Win Every Argument by Mehdi Hasan

How strongly I recommend this book: 7 / 10

Date read: November 30, 2023

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Summary / Top Takeaways

Ultimately, Mehdi follows Aristotle’s idea of persuasion – ethos, logos, and especially pathos - but he states that pathos (emotion) often beats logos (logic). Approaching people’s hearts is sometimes more important than logic and facts. We tend to rely on logos in our presentations but when we’re trying to change people’s minds that’s not enough.

Mehdi mentions the importance of ending your speech / argument on a very high note. People tend to remember the beginning and ending of speeches. It’s worth it to spend extra time preparing those sections. He provides great examples of how good orators have used the power of repetition to end their speeches to great effect.

There are a ton of tactics that Mehdi uses to prepare for the big occassion and my notes below will cover those.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Introduction: The Art of the Argument

To quote Winston Churchill, “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king.”

Part One: The Fundamentals

Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it “to whom it may concern.” —Ken Haemer, design expert
First, find out who is going to be in the audience. These are the kind of questions I ask the organizers of every event that I’m invited to speak at: How big is the audience? What kind of people constitute the audience? What’s the rough demographic? Are they young or old? Students or professionals? Political or apolitical? Male or female? White, Black, or Brown? It all matters, because once you have a detailed breakdown of the members of your prospective audience, you can focus your language and tailor your arguments toward them.
To be clear: I don’t want you to change your entire argument, or just tell people what they want to hear. What I’m saying is that you should present your argument in such a way that people feel comfortable getting on board with that argument, because you’ve specifically tailored it to their interests or identities.
Cite facts, figures, and quotes that not only bolster your own argument but also appeal to the specific audience in front of you.
You must grab your audience in the very first minute, ideally in the very first ten or twenty seconds. How?
1. Start with a strong opening line: Something unexpected, provocative, contrary even. To quote the legendary Dale Carnegie, “Begin with something interesting in your first sentence. Not the second. Not the third. The First! F-I-R-S-T! First!”
2. Start with a question: Ideally, a “provocative” question, say those comms experts. “Starting with a question creates a knowledge gap: a gap between what the listeners know and what they don’t know,” adds Akash Karia in his book How to Deliver a Great TED Talk. “This gap creates curiosity because people are hardwired with a desire to fill knowledge gaps.”
3. Start with a story: Ideally, a personal anecdote. You get bonus points if it’s funny, able to get people laughing and relaxed—and paying attention—from the get-go. Storytelling helps with instant engagement because everyone loves a great yarn. Plus, our brains are built to fall in love with a good story—one that taps into imagination and empathy from the very beginning.
Getting people’s attention is one thing. Keeping people’s attention is another. How do we do that? CONNECT WITH THEM. Remember, the goal is to get your audience on your side, especially in a debate. The point is to change not your opponent’s mind but the minds of those watching and listening in the audience.
1. Make eye contact: You have to try and look people in the eye when you speak to them. And also try and make eye contact with people across the whole room. Don’t leave some parts of the audience feeling left out.
2. Heap praise: What do you tend to do when you want to charm a person or win them over? You heap praise on them. You’re nice toward them. You make them feel special. The same applies to an audience. Praise can be one of the simplest and most powerful tools to engage an audience—or any group of people!
3. Get personal: There is simply no better way to influence or stir an audience—instantly, powerfully, authentically—than by opening up to them with a personal story or anecdote. To be clear: I’m not saying you need to tell them long stories about your family vacations or show them baby pictures from the stage. I’m saying that you can share a key biographical detail, or an emotion that you’re feeling in the moment, or a self-deprecating joke. It is a tried-and-tested way of bonding with an audience of strangers—and of laying the groundwork for you to then persuade them.
When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion. —Dale Carnegie
To move people to your side, you need to make them care. You’ll need your facts, your figures, your argument to be rock solid. But you’ll also need an approach that goes back millennia: you have to appeal to people’s hearts, not just their heads.
Aristotle was ahead of the curve on much of this. In his landmark treatise Rhetoric, published more than two millennia ago, the ancient Greek philosopher developed what he believed were the three main ways that a speaker can engage an audience. He called these his three proofs or “modes” of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos.
- An appeal to ethos relies on the “character” and “credibility” of the speaker.
- An appeal to pathos relies on our human emotions and feelings: fear, anger, joy, and the rest. The words empathy and sympathy, notes Beqiri, derive from pathos. Aristotle says that in pathos-based arguments, “persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions.”
