YOU: Well, there’s a reason why other employees come to me for advice. Just to give you one example: Jaime over in accounting had a terrific idea for a word-of-mouth promotion—he swore me to secrecy, so I can’t tell you what it is. He asked me how to approach you, and I helped him put together a short presentation and booked the time on your calendar. You see him next Tuesday.
Well done. By telling a story, you put the boss in your shoes. Whenever you can get the audience to see through your eyes, and experience what you experienced, you put them in a receptive mood. The boss talks about the strategy in your memo, you go over your particular strengths, and it’s time to wrap things up.
BOSS: So, is there anything else you’d like to add?
YOU: Yes, there is. I’m sure you have other great candidates. But nobody will put more heart into it than I will. Give me a chance, and I’ll meet your expectations and then some. And I really want that chance.
Nice peroration. You leave the room with a palpable emotion. Now, some bosses might be put off by this sort of display; some might prefer candidates who play a bit harder to get. But a little emotion at the end of a job interview is usually a good thing. Cicero said so (he was talking about an oration, but it works the same way). And you know I never second-guess Cicero.
Wielding the Book Club
Selling an idea uses much the same tools. Suppose you’re so excited about rhetoric that you want to get your book club to read this book. Here it’s a matter of getting the club to make a choice, not take an action. Therefore, emotion bears less of a burden.
Another difference from a job interview: the product’s ethos counts even more than your own, unless your group has loved every book you have recommended. But suppose for the sake of this argument that this is the first book you present. Where do you start?
YOU: I have a book that’s going to surprise most of you. It surprised me, at least.
Um, okay. Where are you going with this?
YOU: I picked it up in the bookstore because I was curious about the title (holding book up). When I found it was about argument, I was going to put it right back on the shelf.
Oh, I get it. The reluctant conclusion. Very nice. It establishes your disinterest and walks the audience through your reasoning.
YOU: But then I flipped the book open. Let me read you what I read. (Read passage from the introduction about my rhetorical day.) This isn’t a stuffy scholarship or a cheesy business book. It’s funny, and it actually teaches you how to argue. But that’s not why I’m proposing that we read this together. It offers even more than that.
Persuasion Alert
Oh, for crying out loud. Not only do I just happen to use my own book in a sample argument, now I’m even having you praise it. I bank on my identity strategy. Throughout the book, I have attempted to put you in my shoes, playing back dialogues, winning and losing arguments, in the hope that I can get away with an occasional abuse of authorial privilege.
Oh joy, a dirimens copulatio, the but-wait-there’s-more figure! Now you’re just pouring it on. You use inductive logic to read an example, employ the definition strategy—it’s not a scholarly or biz book—and promise something even better. Your group leans in to hear what comes next.
YOU: It shows how argument isn’t just a matter of dominating people. It’s about getting what you want, of course. But it’s also a way of avoiding fights and nastiness of all kinds—in politics as well as at home or work. This club likes to focus on serious books that make a difference in people’s lives. Well, actually, this book is too entertaining to be purely serious, but it has a really serious purpose. And that’s to get us back to what the author calls our “rhetorical roots.”
Very nice. You mention the club’s core values and show how the book sticks to them—a way of touting its rhetorical virtue. You even switch to the future tense at the end.
FELLOW CLUB MEMBER: Is the author an expert on rhetoric—a what-do-you-call-it?
YOU: Rhetorician.
Uh-oh, a practical wisdom question. Does the author have a clue about his subject?
YOU: No, he’s not an academic.
An excellent use of the redefinition tactic. Your fellow member asked if the author was an expert, not an academic. The club avoids scholarly books. Still, that fails to solve the practical wisdom problem. Where are you taking this?
YOU: But he spent many years in publishing as a manager and a consultant, and he’s also a journalist—not to mention being a husband and father—so he’s able to apply rhetoric to real-world situations.
Useful Figure
IDIOM: A set of words that conveys a single meaning. Idioms are a rich source of commonplaces, being a close relative of the cliché. In the case of “Bob’s your uncle,” though, I deliberately use an anachronistic idiom to sustain a light tone. (“Bob” was Robert, Lord Salisbury, a British prime minister who in 1887 promoted his nephew.)
The very definition of practical wisdom! I couldn’t have said it better myself. Head right to a summing-up sort of peroration, and Bob’s your uncle.
YOU: So I can’t imagine a better book for this club. It tells a personal story while it teaches useful social and intellectual skills that we didn’t learn in college. If you have any more doubts, I’ll be happy to read you a couple more passages.
BOOK CLUB LEADER: I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Do any of you? All right, let’s have a vote!
