1806 John Quincy Adams, a young U.S. senator, assumes the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. The chair is now held by Jorie Graham, a poet.
1826 A young Massachusetts congressman named Daniel Webster delivers a eulogy for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The speech makes Webster a rhetorical superstar.
1860 Abraham Lincoln delivers a speech at Cooper Union in New York that propels him to the presidency.
1950 Rhetorician and literary critic Kenneth Burke publishes A Rhetoric of Motives, arguably the greatest work on the art of persuasion in more than a century. Burke introduces the idea of identity as a central tool in persuasion.
1958 Chaim Perelman, a Belgian legal scholar and a Jew who survived the Holocaust, poses a profound human question: how could people govern themselves when the chief intellectual tools of Perelman’s time, science and logic and modern law, had failed to prevent war and Holocaust? Finding an answer in the art of persuasion, he writes an influential book, The New Rhetoric.
1962 Marshall McLuhan publishes The Gutenberg Galaxy. This Canadian rhetorician earns his fifteen minutes of fame by coining the commonplaces “The medium is the message” and “the global village.” He helps revive rhetoric in academe. (I found the book entirely unreadable.)
1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech, brilliantly combining present-tense sermonizing rhetoric with a stirring vision of the future.
1980 The College Board implements the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam, testing students’ knowledge of rhetoric.
2012 The Rhetoric Society of America boasts twelve hundred members.
2019 Students aiming for a Ph.D. in rhetoric can choose among ninety-four programs in America, according to Rhetmap.org.
APPENDIX V
Further Reading
People who want to immerse themselves in rhetoric will find the ancient stuff surprisingly easy to read, if a little dull in places. The modern guides are something else; the lack of good ones helped motivate me to write this book in the first place.
In fact, one of the best current resources is not a book but a website, grandly named “Silva Rhetoricae, The Forest of Rhetoric” (http://rhetoric.byu.edu). At the risk of overpromoting myself, my own site, “It Figures” (figarospeech.com), shows how rhetoric works in politics and the media.
Among the several hundred books on rhetoric that I have read over the years, I found the following the most useful and enjoyable.
A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, by Richard A. Lanham (University of California Press, second edition, 1991). What Strunk and White’s Elements of Style did for grammar, Lanham’s well-organized and entertaining Handlist does for rhetoric. If you lack room on the shelf near your desk, toss Strunk and White and keep the Handlist. You’ll find it infinitely more useful.
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2001). Worth perusing in any library clever enough to order it. It has a wealth of articles covering all aspects of ancient and modern rhetoric, and everything in between. The material on Shakespeare’s rhetoric is first-rate.
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, by P. J. Corbett (Oxford University Press, 1990). The only thorough modern textbook extant. It suffers from the academic distaste for anything practical—Corbett wrote the book for composition students, and you will find little about rhetorical “delivery” or actual argument—but he dutifully leads you through the basic rhetorical principles.
The Art of Rhetoric, by Aristotle (Penguin, 1991). This is the rhetoric book that launched all the others, and it remains the art’s fundamental textbook. Whenever I go back and reread passages that make no sense or seem irrelevant to modern life, I discover that the fault is mine, not Aristotle’s. This book was his masterpiece, written late in life as a culmination of all his political and psychological knowledge. The bad news is you will not find it a page-turner. Some scholars think that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is merely a collection of his lecture notes, and that’s how they read. But if you make the effort, you will uncover a truly uncanny work, one of the genuine classics.
Cicero, by Anthony Everitt (Random House, 2001). History’s greatest orator wouldn’t make for a very good motion picture. At least, you would never see Russell Crowe playing him. For one thing, Cicero was a physical coward. His name meant “turnip seed” in Latin. And he failed to stop tyranny in Rome. But he was a central actor in some of the most interesting historical events of all time, perhaps history’s greatest orator, and one of rhetoric’s chief theoreticians. Everitt has written the most readable biography. He evokes the troubled times in Rome with novelistic flair, and helps us understand why the Romans considered rhetoric the highest of the liberal arts.
The Founders and the Classics, by Carl J. Richard (Harvard University Press, 1994). Readers more interested in history than theory—especially those who find my history far-fetched—should get this book. Richard’s short, readable romp through the founders’ education shows their passion for the ancients better than any other book.
