Thank You for Arguing

Arguing is not fighting

Jay Heinrichs wants to bring back rhetoric, the classical art of persuasion that schools taught for about two thousand years. He says modern people confuse arguing with fighting. In a fight, you want to win and make the other side lose. In an argument, you want to win over your audience. The point is agreement, not domination.

The book opens with a small family scene. Heinrichs gets angry about an empty tube of toothpaste and demands to know who used it up. His young son redirects him: the useful question is not who did it, but how to keep it from happening again. The son has used a rhetorical move without knowing it. He has shifted the argument from blame to a future choice.

Heinrichs uses examples from daily life, politics, advertising and popular culture, from Aristotle and Cicero to Homer Simpson. His claim is that persuasion is a learnable skill, and that a person who understands it can both persuade better and resist manipulation.

Set your goal first

Before you argue, decide what you want. Heinrichs, following the classical tradition, says persuasion has three possible goals:

• Change the audience's mood. The easiest goal.
• Change their mind. Harder.
• Get them to act. The hardest and the most valuable.

Your goal also depends on your personal aim. Do you want to score a point, or do you want something to happen? People who want to "win" a family argument often sacrifice the actual result they wanted.

Control the tense

Aristotle divided rhetoric into three kinds, and Heinrichs maps each one to a tense.

• Past tense (forensic rhetoric) is about blame and guilt. It is the language of the courtroom: who did what.
• Present tense (demonstrative rhetoric) is about values. It praises and condemns, separating good people from bad. It is the language of speeches and sermons that bond a group.
• Future tense (deliberative rhetoric) is about choices. It asks what we should do next. It is the language of decisions.

Heinrichs argues that the future tense is the tense of real persuasion. If you want a decision, steer the argument toward the future. Couples who argue in the past tense trade accusations. Couples who argue in the future tense can solve problems. When a debate is stuck on blame or values, ask a future question: "What should we do about it?"

He adds a practical rule. Do not argue about values that people hold deeply. You will rarely change them. Instead, frame your choice in terms of the audience's values.

The same pattern shows up outside the family. A meeting that dwells on who caused last quarter's miss produces defensiveness. A meeting that asks what the team will change next quarter produces a plan.

Ethos: make them trust you

Aristotle named three tools of persuasion: ethos (argument by character), pathos (argument by emotion) and logos (argument by logic). Heinrichs treats ethos as the most important. People must trust you before they listen to your reasons.

The first part of ethos is decorum: fitting in with the audience's expectations. This means dressing, speaking and acting in a way the audience considers appropriate. Heinrichs discusses code grooming, which means using the words, slang and references of the group you want to persuade, so you seem to be one of them.

He then describes three traits of a persuasive character, taken from Aristotle:

• Virtue, which Heinrichs also calls cause: you appear to share the audience's values.
• Practical wisdom (in Greek, phronesis), or craft: you seem to know how to get things done in the real world, not only in theory.
• Disinterest, or caring: you seem to care about the audience's interest more than your own. You appear to have no personal stake, or even to argue against your own interest.

Heinrichs offers tactics for each. To show virtue, connect your choice to values the audience already holds. To show practical wisdom, tell how you solved a similar problem, or admit that a rule may need to bend in this case. To show disinterest, show that the choice costs you something, or present your view as a reluctant conclusion that you reached despite your first preference.

Ethos also depends on the audience, not only on you. The same person can seem credible to one group and suspect to another. So a persuader adjusts which traits to stress: a technical crowd wants craft, while a community meeting wants proof that you care.

Pathos: make them feel

Emotion is what moves people to act. Heinrichs says that logic may convince a mind, but emotion gets a body out of the chair.

He advises against stating your own emotions loudly. Instead, make the audience feel the emotion themselves. Useful techniques include:

• Telling a story that puts the audience in the scene.
• Using specific, vivid details instead of abstractions.
• Volume control: understate an emotional point so the audience fills in the feeling. Understatement often works better than shouting.
• Humor, which calms an audience and builds goodwill. Heinrichs ranks wit, especially wordplay that fits the situation, above jokes or sarcasm.

He notes that some emotions persuade better than others. Anger, patriotism and emulation (the desire to be like a role model) tend to push people toward action. Belief is linked to emotion too: people are more easily moved when they expect a good result from acting.

Logos: make them think

Heinrichs presents logic as a set of practical tools, not formal proofs.

The key concept is the commonplace: a shared belief, value or saying that the audience already accepts. A good argument starts from a commonplace and moves to a conclusion. Find what the audience already believes, then build on it.

Aristotle's enthymeme is a short logical argument that leaves one part unstated because the audience already accepts it. "We should leave early, because traffic will be bad" rests on the commonplace that nobody wants to be late.

Heinrichs separates deduction (applying a general rule to a case) from induction (moving from examples to a general rule). He also teaches concession: agree with part of the other side's argument and use it to your advantage. He sometimes calls this rhetorical jujitsu. If someone says your plan is expensive, you can agree and argue that the cost is exactly what makes it reliable.

Definition is another tool. Whoever defines the terms often wins the argument. Heinrichs shows how to redefine a word to change its meaning. A person called "stubborn" can reply that they are "principled."

Defense: spot fallacies and fouls

The second half of the book teaches defense. Heinrichs wants readers to notice when someone is using bad logic or a cheap trick.

He lists seven deadly sins of logic:

1. False comparison: claiming two things are alike when they are not.
2. Bad example: using a weak or unrepresentative example as proof.
3. Ignorance as proof: saying something is true because no one has proved it false.
4. Tautology: a circular argument that repeats its own claim as its reason.
5. False choice: offering only two options when more exist.
6. Red herring: changing the subject to a distraction.
7. Wrong ending: claiming that one step will inevitably lead to a chain of bad results, a version of the slippery slope.

Heinrichs separates fallacies, which are logical errors, from fouls, which are moves that break the rules of a fair argument. A foul tries to end the argument instead of advancing it: threats, refusing to discuss choices, insisting on full agreement before the conversation can continue, or treating the opponent as unworthy of debate. He advises you to call a foul when one happens, and to otherwise allow rhetorical tactics as part of the game.

He also offers a simple test for any persuader: ask whether their interests line up with yours. A salesperson on commission may give sound advice, but their stake differs from yours, so weigh their claims with that in mind.

Advanced moves: timing, medium and figures

The later chapters cover more advanced tools.

Kairos is the persuasive moment: the right time to make your argument. An argument that fails today may succeed when the audience's mood shifts. Persuaders watch for moments when people are open to change.

The medium matters too. Heinrichs discusses which arguments work best in person, on the phone, in writing or in images, and how to match the medium to the emotion and goal.

He also introduces figures of speech, the decorative and memorable patterns of classical rhetoric. Examples include chiasmus (a reversed structure, such as "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country") and other wordplay that makes an idea stick. He shows how a well-crafted figure can make a speaker seem witty and in control.

The book closes with advice on structure, delivery and the canons of rhetoric from the Roman tradition: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Later editions add material on topics like public speaking and online arguments.

Who should read it

This book suits anyone who wants to win more agreements at home, at work or in public life, and to notice when others try to persuade them. It is a light, example-heavy introduction to classical rhetoric rather than a scholarly text, so readers who want depth may follow it with Aristotle's own Rhetoric.