Everything's an Argument

“The clothes you wear, the foods you eat, and the groups you join make nuanced, sometimes unspoken assertions about who you are and what you value. So an argument can be any text—written, spoken, aural, or visual—that expresses a point of view.”

This quote embodies the book’s overarching message: Everything is an argument. The parallelism of “the” before “you” emphasizes the reader’s explicit and implicit arguments as well as their effect on others. The authors call attention to the wide variety of ways a person can argue by setting them apart with dashes, establishing the relevance of the book’s content for its audience.

“Our laughter testifies to what some people have thought all along: people who want us to eat tofu are the real problem.”

This quote uses humor to engage readers and build ethos by relating to those who love food, a typical college stereotype. In positioning this passage after a section about using humor to suspend an audience’s judgment of the speaker, the authors model this strategy. They take the risk of alienating the vegans and vegetarians in their audience for humor’s sake, but their choice of collective pronouns establishes a sense of camaraderie.

“We observe people, groups, or institutions making and defending claims all the time and inevitably ask ourselves, Should we pay attention to them? Can we rely on them? Do we dare to trust them? Consider, though, that the same questions will be asked about you and your work, especially in academic settings.”

The arrangement of this quote twists readership into authorship. First empathizing with the familiar phenomenon of critiquing others’ credibility, the authors connect a familiar experience to one less familiar to readers: considering how others do the same to the reader’s arguments.