- An appeal to logos is founded on logic and reason, on facts and figures. In fact, the word logic itself comes from logos, the Greek word meaning “reason.” According to Aristotle, when it comes to logos, “persuasion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.”
In our speeches, our presentations, and our debates and arguments, we tend to rely on logos above all else. We extol the use of reason and logic, statistics and data—and for good reason. We want our arguments to be based in bedrock truth. But when we’re trying to change people’s minds, that’s not enough. It’s not how our minds work. In fact, this is where I differ from the great Aristotle. He tended to give equal treatment to all three of his modes of persuasion. But the reality is that pathos beats logos almost every time.
Pathos not only beats logos when it comes to influencing your audience, but pathos is also perhaps the best way to deliver logos to your audience. It is the perfect vehicle for it. Study after study shows that if you can tap into your audience’s emotions, you are more likely to win over their minds.
I have three lessons to share on how you can master pathos.
1. Tell a story: “Those who tell stories rule society” is a quote attributed to Plato, Aristotle’s teacher.
The human brain did not evolve to absorb only cold hard facts. It’s hardwired for storytelling.
Our brains become “aligned” with one another’s when we hear the same story. He calls it “brain-to-brain coupling.” Hasson, notes Carmine Gallo in his book Talk like TED, used a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, scanner in his lab to record brain scans of multiple people as they either told stories or listened to them. As Joshua Gowin, an expert on the brain, later elaborated while reviewing the results of Hasson’s research:
When the woman spoke English, the volunteers understood her story, and their brains synchronized. When she had activity in her insula, an emotional brain region, the listeners did, too. When her frontal cortex lit up, so did theirs. By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains.
In a 2007 study, Wharton professor of marketing and psychology Deborah Small and her two coauthors found that people ended up giving more money to charity upon hearing and seeing a story about a single “identifiable victim,” as opposed to one that described numerous “statistical victims” in the same plight. A story about a single child, with a name and a face, in need of help, has a much bigger and more direct impact on our level of empathy than a story about millions of nameless and faceless people in need. That’s pathos over logos in a nutshell.
No matter how serious, no matter how technical the subject you are discussing might be, you will need to rely on good anecdotes and gripping narratives to get your point across. If you’re stuck for a story, think about how the topic you are discussing—be it politics, law, religion, physics, whatever—impacts the lives of real people. Individuals with names and ages; friends and families; hopes and dreams. Talk about them. Tell their stories. And if you’re still stuck in finding a story to tell, consider sharing an event or experience from your own life. Don’t be afraid to get personal.
Researchers led by Kurt Gray, a psychologist and director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding at the University of North Carolina, conducted fifteen different experiments that found that our opponents in a debate “respect moral beliefs more when they are supported by personal experiences, not facts.” Gray and his coauthors call this “the respect-inducing power of personal experiences.”
To engage with people emotionally, you have to use language that engages with their emotions. You want to find ways to grab your audience’s attention: to rouse them, inspire them, and ultimately persuade them. You’re trying to change how they feel, using just your words. And every word you choose matters.
Show, don’t just tell: The orator, wrote a young Winston Churchill in his 1897 essay “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric,” “is the embodiment of the passions of the multitude. Before he can inspire them with any emotion he must be swayed by it himself. When he would rouse their indignation his heart is filled with anger. Before he can move their tears his own must flow. To convince them he must himself believe.”
Where’s the best moment? My own view is: do it wherever you think an emotional appeal feels genuine. But I also agree with Aristotle, who argued that the introduction and the conclusion of a speech are the two most important and memorable junctures to make that emotional appeal to your audience. Start with emotion and end with emotion.
Westen notes that Republicans often win because “they have a near-monopoly in the marketplace of emotions,” while Democrats continue to naively “place their stock in the marketplace of ideas.” This drives Democrats up a wall, as they cite policy propositions and figures only to lose out on inspiration. But the simple truth is that conservatives across the West know how to rile up and energize their base.
Feelings are what help you get your facts across to your audience. They’re what help listeners retain those facts. And you can ensure that you reach your audience emotionally—by telling stories, using the right language, and knowing when to show emotion yourself. But if it comes down to facts versus feelings, beware: feelings often win.
If you want to convince an audience, if you want to pin down your opponent, if you want to prove that you’re right and they’re wrong, you have to be prepared. You have to show your evidence. Your proof. Your receipts.
Confidence, charisma, eloquence, storytelling … they only go so far. Pathos often can trump logos, as we’ve seen, but emotions are quixotic. You need to have a solid factual base for what you’re arguing—or you’re going to get trounced by someone who can connect emotions and evidence. To win the argument, you’ll need both: feelings and facts.
