Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
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Jay Heinrichs on Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A dim corner and a maroon-red bookThe book’s origin is a single unplanned afternoon at Dartmouth College’s library, where Heinrichs was browsing with no destination in mind. He found a volume of John Quincy Adams’s rhetorical lectures from the early nineteenth century, followed Adams’s reading list for roughly twenty years, and emerged convinced that rhetoric deserved his career.
I flipped it open and felt like an indoor Coronado. Here lay treasure.
Two decades of reading in rhetorical theory left him with expertise and a problem: no modern book existed that made the subject readable. The gap was the commission he gave himself.
After looking for a readable guide to the ancient art of persuasion and finding only dry textbooks, I decided to write my own. I wanted this seductive art to seduce me!
The subject’s pull on him was, he admitted, its own kind of argument. The phrase captures something the twenty-year detour makes concrete: he did not choose rhetoric so much as rhetoric chose him.
You could say that rhetoric talked me into itself.
Even after he had written the manuscript, he worried the title would kill it before it reached readers. American publishing culture in the mid-2000s treated argument as a symptom of dysfunction, not a skill to acquire, and he knew it.
I had trouble believing anyone would publish it at all. In our argument-averse culture, doing a book with ‘argument’ in the title sounded about as appetizing to most of my friends as, say, ‘Cooking with Insects.’ But I wanted to help change people’s attitudes toward argument.
How he wrote it
Twenty years of research, three editorial rewritesThe asymmetry between the research phase and the writing phase tells you something about the book’s architecture. The two years of actual drafting were bookended by two decades of preparation and compressed by an editor who demanded the manuscript be rebuilt three times from scratch.
Before writing Thank You for Arguing, I spent 20 years studying rhetoric and bothering rhetoricians, linguists, and neuroscientists around the world. Writing the book — and rewriting the entire manuscript three times under my editor’s direction — took a total of two years.
Before a book deal existed, Heinrichs built a test audience by starting Figarospeech.com, a blog he used to work out how rhetoric appeared in popular culture and to figure out how to make the subject funny. The publisher initially told him to stop; the blog’s readership eventually helped make the book a bestseller [paraphrased from audio].
It allows people for maybe the most cynical reasons to get along better together. I mean, this can save our country, it can save the world... What it does is allow people to argue without anger. [paraphrased from audio]
That framing, irreverent but serious, came directly from what the blog forced him to practice: making classical rhetoric legible to readers who had never heard of Aristotle and didn’t care.
His family served as the book’s working laboratory throughout the drafting. His son George and his wife Dorothy appear in the chapters as real people he was testing rhetorical tools on, not illustrative composites, and he treated the marriage itself as evidence that the system worked.
As we learned the principles of rhetoric, we discovered the benefits of disagreeing openly. These days we manipulate each other shamelessly, and it’s made for a happy marriage.
The three full editorial rewrites were not a crisis; they were consistent with how he works at the sentence level. He has no tolerance for the idea that good prose arrives whole.
For me, writing is rewriting. I’m happy to write badly and then improve through multiple drafts.
The personal thread
His kids, his marriage, and the rhetorical momentThe book’s most immediate audience was not the reading public but two specific people: his son George and his daughter Dorothy Junior. He watched them repeatedly fail what he calls the rhetorical moment, a situation that calls for persuasion where they had no tools at hand. Getting them those tools was where the chapters started [paraphrased from audio].
I want them to see that it’s okay to disagree. Learning how to argue without anger lets us make the best decisions.
The civic argument in the book runs alongside a quieter personal one: that a household where people know how to argue is a healthier household than one where they don’t. Heinrichs presents his own marriage as the data point.
As we learned the principles of rhetoric, we discovered the benefits of disagreeing openly. These days we manipulate each other shamelessly, and it’s made for a happy marriage.
What he wants us to sit with
Argument as the core skill of a functioning democracyAsked to summarize the book’s purpose in plain terms, Heinrichs reaches past persuasion technique toward something closer to cognitive self-defense: a way of thinking that makes you harder to manipulate and more useful to the people around you.
The reason I wrote it was to show people how to think rhetorically, and by that I mean how to think like a rhetorician... because it teaches you — it taught me — how to write and think persuasively, how to understand audiences and markets better, and how to produce something to say on every occasion and have people like you when you say something.
Of all the tools in the book, one comes up in reader correspondence more than any other. In arguments stuck in blame or competing values, a single grammatical shift does what hours of debate cannot: it moves the conversation from what went wrong to what happens next [paraphrased from audio].
I’ll tell you the tool I hear about the most from Thank You for Arguing... if you can switch to the future tense, you win. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s largest bet is that rhetoric’s near-disappearance from American education is a civic injury, not just a curricular gap. Heinrichs spent a career in publishing before he could name that injury; the essay for Penguin Random House Higher Education is where he states it most directly.
In short, I found the why of words. Rhetoric gives a real purpose to a liberal education, pulling together all of a student’s knowledge while giving her the tools to inspire others. It inoculates her against the kind of manipulation and tribalism that poison our politics. It creates a good citizen.
He traces the problem historically rather than abstractly. The founders did not treat rhetoric as an elective; they treated it as the prerequisite for self-governance, a fact that sharpens his case for bringing it back.
Rhetoric is the core skill of citizenship; all of America’s founders had some degree of rhetorical training.