“Win Every Argument,” by Mehdi Hasan, and “Say the Right Thing,” by Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, offer different approaches to talking to others. An excerpt:
Hasan’s book is, by necessity, the more straightforward of the two. He has an unambiguous case to make: He will teach you not just how to argue but how to win. Whether you are debating on national television or sniping at the Thanksgiving table, there are distinct parties involved: You, your opponent and your audience. You persuade your audience by demolishing your opponent. By necessity, a good strategy is paranoid; you’re on the lookout for missteps and weak spots so that you can poke a hole in your opponent’s argument and bring it all down. These conflicts are zero-sum. There is no “win-win” here.
Hasan offers an entertaining primer on rhetorical techniques, including what Aristotle called appeals to logos (reason), pathos (emotion) and ethos (authority). Logos is the basic stuff of argument: Present the facts and draw connections between them. But it would be a pretty fantasy to think that the facts can speak for themselves: “The reality is that pathos beats logos almost every time.”
Read more at the New York Times