Your first task is to get hold of them; to find facts, figures, and quotes that you can use to bolster your own argument while undermining your opponent’s.
Be on the lookout for moments in an argument where you can undermine your opponent’s claims by citing as your receipt something they themselves said earlier. Listen for contradictions in their argument, and highlight any inconsistencies on their part. Doing so in real time can put them on the defensive.
Time the receipts: Once you have collected your receipts, the big question is: What do you do with them? You can’t just throw them at your opponent willy-nilly. That doesn’t tend to work. Ideally, you want to find an opening to show those receipts, where you can catch your opponent on the back foot.
Delayed gratification is often the key to deploying receipts. You might want to show all your evidence early on, but it’s almost always better to wait for the right time, for that moment where it will have the biggest impact and undercut your opponent’s argument.
If an opponent is not a good or honest person, if they’ve been unreliable or fallacious in the past, that should affect how an audience considers their present argument. So, say that!
To conclude: the ad hominem argument is a high-risk/high-reward argument. Get it wrong and your attack could backfire on you. Get it right and your opponent will be on the ropes—maybe even on the mat. The power of the ad hominem attack—and one of the main reasons why it annoys and angers so many people!—is that it is difficult to come back from.
It’s critical listening that enables you to keep track of the various claims and contentions that your opponent is making, and then highlight any glaring (or not-so-glaring!) mistakes or fabrications in their presentation. I cannot tell you how many times I have caught a lie or half-truth in a live debate, that no one else on the stage or panel clocked, because no one else was paying as close attention to what was being said as I was.
Konnikova quotes Sherlock Holmes from A Study in Scarlet, the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories about the detective:
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
It takes attention, effort, and hard work to hone your critical listening skills. But the more practiced you are, the more formidable you become as a speaker and debater.
There’s a second essential listening style that any good debater needs to master. Critical listening is what you should be doing when your opponent is speaking. But empathetic listening is what you should be doing when an audience member is speaking.
Mandela showed empathy as a listener not merely out of the goodness of his heart but also because he understood how effective it was as a tool of persuasion. “It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea,” he pointed out.
Laughter, as the old saying goes, is the best medicine. But it’s also one of the best ways to win an argument, one of the crucial ingredients of a good speech, and one of the few rhetorical strategies that an audience will always appreciate.
Laughter helps with engagement because, when we laugh, “the reward center of our brains is flooded with the neurotransmitter dopamine,” which “engenders deeper focus and better long-term retention.” According to Bagdonas, “using humor not only can make our content more engaging in the moment, but it also makes it more memorable after the fact.” Laughter provides your audience with “social glue,” too. Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that shared laughter brings people together—in ways that can help you as the person making them laugh. “For people who are laughing together,” says social psychologist and study coauthor Sara Algoe, “shared laughter signals that they see the world in the same way, and it momentarily boosts their sense of connection. Perceived similarity ends up being an important part of the story of relationships.”
Gorgias of Leontini, the famous Greek philosopher and educator of the fourth century BCE. “The orator should defeat his opponents’ seriousness with laughter,” he advised, “and their laughter with seriousness.”
Translator of Cicero’s treatise on comedy, the Roman statesman used jokes as “weapons of war” and as a source of rhetorical power over others. “His enemies said, ‘This guy’s a total buffoon. He’s a clown. He’s telling jokes, he breaks protocol,’” according to Fontaine. “And yet he keeps winning and winning and winning.”
A laughing audience—whether it’s a few people or a few hundred people—is also a relaxed audience. It’s an audience that’s not just paying attention but much more willing to hear you out and also take your side. Think about it: if they’re laughing and enjoying what you’re saying, they can’t also be annoyed by you and disagreeing with what you’re saying. Remember: the audience wants to see you have a sense of humor, a lighter side, a human side, because that’s how they connect with you. Humor, writes Zimmer, “bonds” you with your audience.
THE DOS OF DEBATE HUMOR
1. Do be self-deprecating: Make fun of yourself. It always goes down well. You won’t come across as some grand, or distant, or boring figure; instead you’ll come across as relatable.
The best humor is the humor that comes naturally, spontaneously, off the cuff. Don’t try and force it or squeeze a preplanned joke into a place where it only half fits. Allow your wit to be a reflection of your own personality.
Visual cues matter a great deal when it comes to public speaking in general, and to humorous public speaking in particular. So use this as license to act out your humor, your gag, your funny anecdote. Don’t be afraid to use your facial expressions, your hand gestures, or your body language to convey your humor to the crowd. Sometimes a raised eyebrow or a rolled eye can get your audience giggling.

