Choosing the overall approach

When the Ancient Greeks first studied rhetoric, they identified three basic distinct approaches — three different ways to win an argument:

• Logos: Facts and figures make the speaker look knowledgeable and impress the audience. Critical Thinkers do this automatically, of course. Join the facts up using logical arguments and you convince people who are following carefully and are open minded.

  In other words — logos doesn't win most people over! So the good speaker adds in some of the other two approaches too.

• Pathos: Reaction in the listeners or readers. Politicians of course dwell on sad tales people have asked them to help with. But even the most clinical social scientists or academics can't resist dressing up their essays with a little tirade (angry speech) at a social injustice, or stop themselves dwelling a little longer and in a little more detail than necessary for the point they're making on examples of misfortunes or tragedies. All this is pathos.

  But beware you don't overdo it and end up with bathos, which is an abrupt transition in style, for example, from a lofty scholarly account to a highly subjective personal view, producing a ludicrous effect.

• Ethos: Involves convincing your audience that you're trustworthy and expert. You speak (or write) with quiet authority. Achieving this goal is of course the tricky bit — the skill is linked to having charisma, a certain magical, even ‘godlike’, quality. One practical tip is to be honest, accurate and modest.

Making a great speech

A Spanish-born lawyer, called Quintillian, set out what he saw as the key elements of rhetoric in the first century CE. Although Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (to give him his impressive full name) focused on public speaking, his points also apply to all sorts of attempts to put forward a particular point of view.

Here are his five ingredients for a great speech:

• Invention: The key stage of thinking of something to say! Invention is concerned with the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of the issue. It covers questions such as how to come up with a strategy to argue a point, a task that's often equivalent to thinking of some good reasons to support a conclusion.
• Arrangement: How you're going to set the speech out, in the sense of how to order and arrange the ideas and any arguments being included. Should you say a bit about yourself first? Or keep the conclusion secret to the end?
• Style: Involves decisions such as would it be effective to pause here, and maybe insert a joke? And how about a little personal anecdote in the middle? Politicians often like to end their speeches with an appeal to action, wrapped in an emotional glow: ‘Yes, we can!’
• Memory: This is something where I fall down: I can never remember my points. Fortunately (unlike in Quintillian's day) keeping a sheaf of notes handy is usually acceptable. But these are little use if you haven't got the important points you need written down clearly on them. There's nothing worse than having to flounder through your notes with a crowd of people waiting on your next word! So make sure your notes have a clear structure that makes them easy to dip into if necessary.
• Delivery: The original Greek word for this is hypokrisis, which roughly translates as ‘acting’. Acting skills are what make all the difference between a good presentation and a lousy one. You have to empathise, ‘to bond’ with your audience, create a sense of personal dialogue with everyone present. Plus, of course, your speaking needs to come across ‘loud and clear’ and also sound melodious and varied, a combination that's rather harder to achieve.

Write a two minute speech — a simple ‘presentation’ — and (via the wonders perhaps of modern cameras or phones, record yourself giving it. Short of a topic? Why not just make it your own short version of the ‘Art of Rhetoric’?

Clever old Quintillian's five elements of rhetoric are so good that people continue to use them today. The first one, invention, is the part that overlaps most with the usual ideas of Critical Thinking. But in rhetoric, you don't just draw upon arguments. You may want to offer authorities to back your view — maybe even to present yourself as such — or perhaps overwhelm with facts and figures (see the approaches of ethos and logos, respectively, in the preceding section).

A vital part of speaking and writing effectively is to tailor what you're doing to the particular audience, a skill I cover in more detail in Chapter 10. For example, don't deliver a complicated, fact-heavy account to people who just need an overview, or give a weepy, emotional account to a sceptical audience. And don't tell dirty jokes to a Select Committee at the House of Commons looking at teaching thinking skills!

Favouring a simple but effective structure

The simplest way to structure your speech is the same way that you structure an essay, in order to aid comprehension:

1. Outline the points you're going to make with a short introduction.
2. Give the meat of the argument, following the outlined structure.
3. Summarise the argument.

As the lawyers’ dictum has it:

Tell them what you're going to tell them. Then tell them. And then tell them what you told them.

When you identify in advance your points, you let the audience know what to expect and encourage them to mentally prepare for what's coming up. Explaining in advance helps the audience to file information and ideas away, and to see connections better. Summing everything up at the end, reprising the key points you've made, isn't going to bore anyone. Instead it reassures those who got the point the first time and gives a second chance to those who didn't.

Speeches in particular, and arguments in general, are much more persuasive when they're clear — which requires a structure. A structure is most useful when it is explicit and audience can see it. (For Dummies books do this all the time, with their hierarchy of headings and the mini-intros at key points telling the reader what's coming up.)

Repetition is a bit of a no-no in academic books and articles, but in speeches, and journalism, it's a key tool. In such contexts, don't be embarrassed to repeat points. Novice speakers are often shy of doing so, feeling that the audience may spot and frown upon it (‘borrring!’), but great speakers love to repeat things. Think of some of Winston Churchill's epic speeches, such as: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’!

