110 pages • 3 hours read
Jay HeinrichsThank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 2, Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Offense”
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Control the Mood: The Aquinas Maneuver”
The Sophists, teachers and intellectuals of ancient Greece, once claimed “pathos affects an audience’s judgement” (83). Modern neurological studies confirm this theory: The limbic system, where emotions reside, overpowers the brain’s rationality. Rhetorically pathetic, pathetic appeal, and emotional argument are all synonyms for pathos. For an argument to be rhetorically pathetic, it must include sympathy.
Heinrichs details tools of pathos that agents can use to rouse their audience to action—one such tool being storytelling. This tool works because experience (what an audience believes already happened) and expectation (what the audience believes will happen) shape emotion. Telling a story with many details makes the story itself seem like a real experience (even if it isn’t), one that could happen to anyone rather than just the teller. Detailed stories are more effective at changing someone’s mood than ranting.
Another tool of pathos is emotional volume control or emotional self-control (i.e., little to no exaggeration of one’s emotions). For successful pathetic appeals, people must use simple emotional language. Heinrichs notes that “holding your emotions in check also means taking your time to use them” (86). Emotions need to build gradually in an argument, working best at the argument’s end.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Turn the Volume Down: The Scientist’s Lie”
This chapter examines tools that help “calm down the passions” (100).The use of passive voice—a grammatical voice construction in which the subject is a recipient of a verb’s action—is one such tool. Passive voice can calm an audience as it is difficult to get mad when the one doing is unclear.
However, passive voice might not be as effective in the face of rage. Heinrichs suggests trying to get the brain back to “System One” (101), which is when the brain operates on autopilot. Agents want to avoid “System Two” (101), which is when the brain processes difficult problems. An audience is more susceptible to persuasion when their brain is operating under System One rather than System Two. There are several strategies to help engage System One. The first is to “keep everything simple” (102) by using simple language and short sentences. The second strategy is to “make your audience feel powerful” (102), as a given sense of self-control keeps people calm. The final strategy is a winning smile (102), a show of confidence, as frowning gets people thinking. Once they start thinking, they engage System Two.
Humor can also lessen anger, so long as the right kind is used—such as banter with concession. Banter involves insults and clever comebacks; concession is when an agent agrees to a point only to use it against their opponent (as explored in Chapter 4). Heinrichs uses dialogue between Lady Astor (a British politician born in America) and Winston Churchill (British politician-turned-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II) to illustrate this tool. Lady Astor insults Churchill, saying “Winston, if you were my husband, I’d flavor your coffee with poison” (105); Churchill responds with, “Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it” (105). Churchill accepts Lady Astor’s jab and promptly uses it against her. Heinrichs cautions readers “to make sure you’re capable of this rapid-response humor” (105), or any attempts at banter will fail.
Part 2, Chapters 9-10 Analysis
Chapters 9-10 address the “seductive part of persuasion” (416)—pathos. Heinrichs continues to build on the notion that rhetoric is morally ambiguous. Politicians, in particular, exploit this ambiguity. For example, President Barack Obama once employed passive voice in saying “There is no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been” (100). This rhetorical tool enables President Obama to remove the one doing—the actor from the action—which in this case, were US drones that killed civilians in the Middle East. Other examples include the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote and Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign, both of which employ nostalgia (yearning for a perfect and lost past). Nostalgia shines “a rosy light on days gone by, while gently smothering all the evils of that same past” (94). For this reason, Heinrichs considers it “a first-rate dark-art tool of rhetoric” (95). At its heart, rhetoric distorts reality. Rhetoric itself is not good or bad, but its tools can be abused. Heinrichs discusses these tools in full in the hopes that readers will recognize this abuse and avoid manipulation.
One of the strengths of Thank You for Arguing is Heinrichs’s use of pop culture. With over 100 tools of argument at their disposal, readers can easily get lost or overwhelmed. By grounding examples in pop culture, Heinrichs makes the book’s ancient rhetoric traditions more accessible. The Simpsons is one of his favorite pop culture references, in part because the show satirizes America’s social fallacies. To illustrate the importance of emotional volume control, Heinrichs uses the following excerpt:
B.T. Barlow: Mr. Mayor, I have a question for you…what if YOU came home one night to find your family tied up and gagged, with SOCKS in their mouths? They’re screaming. You’re trying to get in but there’s too much BLOOD on the knob!!!!!
Mayor Quimby: What is your question about?
B.T. Barlow: It’s about the budget, sir (86).
In this example, conservative talk show host, B.T. Barlow, erroneously forgets his pathetic volume control at a town meeting. While many readers likely already watch The Simpsons, those who don’t can easily look up the show and see B.T. Barlow’s lack of emotional volume control in action via the internet.
