In the beginning, I thought that AI might be able to help make my writing better. Not the actual prose, of course, but for editing and feedback. At best, it would be like an always available human editor, and at worst, it would be neutral.

And so I tried it, with some guardrails. I forbade Claude from ever writing prose, demanded it only give feedback. For a short time, I was pleased with myself for figuring out a way to get the good of AI without any of the bad. When I asked it for feedback early in my editing process, I’d sometimes find myself in awe of its cogency and sharpness. How uncanny to discuss nuanced ideas with a machine and have the sense that it basically understood what I was talking about. But even when it initially seemed to be leading me towards a better draft, at some point I’d inevitably realize what I actually wanted to say, and this was always a departure from where Claude had been leading me.

The problem, I thought, was that Claude had been too sycophantic, too quick to accept whatever frame I was already working in. It was never able to help me abandon my initial frame and find the right one. But maybe this was fixable. I fiddled again with Claude’s settings, telling it not to flatter me or wrap feedback in compliments and instead simply point out holes in my argument when they were present.

This had a strange effect, not at all the one I was expecting: it made me like Claude less. The Claude who had once flattered me was now curt and pedantic, a smug asshole who loved pointing out my shortcomings. If you had suggested to me before I made this change that my emotional orientation towards Claude had anything to do with how I judged its feedback, I would have said you were crazy. And yet, I couldn’t deny that changing Claude’s personality had stripped the luster from its feedback. It was like when you have a crush on someone and they can do no wrong, but then the crush wears off and you see what a big narcissist they’d been all along and how crazy you were to fall under their spell.

When Claude was less likable, I could see its bag of tricks more plainly: how it relished pointing out to me that my prose had “unresolved tension” (even when it didn’t); how it always framed its feedback as big gotchas that I wouldn’t want to hear, no matter how minor or inconsequential they were; how diligently it followed my instructions to the letter, yet could never grasp the larger intention behind them.

It wasn’t that Claude was never useful. It would sometimes catch real errors or notice breaks in my argumentative flow. But these were usually things I would have caught at some point during the editing process anyway, and they came at a high cost: for every genuine inconsistency or weakness Claude pointed out, it also found multiple red herrings. Sometimes these red herrings were the result of Claude not having enough context—because that context was still inchoate, and the whole reason I was writing the essay. Other times Claude was just being dumb. Whatever the cause, I’d occasionally allow myself to be drawn into a pointless argument that distracted from my work and benefited nobody.

I decided to give Claude one last chance to prove itself. I pulled up a few essays by writers that I love, ones I consider perfect, that set the standard I aspire to. I pasted each one into Claude and asked for feedback. And in every case, Claude gave advice that would have made the essay worse. For example, I gave it this short and wonderful essay by Larry McEnerney about the hidden literary structures that make the Gettsyburg Address so powerful. McEnerney, who taught writing, argues that it’s often a mistake to wait until the end of an essay to make your point. Novice writers tend to do this because they write the same way they think: building step by step towards a logical conclusion. The problem is that “readers generally need to know the point before they read most of the text.” Otherwise, they’ll just stop reading.

But sometimes, good writers can get away with making their grand point at the end of the essay. Why does this work? That’s the question McEnerney’s essay engages with, by way of the Gettysburg Address. Here’s what Claude had to say about it:

The central irony goes unaddressed, and it weakens the argument. The essay’s thesis is that point-last structure leaves readers “in the dust” unless you compensate with other coherence structures. But the essay itself is point-last: you withhold the real thesis—that Lincoln’s deepest move is making the audience’s problem the reader’s problem—until the final third. You’re doing the exact thing you warn against. Now, you’d likely say that’s deliberate: you’re demonstrating that point-last can work when scaffolded, enacting your own lesson. If that’s the intent, the essay should say so. Right now the parallel is left for the reader to notice, and a craft essay about structure that unconsciously mirrors its subject reads as luck; one that names the mirror reads as mastery. This is the single highest-value revision available to you.

This is wrong on so many levels it almost makes me dizzy: McEnerney doesn’t address the essay’s “central irony” because there is none. The essay does not “do the exact thing it warns against,” saving the main point for the end; it comes fairly early. And even if it did, it certainly wouldn’t improve things to add a line, as Claude suggests, saying something like, “In case you didn’t notice, I’m doing something quite clever here.” Not a single point holds up.