Congratulations. You won the argument, employing the book’s own ethos to make it look appropriate, wielding induction and redefinition, and making the group identify with the choice by employing values language. Oh, and thank you so much.
Charm Capitalists and Jerks
While a prepared pitch is relatively easy to deliver—you could memorize your little book club speech if you really wanted to—you may find it harder to be rhetorically nimble when someone raises an objection. Let’s take an idea and put it—you—in an awkward situation.
You need to raise money to franchise a chain of standardized bed-and-breakfasts, so you give a terrific PowerPoint presentation to a venture capital firm. The proposed chain, Bed & Breakfast & Beyond, has all the charm, comfort, and value of regular B-and-Bs while adding quality assurance and branding. “We’re the Starbucks of boutique hotels,” you say. “An intimate experience, backed by a reliable brand.”
Cue the lights.
One of the venture partners has a puzzled look. Uh-oh.
VENTURE CAPITALIST: Standardized B-and-Bs? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
YOU: So is “venture capital.”
Love the snappy answer! But remember that thing called decorum? Your job is to make the audience identify with you and your decision. Poking fun at the audience’s profession does not constitute good decorum. Try again.
YOU: It’s more of a paradox.
Strike two. Mr. V.C. clearly loves to show his erudition, so arguing about terminology lacks decorum. We’ll give you one more try.
YOU: That’s a great point, and it illustrates the genius of B&B&B. We take a mature industry and create a whole new sales category: assured uniqueness. That may look like an oxymoron, but it actually eliminates the flaws of two mature industries: the standard hotel chain and the independent B-and-B property. The visitor is guaranteed a unique experience—no two properties will look alike—while being assured of a high level of quality. This kind of selective branding should produce an ROI north of eighty percent within five years.
Now you’re talking. You use VC code language (“mature industry,” “property,” “ROI”—meaning “return on investment”) to show you understand the venture capital world. And you refer to the firm’s most cherished commonplace, profit through risk. Keep this tactic in mind: when you find yourself in trouble, you can often buy time
with appropriate code language.
Concession makes an even better instant response, especially if your challenger and the audience are one and the same. Your answer to Mr. V.C. (“Great point!”) constitutes an excellent concession, a neat jujitsu move that turns a hostile question to your advantage.
Can I really expect you to have such a snappy answer at the tip of your tongue? No. A concession is not always snappy. If you can’t think of anything else, agree with your opponent. Like the code-grooming tactic, concession buys you time. If you can’t follow up with a great jujitsu line, using your opponent’s argument against him, you can still switch the tense to the future, and the main topic to the advantageous.
I’m going to put you on the firing line again. You want to sell another idea—a political opinion this time.
YOU: I think we need to increase the Head Start budget. A third of the kids in this country live below the poverty line, and unless we can give them a decent breakfast and some early education, we’re just asking for trouble when those kids grow up.
OPPONENT: Well, I think just the opposite. We should cut aid to poor families. Welfare mothers are lazy and a drain on society.
How do you answer? You could call him a bigot, but that would end the argument. You could try to reason him out of his prejudice by offering macroeconomic structural explanations, then follow up with an appeal to pathos—emotional examples of hardworking mothers making six dollars an hour. If your real audience is a group of liberal intellectuals, that response just might work, though your opponent probably would remain unconvinced. Besides, it’s awfully hard to pull such an answer—practically a full-fledged oration—out of your hat. Your alternative? When in doubt, concede.
YOU: Yeah, I’m sure there are lazy people on welfare.
The best kind of concession redefines the issue without appearing to. Here you shift the generic “welfare mothers” to a limited number of “lazy people.” Plus you depersonalize the bad guys in the story. “Welfare mother” implies a slattern who shoots up to entertain her boyfriends while the kids terrorize the neighborhood. “Lazy people” conjures up a hazier, less specific image.
Still, concession alone won’t win an argument, so you follow up by changing the tense and the issue.
YOU: But the question is, how can we spend the least federal money over the long run? A kid in Head Start is much less likely to end up in prison. I’d rather the kid got a job than have to support him behind bars.
By shifting the tense, you move the conversation away from tribal talk and into something arguable. Plus you use a conservative commonplace, “Spend less money.” Will the argument succeed? It might, especially if the audience includes more than just your opponent. The advantageous is a powerful topic.
It can even work in an election—provided you have a savvy audience. Suppose your rhetorical ambitions get so fired up that you run for local office. At a public debate, the incumbent holds up an old photo of you as a teenager wearing a shirt that says “Tokin’ Male.”
INCUMBENT: My opponent abused drugs. And drug abusers do not belong in public office!
Ouch. All the heads in the audience now swivel in your direction. What do you do? Here are a few choices:
Deny you ever smoked. Say you bought the shirt off a young reforming addict who needed money for the church collection plate.
