Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  10. Airport gate agent: You’re eighth on the standby list and…there are seven seats left.

  Hint: Think caring and employ an identity strategy.

  a) Who are the seven ahead of me? Your relatives?

  b) Oh, I’d really been hoping. I haven’t seen my family in months.

  c) It must be hard having to tell people that. You look like the kind of person who likes to give good news.

  d) This is unacceptable. I need to speak to the manager.

  ACTION TEST

  To see whether people actually do the thing you ask them to—whether they desire the act—create a “commitment ratio”: divide the number of times they go along with your request by the number of “Okays” and “Yes, dears.” I achieved a 70 percent rate over three days—a passing grade. (You may do better if you don’t have children.)

  Tenses

  Remember:

  The past (forensic rhetoric) is about blame and punishment.

  The present (demonstrative) has to do with values—what’s good and bad.

  The future (deliberative) deals with choices—what’s to your audience’s advantage.

  TENSE ARGUMENT

  Choose one of these topics, take a stand, and argue it in terms of past, present, and future. Do it with a friend, or just imagine how you’d go about arguing. Imagine your audience. Which tense would be most likely to make them change their mind?

  After you’ve constructed your argument, switch sides.

  The Brad Pitt–Angelina Jolie divorce

  Illegal drugs

  Abortion

  The Democrats’ or the Republicans’ ability to improve the economy

  The Civil War: how much did slavery have to do with it?

  America as an exceptional nation

  Facebook: good or bad?

  America as a free country

  Electric cars

  Who talks more: girls or boys?

  PAST-PRESENT TRIAL

  Try to debate a choice (vacation plans, whether to quit your job) without using the future tense.

  Logos

  COMMONPLACE

  COMMONPLACE HUNT

  Find the commonplaces in jokes, political speeches, ads, or everyday conversation. Remember that a commonplace is a belief or attitude shared by an audience, and it may not be stated overtly. Example: “Subway, Eat Fresh.” The commonplace here is that freshly prepared food is better than pre-prepped food. Apple’s “The Power to Be Your Best” works off the commonplace that technology is empowering.

  Keep a list over a day or two and compete with friends to see who collects the most.

  ENTHYMEME

  ENTHYMEME CONSTRUCTION

  Choose some of these commonplaces and apply a conclusion to each of them. That’s deductive logic; specifically, the enthymeme.

  Example: For the commonplace “Luck comes to the well prepared,” your argument could be, “Luck comes to the well prepared. So you should research the company better than any of the other applicants for the job.”

  Kids today are different from before.

  America is the best nation in the world.

  Cold hands, warm heart.

  Kids need to burn off energy.

  The eyes are the window to the soul.

  Working for your salary is just renting out your life.

  Show me a child of seven and I’ll show you the adult.

  A cold night means good sleeping weather.

  A true leader doesn’t command, she motivates.

  To forgive is divine.

  There’s a fine line between genius and insanity.

  DEDUCTIVE AD CAMPAIGN

  Take popular ad slogans and rewrite them as syllogisms, then enthymemes.

  CONCESSION

  NO BUTS POLITICAL EXPERIMENT

  Politics makes an excellent test of concession, in part because the tactic is so refreshing. See if you can go through an entire discussion without overtly disagreeing with your opponent.

  SHE: I keep guns at home to protect my ten-year-old daughter.

  YOU: That should keep the bad guys at bay! Do you keep the guns locked?

  SHE: Absolutely! You don’t want to tempt a ten-year-old with guns.

  YOU: Good for you! And the ammunition?

  SHE: I keep it away from the guns. That’s another safety rule.

  YOU: So if an intruder comes, you unlock the gun, go get the ammunition, and lock and load.

  SHE: Well…

  YOU: Of course, your daughter could probably do that faster.

  PICK A TOOL

  Use at least one of these concession tools in your next disagreement with someone. The simplest way may be to pick a technique and then wait for a disagreement to pop up. Don’t worry; you won’t wait long.

  Put your argument in the other person’s mouth. So how would you put it?

  Pretend you’re just revising a plan instead of making a choice. Okay, so let’s tweak it.

  Admit you’re wrong in an attempt to reach a larger goal or to switch to the future. You win. Now how about…

  Anticipate your interlocutor’s objection and agree with part of it. You’re probably thinking my idea is impractical.

  Without thinking of any specific technique or script, just simply think about your goal in the argument—while agreeing with every point the other person made. Need help? Practice what improv performers do: Begin all your responses with “Yes, and…”

  Use concession to banter. So I’m a pig. That’s why I love your sty.

