Go Ahead, Put Your Door in My Face

Techniques & Tactics. 

I am sure that all teenagers go through this phase were which you want to do everything (probably I’m still in this phase so this is me, not judging so much), and go to every party, and do everything that is “de moda” and you’ll never stop until your parents say “YES!”

Recently in psychology I learned a very sneaky tactic that’s called The Door in the Face Technique, lets say I want to get a piercing (I actually don’t, but this is actually a very good example. Just wait.) I go to my mom and say “Mom I really need to ask you something.” Ill tell her that I really want to get a tattoo. That it’s something I’ve really wanted for a while but that I’ve been afraid to ask. Obviously she will say no. And of course I won’t be disappointed, because this is the answer I was looking for. I look sad and disappointed, and then I go ahead and say, “what about a piercing in the ear?” It is more likely for her to say yes to this permission than she did for the tattoo one. It’s like magic really.

Persuasion is really an art if you can master it as well as Heinrichs does.

There is also the exact opposite, the foot in the door technique, you ask for a small favor first and then when you know they are willing to do it for you, you go ahead and ask a bigger one. Works too. Like a charm. But I prefer The Door in the Face Technique.

All of this is just so elementary!! As I continued reading what Heinrichs had to say about persuasion my sneaky techniques seemed not so sneaky after all. You will never know but there are smarter and better ways to get people to do what you want them to do.

In chapter four we go back to what we have been learning about in class, ethos, pathos and logos. Heinrichs takes it to a whole other level in this chapter with new and very ingenious ways of putting these Aristotle methods into action. What he teaches us to do in this chapter… “To persuade people-to make them desire your choice and commit to the action you want”(42) You don’t just want to convince someone, you have to make them feel happy about their choice. Just as Heinrichs every time he left his boss’s office, he “would leave his office in a good mood after losing every point”(43).

There is also a new type of persuasion that I had never heard before, the type were you are so nice, or lets put it in another way…So agreeable that you make the person feel better. “She agreed with me so much that I found myself siding with my lousy employers”(44). I didn’t even know that could happen, but I guess now I have another tool to persuade people.

In this chapter Heinrichs gives us “megatools”(45) of rhetoric and he explains in which situations we should and shouldn’t use each. 

Persuaded by "Persuasion-Resistant Humans"

Have you ever stood up in front of a group of people and started talking about a certain topic? As soon as you open your mouth everyone, or well mostly everyone turns and looks at you. One of the hardest things to do is to maintain an audience focused throughout your whole presentation, or speech, or whatever it is you are talking about.

In the first chapter of Thank You For Arguing, Heinrichs assures us that he will teach us to use “logic as a convincing tool…”(5). Because he tells us that “Logic alone will rarely get people to do anything”(9). We are trying to get people to do what we want, this is not easy, and it takes practice, but with the right techniques one can be successful.

Heinrichs talks about the rhetorical tricks that even the most “important” people in our society have used or are still using. Julius Caesar, Cicero, and even Shakespeare.

I want to learn how to manipulate the audience that is why I want to continue reading Heinrichs ideas. 

After reading the first 2 chapters I can say that I now have a little more idea about how to make the “audience eager to listen”(6). Not only that, I have a better idea of how speakers manipulate the audience to get what they want out of you. You can either argue or fight, but in reality it is the proper arguments that will get you to win.

There are many examples of persuading the audience, or manipulating them, even Heinrichs manipulates his own son and he lets his son feel “triumphant” (3) in order to get what he really wants.

In a presentation about famous speeches last year in France, a woman told us that Hitler used to put cocaine drops in his eyes, he used them to be able to see better and so he wouldn’t have to use glasses. This permitted him to look more powerful, or less weak in front of his audience and showed he had no kind of impairments.

Going back to Heinrichs, he wrote that apparently if we used mirror image in a presentation it would be really effective. Thousands of people joined the Peace Corps because of something John F. Kennedy said (mirror image) “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”(10).

“The happy ones argued” (16). we need to argue, not fight in order to be happy.  You don’t have to be a “bully” (16) and try to bring a person down in order to win, you prosper when you argument well.  Like I said before, we want people to get to do what we want them to, and the easiest and most powerful way to do it is to argue capably. 

And Voila! Our Memoir Book

Wonders of The Past 

Confusion? No. Confucius...

What really is "The Secret"?

Confucius, a famous Chinese philosopher once said “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

This means that if we are positive and if we don’t give up that easy we will overcome all of our mistakes and become better persons because of our mistakes.

According to Rhonda Byrne, the author of a best-selling book, The Secret; is “based on the law of attraction” and that if you think positively you can change your life and become wealthier, healthier, and happier.

Susanna fails from running away, and she fails in her various attempts on suicide, these mistakes made her fall, and made her weak, but she learns from her past mistakes and she will “rise” (Confucius).

Susanna learned from her falls. The guy that “she had always liked” (26) offered to take her to England and run away from the hospital she answered after the moment of imagining her other life: “I think I’ve got to stay here” (27). Past Susanna would have gone with him, she was a complicated girl and in her previous days her “job of the day” was to “swallow fifty aspirin” (17).

