Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated)

by Jay Heinrichs

  FEAT OF RELUCTANCE

  Give your reluctant conclusion a dose of dissoi logoi. Construct an argument in which you enthusiastically describe a stand you agree with. Now reluctantly reveal how the evidence and your own objectivity compel you to support the opposite—even though you don’t actually support it.

  Example: I hate country music and its fake sentimentality. I especially hate it when it sells out completely and appeals to the Auto-Tuned, tone-deaf tween set. But Taylor Swift’s deft lyrics and her sweet voice just pull me in despite myself.

  EDDIE HASKELL PLOY

  THE CARING EXPERIMENT

  Take someone in your life (teacher, parent, spouse, child, boss, coworker, friend). Think of a choice you’d like that person to make—a choice that would benefit you. Now argue against your choice, in her own interest. Feel the disinterest flow!

  Kairos

  Don’t forget, kairos is not all about timing; it’s about occasion. That includes the place and medium as well as the time.

  HOLIDAY PITCH

  Create a proposal for your next vacation. The experiment gets more interesting if your idea strays from the vacation your companions want. Create an occasion plan to present your proposal: Who needs convincing? What’s the best time to make your pitch? What’s the best place and medium? (Rap song? Coffee bar? Quiet stroll through the woods?) The idea is to strike when the time is ripe, and do it in the right place with the right medium.

  CONSTRAINING FACTORS

  Choose a topic for an argument—gun control, cats’ superiority to dogs, the best Hollywood actress, whatever. Now conduct the argument as if you were doing it with:

  Twitter

  A phone (no FaceTime or Skype!)

  An audience that’s hot and tired

  Laryngitis

  ARGUE/DON’T ARGUE

  Decide which of these situations are ripe for an argument. If they don’t seem immediately ripe, what conditions would make them ripe? In which of these arguable situations would you be too shy about arguing? Do you find yourself more likely to try now that you’ve read this book?

  In the passenger seat with a beginning driver, in heavy traffic

  On a third date

  In a meeting where you disagree with everyone else

  During a holiday party

  Before coffee

  Alone with a disagreeable person

  Reading an obnoxious Facebook post

  Seeing a man about to jump off a bridge

  Discussing a film with a film studies major

  SPEECHMAKING

  INVENTION

  Your first task in inventing (or, as the Greeks, might say, discovering) your argument is to set your goal. How do you want to affect your audience—change their mood, or mind, or willingness to do something? Do you want to cause a political change, get approval for an expensive purchase, or sell a product or idea? Everything else you do follows the goal.

  GOAL-TENSE MATCH

  Set three persuasion goals you’d like to achieve in your personal and public life. Think of your audience for each. Now decide whether you’ll want to use forensic, demonstrative, or deliberative rhetoric for each. Remember, if a team or a relationship is your ideal outcome, demonstrative rhetoric will work best. Use deliberative argument if you want to change your audience’s mind.

  ARRANGEMENT

  One of the best ways to learn the Ciceronian outline is to produce an extremely short oration that incorporates all of the elements of classical arrangement.

  THE SIXTY-SECOND ORATION

  Prepare and deliver a video speech in a minute or less, post it to YouTube, and send the link to ArgueLab.com. Use all of the outline elements Cicero taught us (see Chapter 25): introduction, narration, division, proof, refutation, and conclusion. If you’re good with video editing software, label the parts of your talk with these elements. What to speak about? Whatever you want, whether it’s an argument to a parent or a disquisition on guns in America.

  STYLE

  Style is a form of role playing; it’s the voice you take on for a particular talk or piece of writing. Compare Meryl Streep, who changes her style with every character, with an actor who sounds the same in every movie. You need to think about the character you play whenever you speak or write for an audience.

  FILTER EXPERIMENT

  Take a memo or paper you’ve written and grade it according to Cicero’s five style virtues (see Chapter 25): proper language, clarity, vividness, decorum, and ornament.

  MEMORY

  Modern competitive memorizers develop their own versions of the ancient memory villa (see Chapter 25). You can use software and a little practice.

  POWERPOINT BOARD

  Write down all your thoughts for a presentation. Put each thought on a PowerPoint slide. Find or create a graphic for each slide. Print the slides in thumbnail view and cut them out with scissors. Now create a kind of board game, like Snakes and Ladders, where you follow a path through a kind of landscape and encounter each slide. Place the slides in the order you want along the path, beginning with the introduction and finishing with the conclusion. Stare at your “board game” for an hour or two, focusing on the pictures (you won’t be able to read the type anyway). Could you give the speech without notes or slides? At any rate, that’s what the Romans did, in their minds.