So, tell me again why it’s a good idea to ask Claude for feedback?

–My friend Lisa, on what childbirth feels like

Is the pain of childbirth meaningful? Before I’d experienced it, I thought it might be. I couldn’t articulate precisely what I thought it would mean, but it felt like something at least worth trying, like lesbian sex, or psychedelics. Maybe it would transform me in some unknown way. As a runner, I was good at tolerating pain, so that part didn’t really scare me. I wondered if the pain of labor, like the pain of running, might be something I could train for and even take pleasure in. Because I do take pleasure in the pain of running, in that version of myself that can embrace an all-out effort.

So I prepared myself. I hired a doula and dutifully read all the books she recommended. I learned about mindfulness and breathing techniques, I held ice cubes in my palm and practiced reframing the discomfort as pure sensation. I felt ready—excited, even! And then I went into labor and the pain was so great that all that seemed laughable. To think I read books about how to “prepare” for this! I’d have been much more prepared had there been posters hanging in my OB’s office proclaiming “STEEL YOURSELF: BIRTH IS TORTURE.” My birth experience wasn’t particularly bad or traumatic; I was simply blown away by the pain, which made clear how naive I had been to have used the word “pain” to describe anything else I had previously experienced.

The conclusion I drew from all this was that the pain of labor is meaningless. Enduring it didn’t transform me in any way, certainly not in the salubrious way that the pain of running transforms me. I didn’t become a better person or a more fit mother by virtue of having experienced it. And so this was the flag I carried around for a while, the advice I gave to my friends: labor is meaningless suffering inflicted on women by mother nature. Don’t bother “preparing” for it or wasting time thinking about how to manage it. It is simply awful, and then it ends, and this is true regardless of how you prepare or fail to prepare for it.

It felt liberating to let go of the necessity for the pain to mean something. And yet, it wasn’t precisely true, that the pain was meaningless. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I called up its memory again and again, and each time I did, I felt a strange thrill. It was like becoming suddenly aware that I’m not in an ordinary room but a giant cathedral, with ceilings so tall I can’t judge their height. It was a vertiginous feeling that skewed my sense of scale, knowing that the ceiling of pain I could experience without dying was so much higher than I had imagined.

It’s fitting that my mind landed on the image of a cathedral, because the word for what I’m describing is awe. Up to that point, my life had included little awe. I’d known joy, boredom, sadness, and curiosity. But awe is a rare experience for a secular liberal Jew working in tech in San Francisco. And having acquainted myself with awe’s presence during birth, I started catching glimpses of it elsewhere, in much lower stakes situations. I felt it one day when my son, by then a toddler, slithered off his chair at an odd angle and somehow hit his butt against its sharp corner. He wasn’t injured, but it must have really hurt because all of a sudden he made a piercing cry in an entirely different register than his usual cry of complaint or displeasure. It was a cry of real suffering.

I’m not an anxious parent, especially about the many bumps and bruises that are an inevitable part of childhood. But this cry landed on me differently. I imagined him updating his understanding of life as something that also included this—this much pain. And because the pain that provoked this reaction was so trivial, I felt unbearably tender toward him in anticipation of all the future experiences of pain that would macrocosmify this one. How much pain lies in store for him? There is no limit to his capacity for suffering. He, too, resides in the cathedral.

A cathedral is a human structure. But what does it mean to be in a human structure with an infinitely high ceiling? It reminds me of a haiku I’ve always loved:

The barn roof has burnt down

Now I can see the moon

I’ve always thought it was about seeing the bright side of things, like: “it’s too bad the barn is ruined, but at least we have this nice view!” But I see now what a flat reading that is. Much more interesting is to read this as an acknowledgement that we belong more to the infinite darkness of the cosmos than the temporary shelter of barns.

Becoming a parent is an experience of profound tethering: you will always be responsible for this life. So its strange that what birth ultimately meant to me was an equally profound untethering. It showed me that I am something other than I thought I was. Something belonging to a different scale of things. The ceiling blasts off, and with awe and terror, I experience the intimation of a sky that is truly open.

The words hit me while I was lying on the delivery table at UCSF’s Birth Center. Words that had been inert, dowdy even. Words like latch and skin and ache. It was 4 or 5am, I was halfway through labor, and I was having—I’m not sure how else to describe it—a literary experience.

