code grooming, picking up the jargon and commonplaces that the top boss uses. And you might try to employ an identity strategy. How can you make the boss identify with promoting you? One of the easiest ways is to make him identify with you—to see you as a junior version of himself, the way Robert Redford cast his doppelganger, Brad Pitt, in A River Runs Through It. Business sociologists say that managers do tend to hire people with personalities similar to their own.

  Some of your coworkers may see your identity tactics as first-class sucking up, so decorum has to work in all directions. If you want to suck up to the boss, suck up to your peers at the same time. Make a point of socializing with them during this period. Take time for them. Sing their praises to people who will report back to them.

  Now, assume that your strategy works to the point where the boss calls you in for a job interview. You don’t need a memorized script, or figures of speech on the tip of your tongue. Just focus on your ethos strategy: craft (you know what is good for the company, and you have the skills to carry them out), cause (you share the company’s values and will do what it takes to support them), and caring (you’re loyal to the boss and want to make his job easier). Get your decorum down, with the proper dress (for the supervisor’s role) and code language that pleases the boss.

  Let’s run the strategy through some dialogue and see how it pans out.

  BOSS:
Why do you want this job?

  YOU: Because I see the way you mentor people, and I’m excited about the opportunity to bring people along in their own careers.

  Great! I assume the boss is big on mentoring and often uses the “learning experiences” commonplace. Your answer shines with both disinterested goodwill and virtue. You also used an excellent ethical backfire tactic, emphasizing a weakness as a strength. Alas, your boss sees right through that one.

  BOSS: Do you think you’re ready to mentor people? I see from your résumé that you haven’t supervised many people in your career.

  This may sound like an ethos question, but it may take some logic to convince him. How can you reveal your mentoring skill while sitting alone with him? One way is to come up with examples—inductive logic. Suppose you don’t have any supervisory experience, though. Remember that facts compose only one of three kinds of examples, the other two being comparison and story. Time for some storytelling!

  Persuasion Alert

  Who said anything about coworkers coming for advice? You’re using a slightly risky but useful technique: speak of an unproven point as if it’s already a given. It’s risky because your audience—the boss—might call you on it, requiring some serious backing and filling.