  DELIVERY

  Your facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures can convey wildly different moods, even when you recite the same words.

  NAME PATHOS

  Get hold of an old telephone book (or a new one, if any still exist). Read a name with a particular emotional emphasis. Then read the next one with a different emotion. Go through these emotions. If you feel like it, keep reading, going through the same list of emotions or creating new emotions of your own.

  Joy

  Sorrow

  Anger

  Reluctance

  Patriotism

  Humor

  Envy

  Desire

  Relief

  LINCOLN UP

  Recite the first part of the Gettysburg Address four times. (If you’re not one of those old enough to have memorized it in school, try Google.) Use gestures, expressions, pauses, and tone of voice:

  First, in a way that gets an audience interested.

  Second, emotionally excited.

  Third, melancholy.

  Fourth, laughing.

  ENARGEIA

  Use the special effects of rhetoric to create things that aren’t in the room. Try this experiment.

  DON’T SHOW AND TELL

  Pretend you’re supposed to present one or more of the following objects in front of an audience. The problem is, you forgot to bring them. Project the object like a hologram, using only enargeia, the skill of vivid description that makes a scene appear before your audience’s very eyes.

  Superball

  Lizard

  Moon rock

  Stolen copy of the Magna Carta

  Slinky

  Dick Tracy video watch

  Fairy

  Alka-Seltzer

  Your favorite childhood pet

  PROSOPOPOEIA

  Rhetoric students didn’t attempt the prosopopoeia—pretending to be a famous orator or great character—until they were pretty far along in their studies. For good reason: imagine trying to imitate Roger Federer after just a few tennis lessons. If you feel you’re ready, though, have fun. Grab yourself a cigar and be Winston Churchill for a moment. Or play Joan of Arc defending herself in a heresy trial. Think of someone you know a lot about. Now be that person. Don’t worry about being perfectly accurate. This isn’t a historical reenactment, and you’re not an impersonator at a comedy club. You’re just practicing speaking through ano
ther’s voice.

  Put your speech up on YouTube and send us the link!

  FAME CHANNEL

  Choose a character from history, literature, or pop culture. Give a three-minute speech as if you were that person. Put yourself in a situation that the character faced, such as George Washington confronting mutinous officers.

  TIME WARP

  Put a character from history or the media in a novel situation—say, George Washington arguing for universal health care, or haggling with a sales clerk, or demanding a refund at a restaurant, or getting his nephews to do their homework.

  INTERVIEW WITH THE DEAD

  Choose a current issue such as tax policy, gun control, gay rights, marijuana legalization, or the size of the military. Now take a favorite, well-quoted character from history and have her argue one side (or both!) of the issue. You don’t have to make those words up. Take quotes you find on the Web.

  Example:

  INTERVIEWER: President Washington, how do you feel about the separation of church and state? Does that mean avoiding all mention of religion in government affairs?

  YOU AS WASHINGTON: Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

  ESSAY WRITING

  The most persuasive essays have a story as their backbone. Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, used himself as the main character of many of his essay tales. But you don’t have to write about yourself. Find a person who best illustrates the point you’re trying to make. Writing in favor of gun control? Research a tragic case of a child shot by accident. Writing against gun control? Find a person who has used her gun in self-defense. Persuasion starts with character, remember. And a great persuasive essay almost always has a character.

  HERO’S JOURNEY

  Rewatch your favorite movie. Sketch the stages of the hero’s journey: leaving comfort, facing a challenge, committing to the quest, meeting overwhelming odds, triumphing. Now try sketching the journeys of heroes in advertising videos, comic books, political campaigns, and historic figures.

  HOOK STORY

  Whether or not you plan to write a college entrance essay, try crafting a story that enhances your ethos. Think: what one good characteristic or skill sets you apart from the crowd? Now think of an occasion where that special thing got tested. Try writing a hook story for various occasions, and be ready to deliver it orally.

  College entrance essay

  Job interview

  Date with an attractive new person

  Campaign for local office

  Story to tell by the fire

  Story to tell in a bar

  AESOP’S MORAL

  Aesop, the ancient Greek storyteller, liked to end every tale with a wise saying: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” “Appearances are deceptive.” “One good turn deserves another.” While these old morals seem like clichés to us, they must have sounded brilliant in Aesop’s day. Try writing a persuasive essay by crafting the moral first. Then tell a good tale about a real, interesting character (such as you), and put the moral at the end. When you write your argument in the form of a moral, you can make your point sound eternally wise.