Though I’d recently consumed a lot of fentanyl and laughing gas, at that point the only thing in my system was the epidural. So this experience was not the effect of any drug. But there was something drug-like about it: I was suddenly conscious of a hidden beauty in common words. The words were hugging me, singing themselves to me. It was as if my baby-love hormones were misfiring at language.

Do you know, I wanted to ask the busy nurses, that your entire body is covered in skin? But do you really know this? And do you know, I wanted to ask my sleeping husband, that air is available all around us, as invisible and essential as vowels, and that one need only to open her nostrils to take in unlimited quantities of the fresh scent of life? Everyone went about their business while I was possessed by these stunning, obvious realizations.

When my son finally arrived I did not find him beautiful. He was skinny in that awful way that newborns are, not even really cute yet. But the words that circulated in my mind around his arrival, those were beautiful. Skin to skin, the nurses murmured. Skin to skin to skin, I thought, because there was also the word skin, a third surface there between us.

All through pregnancy and then all through postpartum I was plagued by a nothingness. I was a gestating blob and then a lactating blob. Everything unfolded as it did, and I had nothing to say about any of it. But for a brief sliver in between, the blob-sense lifted. A constellation of words became events in themselves, unhinged from reality and simply floating. Like a mobile.

There was skin, a ligamentous K sheathed in the slick sound of S. The word made me suddenly aware of my skin, the sheer volume of it, every inch susceptible to touch. The tops of my feet, earlobes, scalp, all pulsated in response to the sound of their common name. And when a little mouth came for that most sensitive part of my body, the word latch offered itself up for reverie. I could feel the relief embedded in the word: the searching la? and the tight enclosure tch.

I’d be sitting on the couch just existing in a vague anxious stew of homelife, feeling my breasts engorge. And then a word would occur to me, and its occurrence became an occasion. The ache in my breast wasn’t just the ache in my breast, it was the word ache, a throbbing heart of a word that wanted to burst as milk and sputter like mean bright static into the baby’s feverish sucking, and suck, like a cup to my ear strung back in time to adolescent kissing, like a ball landing in a mitt with a satisfying smack, its mad flight arrested in an instant, and all the while my little suckling continued his sucking, oblivious to this pulsing fusion and separation of words and the things they described.

Tit, clot, breath, the words made me blush, they touched my whole skin. It was like the moment they laid the babe on my chest and I could see there was another person in the room, a budding will in a sack of fresh skin. The encounter gave certain words a crispness, a just-bornness. A body of their own. A body I could hold in my mind the way you hold a baby in your arms, not expecting anything of it, not making anything of it, just making acquaintance.

I’d just gone through a breakup, and to cope, I started running more and eating less. I went off to college and the problem continued, but I didn’t see it as a problem. In the running community that I was a part of, it was almost a badge of honor: if you’re a female runner who’s still getting a period, you’re probably not very fit. I was running 60 miles a week, racing well, and feeling incredible.

It was a decade before I learned that what I had was a dangerous but treatable condition that affects millions of women, and that almost none of them are getting proper care for.

When I brought up my missing cycle at doctor’s appointments, none of the providers I spoke with ever told me the name for what I was experiencing: hypothalamic amenorrhea, or HA. Nor did they tell me that it happens as a response to physiological stress, usually in the form of energy deficit. They didn’t tell me that it’s very common among runners and women with eating disorders, but you don’t have to be an athlete or anorexic to get it. You don’t even have to be underweight. Anyone with a history of weight loss can get HA.

There are so many medical issues where the problem is that we just don’t know enough. This seems especially true in women’s health: Preeclampsia. Endometriosis. Menopause. The list goes on. This isn’t one of those stories though. The most commonly cited estimate is that 1.62 million women in the US have HA, but that number is based on women who presented to clinics and were formally diagnosed, and for reasons I’ll explain, it’s almost certainly a dramatic undercount. A more realistic estimate is 3 to 5 million1—more than twice the number of Americans with type 1 diabetes. A standard of care exists, and it’s not controversial, complicated, or expensive. And yet it’s not widely practiced.

The consequences are serious, and go far beyond fertility. The most significant one is bone loss. Estrogen is essential for maintaining bone density, and without it, women with HA can develop osteopenia or osteoporosis, not in their 70s, but in their 20s and 30s. (I got my first stress fracture at 25.) The damage done during these years is not fully reversible; you can recover your period, but you can’t fully recover your bones.