Part Two: Tricks of the Trade

There’s an old Latin phrase: Omne trium perfectum. Everything that comes in threes is perfect. Since the era of Aristotle, good public speakers—and especially good debaters—have sworn by this principle, the Rule of Three. It says that ideas or arguments put forward in three words or three parts, in a trio of some shape or form, in the words of speech coach Dave Linehan, are “more interesting, more enjoyable, and more memorable for your audience.”
Patterns also play a role here, because patterns are often how we process information. Again, the science is clear: people gravitate toward groups of three because our brains are always looking for patterns. And three, say the experts, happens to be the smallest number that allows us to see a pattern.
The Rule of Three is much more than a rhetorical device. It is also an organizing principle for our thoughts—and our arguments. According to Cowan, the cognitive psychologist, three gives you a “stable structure”; it gives you “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” As ever, the ancients were far ahead of the science. It was Aristotle, in his Poetics, who said “a whole [story] is what has a beginning and middle and end.”
You want your audience to feel like your presentation is whole and complete, so apply the Rule of Three when you’re structuring your remarks. If, as researchers such as Cowan suggest, your audience is only going to remember three things you tell them, what do you want them to be? Make sure that you know, so that they leave with the message you intend.

Part Three: Behind the Scenes

What do most people look for in a successful speaker or communicator? It’s the same thing they look for in a successful leader, says author Carmine Gallo: confidence. And when it comes to winning an argument, I simply cannot overstate how important it is to both be confident and show confidence. Confidence is neither an ability nor an attribute. It is, as the experts say, “a belief in oneself”—the certitude that you have what it takes to succeed out in the big, bad world. And it is an attitude, crucially, that inspires both action and presence.
Visualize success: The next time you are asked to give a speech or presentation—whether it’s to friends and family, or to a boardroom full of colleagues—I want you to try something out beforehand. “Find a quiet place,” says the Presentation Training Institute, a few hours or even days in advance, then “close your eyes and visualize yourself giving your speech.” Imagine yourself standing there in front of your audience, speaking loudly and confidently. “See yourself” delivering every line to perfection, covering every relevant argument crisply and coherently. “Be as detailed as possible”: pay attention to the size of the room, the type of flooring, the number of seats. Bring the scene to life: visualize your friends or colleagues laughing at your jokes, imagine the smiles on their faces. Even try to hear the “sounds of their applause” at the end.
In fact, some of the most successful athletes on the planet say they confidently prepare for victory by using visualization techniques. Take Michael Phelps, perhaps the greatest swimmer of all time. “There are times in my sleep when I literally dream my race from start to finish,” wrote the twenty-three-time Olympic gold medal winner in his 2004 memoir, Beneath the Surface. “Other nights, when I’m about to fall asleep, I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race.”
How it is that McGregor always comes across as calm and assured when he walks out for a fight, no matter how big the crowd in the arena.
He knew exactly what was going to happen [in a fight] long before it happened because he had done it a thousand times in his head. He had warmed up backstage. He had heard the crowd. He had smelled the arena. He had seen the audience. He really immersed himself in the Fight Night. So by the time Fight Night came along, for a lot of people, they had maybe been training in kind of a quiet gym, for eight or twelve weeks, and then they would walk out to fifteen thousand people and get shocked. He used to walk out and go: “Yeah, this is my thousandth time doing this.”
We can’t gain confidence about what we can do until we actually try to do it—and that means “taking risks,” say the experts. To work on your confidence, therefore, you have to consider your own willingness to take more risks in your everyday life. Because our self-confidence increases not just through success and achievement but through our experience of “risk and failure” as well. “Confidence comes with familiarity,” writes the acclaimed executive coach Megan Bruneau. “Familiarity comes with experience.” And experience comes from trying new things!