  PLAY GAMES

  Here are some ways to make a car trip go faster or an awkward dinner tolerable. While this book certainly does not condone drinking, if you happen to be a young drinking-age adult, you’ll undoubtedly find that more than one of these practically scream drinking game.

  Don’t be afraid to play these games in front of a smartphone. Let us know at ArgueLab.com when you post a video to YouTube.

  FILL IN THE BLANK

  See how wildly you can stray from the obvious. It’s a good way to strengthen your cliché-busting muscles, and can make you sound hilarious after a glass of wine or two.

  Example: When you wish upon a star, makes no difference whether it’s just a passing jet.

  You are what you _________

  The more things change, _____­_____­___

  ________ come(s) to those who wait

  Strength in _____­_____­____

  A picture is worth _____­_____­_____­___

  Eyes are the window to _____­_____­____

  _____­_____­ make(s) good neighbors

  Birds of a feather _____­_____­___

  The best part of being old is _____­_____­__

  My middle name really should have been _____­_____­

  If you think you’re a duck, then ________

  Life is a _______

  From a little acorn grows a mighty ________

  If it’s too good to be true, then ________

  SCAVENGER HUNT

  Find the following in the news, social media, literature, art, and popular culture. Or, if you’re driving, find them as they flow by.

  An argument (discern which parts make the argument and which do not)

  A trope

  An enthymeme

  Code grooming

  A fallacy

  LIFEBOAT EXERCISE: ACADEMIC VERSION

  Here’s a way to practice your argument skills without entering into dangerously personal or political terrain. You’re boarding a lifeboat from a ship sinking in the middle of the ocean. If you had to take a professor from one field, which field would you choose?

  Try arguing first with pure logos, offering a rational argument. Then try arguing just with pathos, getting the audience emotionally involved through a touching anecdote. If you’re ambitious, see if you can use an identity strategy, tying your choice to the audience’s own values.

  LIFEBOAT EXERCISE: HUMAN VERSION

  Which three people from the following list would you bring on board and why? How do you decide? Try the logos, pathos, and identity approaches here as well.

  Restaurant manager, 44, married with two kids

  Croatian first-year medical student, 23, speaks little English

  Single mother, 34, has three kids

  Female baby, 8 months, excellently behaved

  Accountant, 58, amateur triathlete

  High school grad, 18, going into the army

  Korean War veteran, Bronze Star, 73, surly attitude

  Female fashion model, 25, grew up on a farm

  Comedian, 38, perceptive

  Poet, 64, internationally famous

  Homeless person, 40, Harvard dropout

  Successful entrepreneur, 49, chronic medical problems

  Top-ranked Olympic swimmer from Brazil, 21, no English

  Billionaire’s daughter, 6, certified genius

  You

  DESERT ISLAND

  You’re stuck on a desert island and can choose one person to be there with you. Whom would you choose? Make your case and defend your answer depending on:

  If you had to figure out how to survive there

  If survival were not an issue

  If it were your idea of paradise

  If you could take one item in each scenario, what would it be? Use your enargeia to describe it on that island.

  EVEN BETTER GAME

  Take a particular object or book and hold it in your hand. Argue how it could be “even better.” Try to sound as if you love your object even while you suggest a complete change. It’s great practice in the art of ingratiation.

  Example: “Isn’t this water glass amazing? It’s so…clear. And it holds water! It would be even better if it didn’t sweat all over my desk. An unsweaty glass: the Platonic ideal of water containers!”

  Paper clip

  Pencil

  Pillow

  Light switch

>   Toothbrush

  Remote control

  iPhone

  Laptop

  The human mouth

  Your ears

  SALES COMPETITION

  This is best done with a group. Hand out objects of equal value along with play money equal to the amount of the objects. Each player gets money and an object. Now sell them to each other. (Don’t let participants know the objects are equal in value.) The player with the greatest value, in money and objects, wins.

  SYNONYM ETHOS

  Take an object and name it with as many synonyms as possible. Which terms make you think the object has good craft? Which ones seem to be the most “caring”? And which illustrate virtue—shared values? Example:

  Beer

  Brewski

  Natty Light

  Cold one

  John Barleycorn

  Intoxicating fermented beverage