Summer Reading: How to Argue with a Cat

Since it’s initial publication in 2007, I have utilized both individual chapters and the entirety of Jay Heinrich’s popular Thank You for Arguing with both Advanced Placement and Regents students. Despite its effective use with my classes, most summers I'll seek out other texts on the same subject matter, usually by other authors with a slightly different approach. Having read a number of editions of Thank You for Arguing, I was pleased to find Heinrich had also written another book on the topic of persuasion and rhetoric, How to Argue with a Cat: A Human’s Guide to the Art of Persuasion (2018), this time using feline behavior as a starting point for sharing argumentation strategies. 

Heinrich notes in the introduction that despite having already written a best seller about the subject of rhetoric, he still loses most arguments with his own cats, Maturin and Killick. As tricky and hard-headed as humans can be, Heinrich immediately establishes that persuading cats is even more of a challenge.  In an interesting move, Heinrich asserts that this book is perhaps a better vehicle for obtaining initial comfort with concepts in advance of reading the more formal (at least in terms of hard-core terminology) TYfA. After finishing both books, the reason for Heinrich's suggested reading order is clearer: while TYfA provides key (and very specific) concepts and terms in a variety of ways, including a "Tools" section following each chapter, HtAwaC adheres to its original deceit while slowly introducing only certain ideas. If TYfA is an academic introduction (albeit with fun cultural allusions), Human’s Guide to the Art of Persuasion is less formal by virtue of its clever use of cats to frame only the most necessary introductory ideas around argumentation.

In addition to offering interesting examples and anecdotes of familiar rhetorical situations at work, taken together, both Thank You for Arguing and How to Argue with a Cat create an interesting opportunity to consider a single author’s approach to the same material through slightly different lenses. The snarky, humorous tone displayed in TYfA remains in HtAwaC as the increasingly dated cultural analogies have been made slightly more timeless through the use of human/cat interactions. HtAwaC’s  not-so-secret weapon is the contribution of illustrator  Natalie Palmer-Sutton. Heinrich says it best when he describes her artwork as if Palmer-Sutton had "peered right past her cats' pretty faces and into their devious little souls." Each chapter and section of the book is preceded by a piece of "Cat Wisdom" reflecting the theme of the content to follow, as well as an accompanying illustration. As a friends of a devious cat myself, the attitudes and inisght in the images rang true to his own nature.

As a reader, I found  How to Argue with a Cat: A Human’s Guide to the Art of Persuasion (2018) to be both entertaining and informative. As a teacher of students who that may be less inclined to dive right into a topic that can be mistakenly seen as dry, HtAwaC's length and pace make it a more attractive reading option for laying the groundwork for rhetoric, argumentation and persuasion. Certainly, the text establishes an accessible introductory framework on which a teacher can hang any of the many supplemental concepts and ideas dealt with in greater depth in the other (TYfA).

Should we (fingers-crossed!) find ourselves back in classes come September, I plan to share How to Argue with a Cat with students. For anyone curious about a quick and fun introduction to the subject of argumentation, this book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.