Volunteer to speak in front of crowds. “Seize every opportunity” to speak in front of friends or family, says speech coach Simon Trevarthen. Get used to having all eyes on you as you speak aloud to a group of people. Start small (family dinner? team meeting?) and then slowly add to the number of people in front of you (best man speech? commencement address?).
The challenge is to surround yourself with the kind of people who end up boosting your confidence, rather than those who chip away at it. There’s a saying often (mis)attributed to Albert Einstein: “Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.”
When you’re trying to change someone’s feelings or attitudes, your words account for just 7 percent of your overall message. Seven percent. That’s it. In contrast, your tone of voice accounts for 38 percent of it, and your body language accounts for a colossal 55 percent. This is the famous 7-38-55 rule, or concept, which Albert Mehrabian, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, came up with in 1971 in his book Silent Messages.
Don’t be afraid to pause. Volume is important, but moments of silence accentuate the power of what you’re saying. They can be a powerful tool to build drama and to convey self- confidence.
Confident and relatable speakers make eye contact not only when they’re speaking but when they’re listening, too. I always try and lean forward and look an interviewee in the eye when I am listening to them talk, as it shows I am focused. That said, don’t stare; you’ll make others feel uncomfortable if you look at them for too long. Here, the 50/70 rule is your friend: when you’re speaking to people, “maintain eye contact” for at least 50 percent of the time; when you’re listening to people, do it for up to 70 percent of the time. Experts say it’s the right mix of “interest and confidence.”
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath. —Michael Caine
If you lose your cool during an argument, odds are you’ll lose that argument.
“When the breath wanders the mind is unsteady, but when the breath is calmed, the mind too will be still.” Those words of wisdom come from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a fifteenth-century yogic text authored by Swami Svātmārāma.
In The Karate Kid II, when our hero Daniel is stressed, what does his mentor and sensei Mr. Miyagi say to him? “When you feel life out of focus, always return to basic of life … Breathing. No breathe, no life.”
Plutarch writes that the young Demosthenes built a “subterranean study” into which he would “descend every day without exception in order to form his action and cultivate his voice, and he would often remain there even for two or three months.” He went so far as to shave one half of his head to ensure he would be too ashamed and embarrassed to leave his underground cavern and go “abroad.” And when it came to his speech impediment, what Plutarch called “an inarticulate and stammering pronunciation,” do you have any idea how Demosthenes overcame it? By putting pebbles in his mouth while practicing his speeches. Yeah, literal stones! His shortness of breath was easy pickings after that. According to Plutarch, the orator improved his stamina by running uphill while “reciting speeches or verses at a single breath.”
John quotes Demosthenes in his now-legendary Third Philippic:
You are in your present plight because you do not do any part of your duty, small or great; for of course, if you were doing all that you should do, and were still in this evil case, you could not even hope for any improvement. As it is, Philip has conquered your indolence and your indifference; but he has not conquered Athens. You have not been vanquished, you have never even stirred.
Let’s start with Churchill. As a child he had a stutter and a stammer, he often spoke with a lisp, and he was shy. Even by the time he had entered politics in his twenties, he still had issues with his speech. As one early observer noted: “Mr. Churchill and oratory are not neighbors yet. Nor do I think it likely they ever will be.”
Churchill himself resolved never again to behave like those orators who “before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.”
