Thank You for Arguing, Third Edition: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion - Softcover

Heinrichs, Jay

 
9780804189934: Thank You for Arguing, Third Edition: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804189935 ISBN 13: 9780804189934
Verlag: Crown, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A master class in the art of persuasion, as taught by professors ranging from Bart Simpson to Winston Churchill, newly revised and updated.

The time-tested secrets taught in this book include Cicero's three-step strategy for moving an audience to action, and Honest Abe's Shameless Trick for lowering an audience's expectations. And it's also replete with contemporary techniques such as politicians' use of code language to appeal to specfic groups and an eye-opening assortment of persuasive tricks, including the Eddie Haskell Ploy, the Belushi Paradigm, Stalin's Timing Secret, and the Yoda Technique.   

Whether you're an inveterate lover of language books or just want to win a lot more anger-free arguments on the page, at the podium, or over a beer, Thank You for Arguing is for you. Warm, witty, erudite, and truly enlightening, it not only teaches you how to recognize a paralipsis when you hear it, but also how to wield the weapons of persuasion the next time you really, really, want to get your own way.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAY HEINRICHS spent twenty-six years as a writer, editor, and magazine-publishing executive before becoming a full-time advocate for the lost art of rhetoric. He now lectures widely on the subject, to audiences ranging from Ivy League students to NASA scientists to Southwest Airlines executives, and runs the language blog figarospeech.com

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Chapter 1. Open Your Eyes

THE INVISIBLE ARGUMENT

A personal tale of unresisted persuasion

Truth springs from argument among friends. —David Hume

It is early in the morning and my seventeen-­year-­old son eats breakfast, giving me a narrow window to use our sole bathroom. I wrap a towel around my waist and approach the sink, avoiding the grim sight in the mirror; as a writer, I don’t have to shave every day. (Marketers despairingly call a consumer like me a “low self-­monitor.”) I do have my standards, though, and hygiene is one. I grab toothbrush and toothpaste. The tube is empty. The nearest replacement sits on a shelf in our freezing basement, and I’m not dressed for the part.

“George!” I yell. “Who used all the toothpaste?”

A sarcastic voice answers from the other side of the door. “That’s not the point, is it, Dad?” George says. “The point is how we’re going to keep this from happening again.”

He has me. I have told him countless times how the most productive arguments use the future tense, the language of choices and decisions.

“You’re right,” I say. “You win. Now will you please get me some toothpaste?”

“Sure.” George retrieves a tube, happy that he beat his father at an argument.

Or did he? Who got what he wanted? In reality, by conceding his point, I persuaded him. If I had simply said, “Don’t be a jerk and get me some toothpaste,” George might have stood there arguing. Instead I made him feel triumphant, triumph made him benevolent, and that got me exactly what I wanted. I achieved the pinnacle of persuasion: not just an agreement, but one that gets an audience—­a teenage one at that—­to do my bidding.

No, George, I win.

The Matrix, Only Cooler

What kind of father manipulates his own son? Oh, let’s not call it manipulation. Call it instruction. Any parent should consider rhetoric, the art of argument, one of the essential R’s. Rhetoric is the art of influence, friendship, and eloquence, of ready wit and irrefutable logic. And it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument.

Whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision, and goads you to buy things. Argument lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures, and guilt trips; it forms a real-­life Matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade one another, the art of persuasion reveals the Matrix in all its manipulative glory.

The ancients considered rhetoric the essential skill of leadership—­knowledge so important that they placed it at the center of higher education. It taught them how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on every occasion, and make people like them when they spoke. After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the world’s first democracies. It trained Roman orators such as Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero and gave the Bible its finest language. It even inspired William Shakespeare. Every one of America’s founders studied rhetoric, and they used its principles in writing the Constitution.

Rhetoric faded in academia during the 1800s, when social scientists dismissed the notion that an individual could stand up to the inexorable forces of history. Who wants to teach leadership when academia doesn’t believe in leaders? At the same time, English lit replaced the classics, and ancient thought fell out of vogue. Nonetheless, a few remarkable people continued to study the art. Daniel Webster picked up rhetoric at Dartmouth by joining a debating society, the United Fraternity, which had an impressive classical library and held weekly debates. Years later, the club changed its name to Alpha Delta and partied its way to immortality by inspiring the movie Animal House. To the brothers’ credit, they didn’t forget their classical heritage entirely; hence the toga party.

Scattered colleges and universities still teach rhetoric—­in fact, the art is rapidly gaining popularity among undergraduates—­but outside academia we forgot it almost entirely. What a thing to lose. Imagine stumbling upon Newton’s law of gravity and meeting face-­to-­face with the forces that drive the universe. Or imagine coming across Freud for the first time and suddenly becoming aware of the unconscious, where your id, ego, and superego conduct their silent arguments.

I wrote this book for that reason: to lead you through this ill-­known world of argument and welcome you to the Persuasive Elect. Along the way you’ll enhance your image with Aristotle’s three traits of credible leadership: virtue, disinterest, and practical wisdom. You’ll find yourself using logic as a convincing tool, smacking down fallacies and building airtight assertions. Aristotle’s principles will also help you decide which medium—­text? phone? skywriting?—­works best for each message. You will discover a simple strategy to get an argument unstuck when it bogs down in accusation and anger.

And that’s just the beginning. The pages to come contain more than a hundred “argument tools” borrowed from ancient texts and adapted to modern situations, along with suggestions for trying the techniques at home, school, or work, or in your community. You will see when logic works best, and when you should lean on an emotional strategy. You’ll acquire mind-­molding figures of speech and ready-­made tactics, including Aristotle’s irresistible enthymeme, a neat bundle of logic that I find easier to use than pronounce. You’ll see how to actually benefit from your own screw-­ups. And you’ll discover the most compelling tools of all in your audience’s own self-­identity.

By the end of the book you will have mastered the rhetorical tricks for making an audience eager to listen. People still love a well-­delivered talk; the top professional speakers charge more per person than a Bruce Springsteen concert. I devote a whole chapter to Cicero’s elegant five-­step method for constructing a speech—­invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—­a system that has served the greatest orators for the past two thousand years.

Great argument does not always mean elaborate speech, though. The most effective rhetoric disguises its art. And so I’ll reveal a rhetorical device for implanting opinions in people’s heads through sheer sleight of tongue.

Besides all these practical tools, rhetoric offers a grander, metaphysical payoff: it jolts you into a fresh new perspective on the human condition. After it awakens you to the argument all around, the world will never seem the same.

I myself am living proof.

Ooh, Baby, Stir Harder

To see just how pervasive argument is, I recently attempted a whole day without persuasion—­free of advertising, politics, family squabbles, or any psychological manipulation whatsoever. No one would persuade me, and I would avoid persuading them. Heck, I wouldn’t even let myself persuade myself. Nobody, not even I, would tell me what to do.

If anyone could consider himself qualified for the experiment, a confirmed hermit like me could. I work for myself; indeed, having dropped out of a career in journalism and publishing, I work by myself, in a cabin a considerable distance from my house. I live in a tiny village in northern New England, a region that boasts the most...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804189935
ISBN 13 
9780804189934
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
3
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Three Rivers Press
https://www.adolfodominguez.com/en-us/legal-notice.html

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