A Rhetoric of Motives, by Kenneth Burke (University of California Press, 1950). This brilliant, dense book is only for the rhetoric addict. Burke ranks as one of the leading philosophers and literary critics of the twentieth century. It is no exaggeration to call him the greatest rhetorical theorist since Augustine. But the book is slow going for the uninitiated.
Finally, at the risk of overloud horn tooting, may I suggest Word Hero by Jay Heinrichs (Three Rivers Press, 2010)? It’s a playful introduction to figures of speech and tropes, and the successor to Thank You for Arguing.
To Dorothy Jr. and George:
You win.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While the anecdotes in this book all tell “the truth, mainly,” as Huck Finn would say, the stories of my family aren’t really true anymore. Which is a good thing. The kids I recall as little ones and sarcastic teenagers now lead serious lives, with jobs and everything. Dorothy Jr. is now Dorothy Jr., R.N., a rapid response nurse in Washington, D.C. George teaches history and debate (!) in an independent school. Both of them still make me laugh in exactly the same ways, and I continue to be grateful for the rhetorical instruction they give me.
My wife, Dorothy Sr., continues to work as a fundraiser, though no longer at a law school. In addition, she is the top official in our little town. When I told Dorothy that I wanted to quit my job and write a book on rhetoric, she replied without irony, “I believe in you.” As terrifying as those words were, without Dorothy’s faith, her steady income, and her insightful criticism of my drafts, this book certainly would have been impossible. I would have been impossible.
Cynthia Cannell, my agent, called me every few months for almost a decade to ask if I was ready to write the book, and won my heart yet again by selling it to a publisher. She got the book published in fourteen languages so far, including Italian, Polish, Czech, Korean, Turkish, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, German, and British, to name a few. My original editor, Rick Horgan, steered me with savvy wit and pushed me as no editor ever has. Matt Inman provided critical guidance and editing for this edition.
Authors Jim Collins, Kristen Collins-Laine, Lisa Davis, Peter Heller, Eugenie Shields, and Bob Sullivan dealt indispensable advice. Gina Barreca, a superb humorist and star faculty member at the University of Connecticut, saved me from miring myself in rhetorical jargon. Thanks also to Sherry Chester, Jeremy Katz, Nat Reade, Steve Madden, and Kristen Fountain for their comments and advice.
Dozens of rhetoricians at colleges across the country have helped me over the years. My Argument Lab partner and friend, David Landes, has held me spellbound with our wide-ranging rhetorical Skype sessions between New Hampshire, Dubai, and Beirut. Dominic Delli Carpini and his colleagues at York College welcomed me as a writer in residence and showed me what an innovative rhetoric program truly looks like. Middlebury College’s Dana Yeaton pulled me in
to one of academia’s most exciting experiments in oratory. These scholars and their colleagues have kept rhetoric alive just as the monks did in the Dark Ages.
This book would never have become a bestseller without the backing of AP English Language and Composition teachers. For this edition, I asked a group of them to critique the book themselves, as well as give me student feedback. These elite teachers include Angela Balanag, Crystal Chapman, Mandy Fils, Justin Grow, Jenifer Kisner, Tom Klett, Julie Laurent, Sarah Lyon, Lara Mallard, Grace Maneri, Jennifer Mitchell, Alexandria Mooney, Tracey Moore, Portia Mount, Anne Nichols, Thomas Pillow, Tania Pope, Stephanie Powell, Kim Powers, Tony Soltis, Elizabeth Stone, Adam Tarlton, Melissa Vello, Kathryn Williford, and Hilary Wiltshire.
Finally, the thousands of subscribers to Figarospeech.com and ArgueLab.com sustain my faith in the art of persuasion. With a few million more figarists like you, we shall raise Aristotle, Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, Churchill, Burke, King, Madison, Lincoln, and Hamilton from the dead. Bless you all.
ALSO BY JAY HEINRICHS
Word Hero
How to Argue with a Cat
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAY HEINRICHS has spent more than thirty years in the media as a writer, editor, executive, and consultant. Since the first publication of Thank You for Arguing in 2007, he has traveled the world as a presenter and persuasion guru. He has taught rhetoric as a professor of the Practice of Rhetoric and Oratory at Middlebury College. Beginning his career as a reporter in Washington, D.C., he went on to supervise numerous magazines with a total circulation of more than 10 million. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education awarded him three gold medals for the best feature writing in higher education. His other books on rhetoric include Word Hero and How to Argue with a Cat. Jay lives with his wife, Dorothy Behlen Heinrichs, on 150 acres in central New Hampshire.
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Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 49