  Agree with an opponent’s commonplace, then show how his conclusion fails to fit the point. Yes, a man’s home is his castle. But how many castles installed expensive alarm systems in the days of yore?

  Try to use an opponent’s point to prove your own conclusion. Yes, a new park would make home values increase. But that won’t raise your taxes. It will lower them.

  Concede to redefine the issue. Tree climbing does involve some risk taking. But a kid needs to know how to take some risks.

  POLITICAL JUJITSU

  Practice your rhetorical jujitsu with a variation on the rhetorical question “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

  OPPONENT: The Democrats are the reform party.

  YOU: With reformers like that, who needs crooks?

  HOW IRONIC

  Counter the slippery-slope arguments below with an ironic concession. One great way to counter that fallacy is with another fallacy, the reductio ad absurdum. Find one ridiculous detail to agree with.

  Example: Your opponent says, “If we ban automatic weapons, pretty soon jackbooted government types will be coming to take your guns away.” You reply, “That’s terrible! What do bureaucrats need boots for?”

  “If I lend you my socks, pretty soon you’ll be wanting to borrow my underwear.”

  “A vote for mass transit is a vote for a future America where we won’t be allowed to drive cars.”

  “Don’t touch that doughnut! You’ll end up eating a dozen doughnuts and getting diabetes.”

  “Give a little kid a smartphone and he’ll never read, never go to college, and end up pumping gas in some one-horse town.”

  “No, you can’t join the cycling team. Either you’ll be terrible at it or you’ll be arrested in the long run for abusing steroids.”

  “Don’t let McDonald’s into our little town! Next thing you know there’ll be big-box stores, the bookstore will go bankrupt, and the only viable small business will be tattoo and massage parlors!”

  REDEFINITION

  The easiest way to redefine an issue is to swap your opponent’s terms for your own.

&n
bsp; AD NAUSEAM

  Redefine terms in advertising—particularly of products you dislike. Look for euphemisms and swap in unflattering words.

  Example: That’s not an energy drink. It’s a calorie drink.

  WORD FLIP

  Redefine these terms.

  Example: Luxury car/Expensive car

  Easy course

  Hard course

  Painful experience

  Traumatized on the first day of the job

  Fired from work

  Winner

  Freedom

  Fresh food

  Moldy food

  Threw up

  Job creator

  Working class

  Cosmetic surgery patient

  Prestigious home

  Fine dining

  Miller Time

  Animal shelter

  DEFINE LINES

  Abortion isn’t about ___, it’s about ____.

  Most people think love is ____, but it’s really ____.

  BRICK WALL EXPERIMENT

  Choose among the following sentences. Take several of them apart brick by brick, challenging every word. (Extra points if you can tell where we got them!)

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

  Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

  Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.

  The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

  Psychics can see the color of time; it’s blue.

  Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.

  They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.

  REVERSE WORDS

  Reverse words swap a term your audience dislikes for one it likes. This technique works better in defense than in offense, so you’ll need to wait for an audience to accuse you of something.

  COWORKER: Stealing office supplies again? That makes you a thief!

  YOU: I give them to my children, so I’m more of a Robin Hood.

  Consider using your reverse words in a litotes (see Chapter 20).

  FRIEND: I can’t believe how sexist you were with that woman.

  YOU: I may not have sounded like a feminist.

  REVERSAL EXPERIMENT

  Take an accusation and deny the opposite term. Were you eating like a pig? Admit you weren’t being a picky eater. You may have noticed that reverse words qualify as a form of concession.

  FALLACIES

  While most fallacies are permitted in rhetoric, some fallacies work better than others. And if your audience knows its logic, then your fallacious reasoning deflates rapidly. Still, you should practice making fallacies. It’s one of the best ways to learn to recognize them.

  ILL LOGIC

  Write a short argument using at least three of these fallacies. Try to make it convincing. (See Chapter 15 for a refresher.)

  False analogy

  Appeal to popularity

  Reductio ad absurdum

  Fallacy of antecedent

  Unit fallacy

  Hasty generalization

  Fallacy of ignorance

  Tautology

  False dilemma

  Red herring

  Straw man

  Slippery slope

  Post hoc ergo propter hoc, or the Chanticleer fallacy

  SPOT THAT FALLACY!

  Find a willing partner and read the argument you wrote in the previous experiment. See if she can identify the fallacies.

