Author: Jay Heinrich
Notes:
Basic Devices to determine outcome of argument
Offense
- Choose the right Tense
- Make Choice → Future
- Compare/Check Values → Present
- Fix Blame → Past
- Main tools of Rhetoric
- Logos: Argument by Logic
- Concession: Use opponent's argument to your advantage
- Labeling: Attach favourable worlds and connotations to people and concepts
- Term Changing → insert your own terms
- Redefinition → change the meaning of opponent's terms
- Definition Jujitsu → Use opponent's terms to attack
- Definition Judo → Use terms that contrast with opponent to make them look bad
- Framing:
- Find commonplace words that favour you
- Define issue in broadest context (appeal to values of most audience)
- Deal with specific problem in future tense
- Deduction: Use commonplaces to reach conclusion
- Induction: Argument by example
- Pathos: Argument by Emotion
- Sympathy: Register concern for audience's emotion, then change mood to suit your argument
- Belief: Use what your audience has experienced and what it expects to happen
- Storytelling
- Volume Control
- Simple Speech: Avoid fancy language
- Anger: Point out lack of concern over audience problems to arouse anger
- Patriotism: Attach choice or action to audience's sense of group identity
- Emulation
- Desire / Lust: Move audience from decision to action
- To reduce/prevnt anger
- Passive Voice
- Cognitive Ease: simple, empower audience, smile
- Humour: Urbane humor, wit, facetious humour, banter
- Backfire: Overplay others emotions yourself
- Ethos: Argument by Character
- Decorum: Get audience to identify with you
- Virtue: Adapt to the values of your audience
- Brag
- Get a witness to brag for you
- Reveal a tactical flaw
- Switch sides when the powers that be do
- Practical Wisdom
- Show off your experience
- Bend the rules
- Appear to take the middle course
- Show "care" or "disinterest in the outcome"
- Make a reluctant conclusion
- Claim a personal sacrifice with outcome
- Dubitatio: show doubt in your own rhetorical skill
- Figures of speech
- Twist a cliché
- Take it too literally
- Reducing to absurdity
- Surprise ending
- Swapping words
- Chiasmus: Changing word order
- Antithesis: Sum up both sides on your own, allowing you to define the issue
- Correct yourself midsentence
- Turn the volume down/up
- Invent new words
- Use the language of the group
- Get audience to identify with the action
- Recovering from error
- Set your goals right after
- Be first with the news
- Switch tot he future
- Avoid belittling the victim
- Don't apologise → Express feelings about not living up to your standards
Defense
- Logical Sins
- Bad Proof
- Bad Conclusion
- Disconnect between proof and conclusion
- 7 Logical Fallacies
- False coparison
- Bad example
- Ignorance as proof
- Tautology
- False choice
- Red herring
- Wrong ending
- 7 Rhetorical out-of-bounds → Make deliberative arguments impossible → Need to find ways to recover
- Switching tenses away from future
- Inflexible insistence on rule
- Humiliation
- Innuendo
- Threats
- Nasty language or signs
- Utter stupidity