Repetition is valuable in creating a pattern, reinforcing the structure of a presentation and providing a powerful aid to comprehension.

Remembering the difference between denotation and connotation

In real life conversations and exchanges, words rarely mean one thing. And often the thing that the speaker intends to communicate is hidden behind another, more diplomatic, form of language. It is useful to both be able to tell what the deeper meaning of words is, and to be able to communicate extra levels of meaning in your own words.

Many words can denote roughly the same thing, but have very different connotations:

• Denotation: Using something as a sign for something else. For example, the jargon buster icon denotes that the text near it explains the use of an obscure or specialised term. In other words, when you mean what you say, literally, or, at the very least, figuratively (that is, metaphorically).

  For example, if you say that a new pop song literally blew your head off, you better stop talking and seek medical advice.

• Connotation: When you mean something else that may be initially hidden. The connotative meaning of a word may be based on implication, or shared emotional association with a word.

  Take the world ‘greasy’, for example: a completely innocent, lovely word. Many things, such as the moving parts of engines, should be greasy. But if you describe a meal in a restaurant, or worse still, your boss, as greasy, it contains negative associations. That's connotation.

Here's another example of language being used to make a point subtly. The words say one thing on the surface, and quite another in practice. A message that might be impolitic to give bluntly is being sneaked in by sleight-of-hand.

A lecturer is asked to write a reference for a student who has applied to be an administrator in a large organisation. The lecturer writes that the student is ‘a very original thinker who often comes up with unusual ideas’. It sounds like a nice thing to say — the denotation is positive — but given the context the connotation is negative, and indeed may set off alarm bells! Not a team player! Possible fruit cake!

Conducting your argument with jokes

Jokes are a great way to ‘break the ice’ and get an audience on your side.

But what if you're speaking or writing? A sheaf of favourite Snoopy cartoons won't do. Ideally, if you're a natural wit, you can ad-lib and make the joke relevant. But otherwise try to have a few prepared jokes up your sleeve!

Here's a joke that I think illustrates an otherwise abstract idea about how humour often involves an unexpected shift in perspective.

A man, who lives in a flat in a hot town centre, goes on holiday, leaving his neighbour to water his prize Bonsai Tree and look after his dog. A few days later the neighbour sends him an email to say his beloved Bonsai Tree has died.

The news spoils the man's holiday and he writes back rather crossly to say that at the very least his neighbour might have led up to it more gradually, for example by saying in a preliminary email that the tree was looking a bit thirsty and he was worried about it. The neighbour apologies. The next day he emails to say that his dog seems rather thirsty.

Get it? As well as being pleasurable, humour is a valuable way of getting people to think: it seems to ‘loosen up’ the thought processes.

In many contexts, jokes are going to be considered not very respectable. Even when funny, they can be seen as inappropriate, bad form and frowned upon. So by all means include a joke in your presentations and public speaking, But show a little, ah, discretion.

Speaking in triples

This method for achieving rhetorical effect is simple: whenever possible speak in triples. Trios, triplets and triads abound in Western culture. Just consider the memorable triads in the nearby sidebar ‘Famous triples’.

What is it about triples that makes them so effective? Three creates a pattern, and offers a structure. Each triple is also a beginning, a middle and an end. And even where there's no grand sense to the triple, it sounds right. Go for it! Just do it!

Some of the most famous speeches ever delivered feature triples prominently. Julius Caesar proclaimed: Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered). Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address played on the power of three by saying: ‘We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’.

In more recent years, that natural orator Barack Obama (a self-proclaimed fan of Lincoln), played on the power of three as he campaigned with: ‘Yes we can’. His Inaugural Speech included memorable lines such as: ‘We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and remake America’, and unmemorable ones too, such as: ‘Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered’. That's style for you!

Making a virtue of not knowing

Audiences are much more sympathetic to people who admit not knowing than they are to someone who reveals through a mistake that they're ignorant. After all, most of the audience doesn't know either and no one likes a smart alec. So if you don't know, shout it out loud! This is a legitimate tactic in arguments.

But a more sophisticated kind of ‘admission of ignorance’ is a little bit less honest. Funnily enough, when it suits them, subject experts often back up their positions by saying that no one knows certain things about an issue. The tactic has a grand Latin name: the argumentum ad ignorantiam.

For example, physicists, astronomers and cosmologists regularly announce firmly that no one knows (and no one can know) anything about the state of the universe before the Big Bang — the primordial explosion that most scientists think brought the universe into existence. But when facts are based on a claim about ignorance — for instance, that the age of the universe is that which can be calculated from the Big Bang onwards (because no one can know anything about the universe before) — strictly speaking, such claims are fallacious.

Don't let the grand rhetorical flourishes that often accompany this tactic blind you to errors in reasoning.

Employing convoluted jargon

The rhetorical strategy here is to use big, complicated words so that you seem to be an expert. Academics and specialists of all kinds invariably think that the more obscure their terms, the more expert they are. This style also looks rather impressive. Indeed, people have written books using the method — even in the area of Critical Thinking where in principle the method should be shunned.