  Pathos

  FIGURES

  Two great ways to practice figuring are to work with the chiasmus (mirror image) and the cliché twist.

  MIRROR CRAFT

  The chiasmus or mirror-image figure works best as a reply or retort, using your opponent’s words against him. For example, suppose a colleague challenges your proposal to use flash mobs to promote your company’s new Internet domain-hosting product.

  COLLEAGUE: This is a technical offering, not reality TV. Your idea would have us jumping the shark.

  YOU: Our competitor uses supermodels as their “technical” spokespeople. We can either jump the shark or let the shark jump us.

  Sure, it’s hard to come up with a retort like that on the spur of the moment. But with practice you’ll eventually surprise yourself. And you can always put the chiasmus in a follow-up email after the meeting, after you have had some coffee.

  Now come up with a chiasmus as a reply to each of these statements.

  EXAMPLE:

  CITIZEN: We can’t cut the high school budget for football. Football is life.

  YOU: If football is life, explain which part of my life is a football.

  Taxes are just a form of theft.

  Kids these days don’t respect their elders.

  Say you’re sorry for hurting her feelings.

  I never met a man I didn’t like.

  Love means never having to say you’re sorry.

  CLICHÉ TWISTING

  Before you start messing with clichés, make sure you can recognize them. In our culture, sophisticated people avoid them like…well, they avoid them. So keep a journal of clichés you’ve heard during the day. Don’t mess with them at first. Just collect them. You may find this exercise less of a chore than you thought. Instead of annoying you, every new cliché becomes part of your campy collection.

  After a week or so of keeping your list, check the clichés that tend to crop up the most, including the ones you found yourself using. Try rewriting them. First, choose a cliché and write a witty response. Then take a cliché and swap or add a word to add a kick. It’s like taking one of life’s little lemons and making vodka lemonade.

  CONTRASTING

  One figure every political speechwriter learns is the contrast, weighing ideas or images against each other. Contrasts let you set up a rhythm that makes audiences go wild, while allowing you to set your position up against your opponents. The dialysis and antithesis in Chapter 20 show a couple of great examples of contrast figures.

  Try writing a short speech, taking a stand on something—whether it’s politics, or whether Katy Perry should stop dyeing her hair. Write a series of simple sentences and try to keep them to the same rhythm. Example:

  Cats are friendly, dogs are needy.

  Cats groom themselves, dogs need a bath.

  Cats eat neatly, dogs slobber and gulp…

  If this doesn’t exactly make you sound like Churchill, don’t worry. Insert a passage like that in the middle of a speech to cat lovers, and you’ll have them on their feet. Besides, once you get used to contrast figures, you’ll come up with more palatable sentences.

  VERBING FEST

  Find a neologizing friend and start a verbing rally. Invent a cool new word and send it to her. Then it’s her turn to send one back. Or start posting a new word a day on Facebook, turning nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and the like. Or combine two words to make one. Hey, what about a word for posting new words on Facebook? Neobooking? Facebology? Okay, you do better.

  TROPES

  We’ll limit tropes here to just three: metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. Actually, let’s make it even easier. Combine the metonymy and synecdoche into one tool, the belonging trope. Take a piece, a characteristic, a representative, or a container for something and make it represent the whole deal; that’s a belonging trope.

  TROPICAL PUNCH

  Rename each of the items on this list as metaphors and belonging tropes.

  Examples: Legs are stilts (metaphor
) and knees (belonging trope). A car is a flowing dream (metaphor) and wheels (belonging trope).

  Hawaii

  Cloud

  Taxes

  Small children

  Twitter

  Evolution

  Leaf blower

  The sun

  Congress

  Marriage

  Dancing with the Stars

  Asparagus

  Red Bull

  Hairy feet

  Dachshund

  Your boss or teacher

  Ethos

  RELUCTANT CONCLUSION

  Besides being one of the most effective tools of persuasion—a tool that makes you look amazingly disinterested—the reluctant conclusion also helps you exercise your dissoi logoi muscles. Try it as a mental exercise when you’re driving or waiting in line. It works like this: Take any opinion you hold, in politics, food, literature, whatever, and turn it into a reluctant conclusion. Make the other side look attractive; then think of why you were compelled to hold your opinion.

  Example: A person like me should love everything Taylor Swift does. She’s a wonderful songwriter, combines folk and country, and sings like an angel. But the Auto-Tuned tracks she’s been putting out, with the relentless disco beats, make her music sound like everybody else’s.