Say you didn’t inhale.
Attack your opponent.
YOU: My opponent has fathered three children out of wedlock. Now, I like a man with family values. He may not have many values, but he sure has a lot of family!
Well, a character attack has its virtues (in a rhetorical sense), but is that why you run for office? To make fun of people? Denying you smoked or inhaled should be your last resort. Even if you never did smoke and you wore the shirt in high school to disguise your lack of hipness, a denial would repeat the charge in the audience’s mind. (Values-laden terms tend to stick better than logical points do.)
Instead, try conceding.
YOU: I cannot tell a lie. I did wear that T-shirt in high school. And I admit my hair looked like that.
Nice use of humor to lighten the audience’s mood. What’s next?
YOU: And I sowed some wild oats as a kid. Now, as a responsible adult with children of my own, I regret it. But do you want to discuss old T-shirts, or can we talk about how to fix the pothole we all had to step over when we walked from the parking lot?
There are plenty more answers where that came from, and maybe some alternatives would test better with focus groups. But any concession that changes the tense from the past (accusation) and present (tribalism) to the future (the advantageous) will win the attention of your audience.
“Sure,” says the talk-radio-saturated, attack-ad-battered, politically fed-up reader. “And what planet are you on?”
It’s not a planet, it’s a nation. It used to be a rhetorical one. And it can be one again.
The Tools
In this chapter, we pulled together the whole arsenal of rhetorical weapons.
For offense, think of your goal, set the tense, and know your audience’s values and commonplaces. Then use ethos, logos, and pathos, usually in that order.
For defense, when you don’t know what to say, try conceding, then redefining your concession. (“You could say it’s spinach, yes. Others would say it’s broccoli.”) Finally, switch the tense to the future. (“But the question is, how are we going to get that vegetable down you?”)
And for specific tools, turn to Appendix II.
29. Run an Agreeable Country
RHETORIC’S REVIVAL
An argument for the sake of argument
Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing…for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. —JOHN MILTON
“You know why Americans are so fat? They drink too much water.”
It was late at night on the Italian Riviera, and I was eating with two local entrepreneurs, Gianni and Carlo, in the beautiful seaside town of Sestri Levante. We had already debated politics, the state of education, even the fish population in the Mediterranean (we were in a fish restaurant, and the owner jumped in).
Gianni took up the subject of water after a couple of hours and too much wine. “I went to America last month, everybody is with a bottle of water. And”—he leaned significantly across the table—“everybody is fat.” This launched an argument that took us through another bottle or two of (nonfattening) wine. You could hardly call it high discourse, and I doubt that Gianni even believed what he said. But he was following the age-old European custom that turns argument into a bonding experience.
If it weren’t for the wine, I would have shrunk in embarrassment. People at other tables were looking at us, and they were laughing—with us, most likely, but still. Here in the States, only the rude, the insane, and politicians disagree.
Then again, our aversion to argument is part of our tradition, right? Not if you go back before the mid-nineteenth century. Europeans who visited the States early in our history commented on how argumentative we were. What happened?
What happened was that we lost the ability to argue. Rhetoric once formed the core of education, especially in colleges. It died out in the 1800s when the classics in general lost their popularity and when even academia forgot what the liberal arts were for: to train an elite for leadership.
Persuasion Alert
I organized this chapter along the lines of a Ciceronian oration. This part is a classic exordium, or introduction, which stresses ethos and defines the issue.
You have seen how powerful the art is for personal use, and you doubtless understand why hundreds of generations learned it as an art of leadership. But rhetoric reserves its chief power for
the state—which leads me to the burden of this final chapter: rhetoric could help lead us out of our political mess.
Persuasion Alert
I end this first section with a bit of self-deprecation to balance the lofty (some would say pretentious) tone. Early in this “oration,” I need to work some ethos mojo. Plus, Cicero said that a good oration should flow nicely from part to part. Mentioning my family allows a smooth transition to the next section, which mentions my family.
I intend to show you the indispensable role that rhetoric played in founding the American republic, and how its decline deprived us of a valuable tool of democracy. At the end, I’ll offer a vision of a rhetorical society, where people manipulate one another happily, fend off manipulation deftly, and use their arguments wisely. It won’t be as hard as it sounds. I’ve been practicing on my family for years.
My Big Fat Rhetoric Jones
My kids say I sound like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Just as that dad claimed the Greeks invented everything, I have an annoying habit of seeing rhetoric behind everything. At church once, my wife had to shush me when I leaned over and explained the origin of the Christian mass.
ME: It’s taken right from a rhetoric-school exercise called the chreia.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 41