Churchill wrote out his speeches in full; he would even write out every planned pause. But he did not read them out. In fact, as another of his biographers, William Manchester, has pointed out, Churchill put so much time into rehearsing his speeches that when he did deliver them, he took only the odd glance at his notes—and his audiences were none the wiser. And what of his stutter and lisp? While walking around outdoors, Churchill would try to tackle his issue with words that started with s by repeating aloud ridiculous sentences such as “The Spanish ships I cannot see since they are not in sight.” Later, he would proudly declaim: “My impediment is no hindrance.”
“It’s well known that King delivered most of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech without any notes and that he improvised much of it on the spot,” notes author and executive coach Scott Eblin. “What’s not as well known is that he had been working with much of the content of that speech in other addresses he gave months and years before the March on Washington. He took the time and opportunity to get very comfortable with his content and experiment with what worked and what didn’t work in venues that weren’t as prominent as the National Mall.” He put the hours in! Yet, even so, the night before he delivered his most famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to over 250,000 people, King was reportedly awake till 4:00 a.m., writing and rewriting it.
“If your voice, gestures, and body language are incongruent with your words, your listeners will distrust your message,” writes communications coach Carmine Gallo in his book Talk Like TED. “It’s the equivalent of having a Ferrari (a magnificent story) without knowing how to drive (delivery).”
Film yourself speaking aloud. Then you can see and hear what others see and hear when you speak to them. Try watching the videos without volume, CEO Jen Glantz has suggested, so you can concentrate solely on your facial expressions and body language and see if they’re helping or hindering your delivery. “Simply seeing yourself in action makes you more conscious of how you come across,” writes Gallo in Talk Like TED, “making you better equipped to eliminate useless movements and gestures.”
I can guarantee that once you become comfortable watching and hearing yourself speak on video, you will find yourself much more comfortable with others watching and hearing you speak, too.
Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have observed, “We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.”
There are four basic aspects to vocal delivery, says speech coach Helen von Dadelszen, known as the 4 Ps: pitch, power, pace, and pause. Pitch is your tone of voice. Power is how “loudly or quietly” you speak. Pace is how fast or slow you speak. Pauses are the breaks you leave between sentences or declamations.
There is nothing, nothing, more off-putting in a public speaker than a flat or dull tone. This is where pitch and pause come into play. What words are you emphasizing and in what way? What tone are you using, and are you varying it from sentence to sentence? Are you pausing at the right spots, for dramatic or even comic effect? A strategic pause can give you a chance to take a breath—and your audience a chance to “digest,” as the old saying goes, what you’ve just told them.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll need to practice much more on consciously slowing yourself down, rather than on speeding up. This is common in first-time speakers, and is often hard to notice. You’re full of adrenaline and eager to get your points across—so all of a sudden you sound like a sped-up podcast.
By recording yourself speaking you’ll be able to hear how others hear you—and that’s key.
As a father of two kids, I’ve always found that reading aloud from a children’s storybook, and literally performing the different characters’ dialogues, can be a superhelpful and natural way of working on your 4 Ps—and pitch, in particular. Professional communications coach Helen von Dadelszen agrees: “Reading a child’s story, out loud, provides you with a fabulous opportunity to explore the range of your voice and bring more variety into it … It provides an opportunity for you to play!” Even if you don’t have kids, pick out a book you like and try vocalizing the dialogue—changing up your tone of voice, using different emotions for the different characters.
Advice for honing your delivery: time yourself speaking. Do it again and again until you can deliver your argument, in your sleep, to time.
Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. “By failing to prepare,” Franklin is said to have remarked, “you are preparing to fail.”
If you want to win an argument, nothing is more important than digging in and doing your homework.
“The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less,” Leonardo da Vinci