In Susanna Kaysen’s memoir she discovers her momentarily secret of life. It has nothing to do with controlling your thoughts and thinking negatively or positively and making that an influence in your life. Susanna’s secret of life is a ten second daydream about running away. “Was this the secret of life? Running away was the secret of life?” (26).

Susanna is in this mental hospital for a reason. She messed up. But every time you mess up there is room to make it better. You can grow and learn from the mistakes you make.

This is what Confucius meant.

He also meant that failing is not failure. If you fail you haven’t been defeated and you can still continue. “Don’t let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game.”

It’s when you refuse to give up that you have understood that failure is important, and that in life you fail constantly. 

More, More and More Fire

I appealed to emotion.

 

 

I wouldn’t expect that after getting out of a whole memoir about a boy who burned himself that I would have to deal with another suicide attempt where another person, Polly, tried to kill herself by lighting herself on fire.  

In the memoir Girl, Interrupted we once more realize what people think about life and how little they value it. “Life was hellish, she knew that” (18). People make decisions, wrong decisions constantly and they don’t learn from them.

Polly, a friend of Susanna’s from the hospital tried to kill herself. Nobody knew why, but Susanna helps us understand that putting yourself on fire takes “courage” (17).

By using Pathos Susanna appeals to our emotions by explaining that “We’ve all had those”(17) meaning suicide attempts;  like taking twenty aspirin, or slitting your veins, or maybe even putting a gun in your mouth. You are often defeated by the moment when you get the gun and put it in your mouth, since most of the times you have to “put it back in the drawer” (17). She herself has put the gun “back in the drawer” many times.  She has tried to commit suicide but she hasn’t been successful. She hasn’t learned from these past decisions’ and she continues to make the same mistake of trying to commit suicide.

We feel somewhat powerless, we can’t help her, and she had no help in her process of making decisions when she wanted to commit suicide.  She relates to Polly, but at the same time she admires her for her strength in being able to get over and defeat the moment.

This is why she doesn’t understand how she wasn’t defeated by the single second moment when “she lit the match” (17) and then lit her body. “A whole world lies between this moment” (16) this moment that you have closely planned, and thought over and over endless sleepless nights.

Once again, we go back to the whole locked up situation that all the patients in this hospital are leading with. There is the emotional lock down, where you know you are never getting out, or that you don’t know when that moment is going to be, and this is what happens with Susanna she feels as if she has no escape. And then there is another type of lock down, the one that you are never getting out of, where there is no hope. This is Polly’s. She is “forever locked up in that body” (19).  A body all burned full of scars. Susanna gives us hope, in saying that she might get out of there “sometime” (19).

Every day we deal with people that dont value life, we forget that there is always hope. For everything.

A War (That/Which) Might Never End

"...nonstandard, but rule-bound, dialect (Greene)".

War, as defined by Wikipedia is an organized, armed, and, often, a prolonged conflict that is carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality

The topic of grammar use is very recurrent in our society, and even if we don’t normally relate grammar to politics, we are in the 21st century, and today everything is possible. What an interesting debate that Garner and Greene present about this topic.

As I read them they got pretty intense. I could relate to Colombia's never-ending fight of Conservative and Liberal political parties. It has been 80 years in which Colombia has been fighting because of this issue. And today, “prescriptivists” and “descriptivist’s” continue fighting over the Language Wars. “The fighting must stop.” (Garner)

Garner as a prescriptivist focuses on how language is used and Greene as a descriptivist tries to describe language as it is used.

As soon as I learned that Greene “glories” slangs and different dialects, I picked a side. The descriptivist one. I am totally into descriptivists, I think in some ways they can be more lenient. And rules for prescriptivists are harder to follow. Not that I don't like hard, I like challenge, who doesn't? But I prefer to write with more freedom. Slang is a part of culture, and it is a sense of identity we all should have a right to. Prescriptivists are the ones that “impose bogus nonrules on too many school children” (Greene). In school we are taught over and over the many diferrent rules about grammar. Much of which are essential for us, but a lot of them aren’t. And they shouldn’t be imposed.

“However, even White doesn’t agree with White.” States Greene as he states that even the people who make the rules make mistakes. He makes a mistake in his own essay “Death of a Pig” in which he mistakes “which” and “that”. Greene later says that there is no reason to comfort him, since he still remains a “fine American writer” from his point of view.  Later, what convinced me the most is the part were he indicates that we are “free” to choose if we want which, or that. Ahhh, freedom. Another recurrent topic that comes from way back and is fought over during the colonization. Anyway, lets continue.

They really get into it when Garner replies and says that there shouldn’t be “labels” between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist”

He makes his points when he says that today, it is accepted that native speakers can’t make mistakes and he supports this with various examples.

Even if I am more descriptivist I hope that some tradition is conserved in language, since language is everything and we never stop and question where it comes from or even what makes it the way that it is.