The good news is that this strategy isn't so difficult. Anyone capable of regurgitating a dictionary or thesaurus can learn the technique. And it never hurts to quote some phrases from long-dead foreign languages, too. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘You says what now?’ for an example.

Throwing in a koan

A koan (pronounced Co-ann or perhaps Cohen even) is a paradoxical statement designed to force people to ‘think outside the box’. The original koans were used to train Zen Buddhist monks so that they no longer depended on conventional reasoning to understand the world, but instead understood it through sudden, intuitive enlightenment.

A famous example is to ask someone to imagine the sound of two hands clapping and then to ask them to imagine the sound of one hand clapping. Another example from literature and philosophy is Jean Paul Sartre's description of a waiter. Sartre explains grandly that the waiter is a being who is not what he is and is what he is not, a contradictory claim which is, in its own way, a koan.

This method of asking people to think about things that literally don't make sense is characteristic not only of many academic philosophers, but also of many other people in public life (I'm thinking of those political types again). These people advance a position, qualify it and then finally suggest a contrary position that negates the original assumptions. They then tell the audience their answer is present somewhere in this contradictory mix of assumptions, if only the audience were clever enough to follow them.

Conducting your arguments via questions

‘What for?’ you may say, immediately using the strategy. ‘Why not?’ I would reply, doing likewise, and maybe add ‘Doesn't everyone?’ and ‘How many of the great thinkers can you name who didn't do that?’

The built-in advantage for the questioner is that asking a question is almost always easier than answering it. (But beware the ‘yes/no’ variety, which can leave the questioner looking long-winded.)

Take a complicated and long-running debate like that about evolution, for example. The issues are things like whether or not human beings really are the random product of billions of years of random mutations or whether some kind of supernatural element needs to be imagined (such as God). Someone sceptical of scientific explanations can easily ask: ‘If you think the theory of evolution explains the world, then can you at least give the basic outline to explain how people evolved from hydrogen atoms?’ The questioner barely needs to know the first thing about what he's asking. Great!

What's more, even if the speaker brilliantly deals with that question, the sceptic can simply nod appreciatively and bide his time for another complicated query. The speaker does the work and the questioner gets the credit. (Smart students know this trick, of course.) Or the person can turn the question into a list of things to be explained, just to be on the safe side.

Complex questions (to use the technical term) where a series of things that ought to be kept separate are strung together can be useful too, but the more complicated they get the more they run the risk of annoying the listeners.

In the evolutionary debate example, a complex question might be: ‘How did birds develop wings, and in what ways is it similar, or different to, the mechanism that explains how birds evolved from dinosaurs?’ The fact that the issues joined together in the question may be logically quite different isn't the questioner's problem: he or she can smile sweetly and leave the expert to sort out the mess.

Above all, never underestimate the power of the ‘loaded’ question, such as the celebrated ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ By implying that the questioner is simply unable to imagine a universe in which the other person isn't beating his wife, the question has a more profound influence than the answer. Politicians who struggle to be logical or reasonable, often excel at this kind of question, offering them as sound bites to the media: ‘Is the government going to stand up for our fishing industry — or carry on kow-towing to European Union bureaucrats?’

Watch out though: the arguing-through-questions technique is a bit of a boomerang, just as likely to generate confusion as to shed light. After all, people can all too easily confuse themselves even without people firing questions at them.

If you're making a presentation or giving a talk and some annoying person in the audience comes up with a killer fact that seems to put you in the wrong, don't be too keen to find some obscure counterexample or suchlike to save face. Think instead about revising your position. At least any Critical Thinkers in the audience will respect your openness.

Getting personal: Ad hominem

Ad hominem argument tactics are criticisms directed at the person making the argument, rather than at the argument itself. The method was very popular in the ancient world, where it was considered perfectly reasonable, indeed quite scholarly. It was particularly favoured for philosophical debates! But today ad hominem attacks are usually seen as the resort of scoundrels and count as fallacies.

In fact, nasty though such tactics sound, they're sometimes sensible and useful. Lawyers can legitimately use them to undermine evidence. For example, the evidence of an expert medical witness may be undermined if the lawyer can show, say, that the expert has previously made many misdiagnoses in his career. Alternatively, a scientist who claims to have made a dramatic new discovery may usefully be challenged over her record if she made similar grand claims in the past and was found to have been mistaken.

Another little piece of Latin jargon exists that means roughly the same thing: tu quoque. The form of the argument, familiar from everyday disagreements, is as follows:

• You tell me not to leave my dirty cups around the house!
• You leave dirty cups around all the time!
• (Therefore, your view is dismissed.)

The argument carries legal weight too. At the Nuremberg Trials, held at the end of the Second World War, German officers accused of violating the laws of war by using American uniforms to infiltrate Allied lines successfully used the tu quoque argument to defend themselves. They introduced evidence that the Allies themselves had on at least one occasion worn German uniforms.

In 2012, Prince Harry was embarrassed after he was photographed at a ‘private party’ wearing a German uniform Alas, despite having had one of the most expensive private educations money can buy, he didn't seem to know to use the tu quoque argument — and respond ‘but the best British heroes have worn Nazi uniforms too!’ — to defend himself.