Part Four: In Conclusion

Every good speech deserves a grand finale. Once you’ve done your research and structured your argument; once you’ve added one part logic, one part emotion, one part humor, and a healthy sprinkling of judo moves; once you’ve practiced it all until it’s perfect—you still need to have a rousing finish. You need your audience to remember all the work you put in, and to leave energized.
For Aristotle, an ideal peroration is “composed of four things”:
- It seeks to draw the audience in, “getting the hearer favorable to oneself, and ill-disposed toward the adversary.”
- It drives home the stakes of the argument, by what he calls “amplification and extenuation.”
- It makes one final appeal to pathos, “placing the hearer under the influence of the passions.”
- It summarizes the key points of your argument, thereby “awakening [the hearer’s] recollection.”
One tried-and-true structure is to shape your entire speech with a clear plan in mind, with the end coming back to reference the beginning. That’s what’s called “topping and tailing,” or starting and finishing with the same theme, the same idea, often the same language. The second time around, however, the listener can hear it with newfound understanding.
Why is repetition so important to the conclusion, in particular? Because this is the “make-or-break” portion of your speech, the section that will decide whether your audience walks away informed, inspired, and persuaded. It is the part of your address that the crowd is most likely to remember.
The difference between a good speech and a great speech is the energy with which the audience comes to their feet at the end. Is it polite? Is it a chore? Are they standing up because their boss is standing up? No, we want it to come from their socks.
Using a quote to conclude your remarks helps provide a change of pace as you approach your climax. It slows down the end of your address as you bring things to a close. And it allows you, says speech coach Andrew Dlugan, to introduce a “second voice,” a fresh voice, to bolster what you have been saying all along. That adds to your authority, and ends your speech on a line to remember.
What’s the most powerful way to appeal to your audience’s emotions? Telling stories. Stories are how we connect with people, how we tap into the empathy of our listeners, and how we most effectively persuade others to follow along. Ending your speech with a story or a personal anecdote is a clever way of keeping the crowd hooked and attentive right until you’ve delivered your very last word.
You’ll notice that I’m not just using quotes and rhetorical questions to round out my speech but also the rhetorical device known as anaphora: I’m repeating the same word or phrase, again and again, at the start of each sentence, to give impact and emphasis. It’s especially useful to deploy at the end of a speech or presentation—allowing you to combine pathos with the power of repetition.
These three main strategies to create a memorable ending to any speech or argument:
1. Employ powerful quotes that echo the theme of your speech;
2. Share a humanizing anecdote that reminds people why your argument matters; or
3. Deliver a heartfelt call to action that inspires people to do something. Choose the option that fits your speech best, or combine them to create your own grand finale.
Here are my own brief dos and don’ts, based on my own experiences, as well as the work of top speech coaches.
- Do think about how you’ll want to be speaking when you write out your lines. Add an “exclamation point,” suggests motivational speaker Brian Tracy, to your most important closing lines when they warrant it. Those sentences you deliver at the end have to pack a rhetorical punch!
- Don’t bring in a new argument or point right at the end that you have not mentioned before. That can be both distracting and confusing. The ending is for summarizing. New complications are a no-no.
- Do signal to your audience that the speech is coming to a close, that “the end is nigh.” It’ll force those who have tuned out, gotten bored, or pulled out their phones to snap “back to attention.” You can signal this with your own pace and tone—slowing down, taking a pause, raising your voice to a crescendo. Or you can do it with language, using phrases like, “In conclusion…,” or “Let me finish by saying this…,” or another variant that’s authentically you.
- Don’t just come to an abrupt halt. Don’t be like the Philadelphia preacher Dr. James Wilson, who would preach for exactly one hour, “no more, no less”. When he saw sixty minutes had passed on his watch, he would stop midsentence, no matter where he was in his sermon, and say: “Brethren, the hour is up. Let us pray.” Don’t do that! Make sure your very last sentence is planned out and—at the very least—sounds like a fully formed final thought.
- Do try to come up with a “memorable” and ideally pithy phrase of your own at the end. As speech coach Dom Barnard reminds us, the late Steve Jobs of Apple used just four words to end his famous Stanford commencement speech in 2005: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
- Don’t go on too long. If abruptness is bad, tardiness is worse. Set a time to finish, and preplan an ending that allows you to wrap up on time without the need to rush. And if you do go over your time, per one speech coach, do not then end your speech with an apology.
A great argument, like a story, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Churchill, the master orator and debater, called this the “accumulation of the argument.” It’s an experience, for both the audience and the speaker. You start with your plan; they start with pure skepticism. But then you land the initial foray—your most important point—followed by your stacks and stacks of evidence, all of which moves your audience toward, in the words of two commentators on Churchill, “one inescapable conclusion.”