Writing (and Speaking!) to Rule the World

Or even better? To change it.

Well, that’s a white-male-dominant way to put it! Which, actually, is our point. The rhetoric that evolved from the ancient Greeks and Romans was invented by white males to help them rule the “known” world. So why should you study it?

1. The tools work.

Lots of modern research in linguistics, behavioral economics, and the neurosciences prove it. We believe that the world benefits if smart young people get ahold of those tools—including a brilliant mix of races, ethnicities, and genders. Rhetoric turbocharges voices.

2. Rhetoric benefits you particularly.

The art offers terrific brain training, forming synapses that give you the traits of a leader. It makes you think consciously of the words you use. It gets you out of your own head and into the heads of audiences. It lets you set goals for every form of communication. And it prevents you from going ballistic at Thanksgiving when your crazy uncle starts bloviating his conspiracy theories or tells you what stocks to invest in.

3. Rhetoric lies behind many of the good things we benefit from today.

Though things don’t seem so great right now, most of us live longer, eat better, and stay free of violence at far greater levels than our forebears did. Many of these benefits come from the inventions of rhetoricians, including democracy and the Enlightenment. (As well as capitalism. Adam Smith, the founding father of capitalism, held a chair in rhetoric at Oxford. Feel free to argue about capitalism.) All of America’s founding leaders—as deeply flawed as they were— studied rhetoric, and they used the principles in writing the Constitution. Knowing that the system they were creating was imperfect, they believed that rhetoric would allow that system to correct itself over time, by airing disagreements and making choices that affect the future. Don’t blame rhetoric for our political problems today. Blame our lack of sophisticated rhetoric. That’s where you come in.

Wait. Why argue?

Some people object to the kind of argument Jay writes about in his books. Why argue at all? Good point. The art began some 3,000 years ago with Sophists teaching tools to win debates (a word that’s a cousin of “battle”). White men duking it out with other white men.

But argument doesn’t mean trying to dominate the other side. As Jay points out in Thank You for Arguing, true deliberative argument means weighing disagreements. We’ll always have disagreements. The question is how we make choices when we disagree. Argument teaches us how.

What does AP Lang have to do with ruling the world?

Honestly? Not as much as we’d like. The course teaches you to think and write in a disciplined manner. But it really doesn’t teach you how to speak well, or to respond when some jerk attacks you verbally. Nor does it teach you to persuade people other than teachers. Jay has spent his career writing persuasively for publication, including more than 300 essays, as well as ghostwriting speeches and newspaper opinion pieces, and he hadn’t even heard of things like “exigence” and “claim.” The fact is, people just don’t persuade in the real world that way.

But education isn’t about training you for the real world. It’s about expanding your brain, helping you think in a disciplined manner. It’s about making your smarter. We believe that AP Lang is one of the most important courses you can take in high school—so long as you take it seriously.

It’s just that you should not stop there. Follow the videos on ArgueLab to see how to argue in day to day life. Join your debate team if you have one. Argue agreeably with your friends. And if you’ve been assigned Thank You for Arguing in your class, just know that Jay didn’t originally write it for AP Lang. He intended to translate rhetoric into a set of useful tools.

So stay curious about rhetoric. Look for colleges that teach it the way the ancients intended. Practice the tools that work in your daily life.

And change this troubled world for the better. We’re counting on you.