Author: Jay Heinrich

Notes:

Basic Devices to determine outcome of argument

• Set your personal goal

• Set your goals for your audience:

  To Change their...

  1. Mood
  2. Mind
  3. Willingness to act

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:
      1. Find commonplace words that favour you
      2. Define issue in broadest context (appeal to values of most audience)
      3. 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
  1. False coparison
  2. Bad example
  3. Ignorance as proof
  4. Tautology
  5. False choice
  6. Red herring
  7. Wrong ending
• 7 Rhetorical out-of-bounds → Make deliberative arguments impossible → Need to find ways to recover
  1. Switching tenses away from future
  2. Inflexible insistence on rule
  3. Humiliation
  4. Innuendo
  5. Threats
  6. Nasty language or signs
  7. Utter stupidity