HA also affects the cardiovascular system, increasing the risk for heart disease, and causes low libido, vaginal dryness, disrupted sleep, anxiety, and depression. These are the same symptoms that women experience in menopause, and for the same reason: the body isn’t producing enough estrogen. The difference is that menopause is an expected part of aging, while HA is happening to women in the prime of their reproductive years, and unlike menopause, it’s reversible.

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Though many cases of HA get missed, mine should have been obvious: I was an athlete and disturbingly lean. But my doctors weren’t concerned. One OBGYN went out of his way to reassure me: “Why would you want to gain a bunch of weight when you’re the very picture of health?” he said. “Come back to me in a few years when you want to get pregnant; there are things we can do.” Another did a full work-up to rule out PCOS and pituitary tumors, but still never gave me a specific diagnosis or treatment plan. “This happens sometimes with active women,” she told me. “Maybe you could try to eat more snacks.”

When I did eventually recover my period, it was in spite of the care I received from my doctors, not because of it. In my late 20s, after three stress fractures, a diagnosis of osteopenia, and a decade without a menstrual cycle, I happened upon a book called No Period Now What. The author, Nicola Sykes, had also experienced HA, and faced the same lack of information from her doctors as I did. With a PhD in computational biology, she knew how to make sense of the research. And with access to hundreds of women with HA through an online forum she ran, she was able to generate some of her own survey data. Her book was the first patient-friendly guide explaining why HA happens and how to recover from it. I followed the recommendations laid out in the book, and a few months later, I got my period for the first time in a decade.

In the years since my recovery, I’ve mentored hundreds of women through theirs, and again and again I hear stories that sound just like mine. A woman loses her period, her doctor either dismisses it or puts her on the Pill, she spends months or years getting worse, and eventually she pieces together an answer from a book, a forum, or an Instagram account. For every one who figures it out, there are many more who don’t.

Many women with HA lose trust in the medical system and turn to Instagram and TikTok for help. What they find there is a mixed bag: lots of period recovery “coaches,” many with no medical qualifications, giving advice that ranges from well-intentioned but imprecise to flat-out wrong. The fact that unqualified influencers can build large followings around this condition tells you something about the demand for care, and about the vacuum the medical system has left. It’s wonderful that No Period Now What exists, but I shouldn’t have had to “do my own research” to find an evidence-based treatment plan.

HA is not a medical mystery. We know how to treat it. So why is it so hard for women to find the care that we know works? I think it comes down to a few specific failures in how HA gets handled by the medical system:

Birth control makes HA invisible

About 20-25% of reproductive-age women are on hormonal birth control methods that mask missing periods entirely; these women can have HA and never know it, because the pill creates the appearance of a normal cycle. Many only discover their HA when they go off the pill to conceive and their periods don’t come back.

The Pill doesn’t only mask HA; it’s also used (inappropriately) as a treatment for HA. Many OBGYNs prescribe hormonal birth control to “regulate” cycles in patients with HA. But it doesn’t treat the underlying energy deficit that caused the menstrual cycle to stop in the first place, nor does it adequately protect against bone loss or increased cardiovascular risks. My own OBGYN recently joked to me, “My job is so easy. No matter the problem someone comes to me, I prescribe birth control. That’s 99% of what OBGYNs do!” Hormonal birth control can be a great treatment for some conditions, but HA isn’t one of them.

HA gets confused with PCOS

HA is frequently misdiagnosed as PCOS, since OBGYNs see far more PCOS and the two conditions can look similar on the surface (both can involve missing periods and cysts on the ovaries). But the treatment for PCOS—losing weight, exercising more, and watching what you eat—is the opposite of what you should do for HA.

Distinguishing the two conditions isn’t that hard. Despite their surface level similarities, they involve opposite hormonal profiles (reproductive hormone levels are high in PCOS and low in HA). The problem is that HA isn’t on providers’ radar, and they’re too quick to jump to PCOS.

It feels wrong to tell patients to eat more and exercise less

Providers see so many patients who are overweight and don’t get enough exercise that it can be hard for them to respond appropriately when someone comes in with the opposite problem. Even when my BMI was in the underweight category, it felt like my doctor was allergic to telling me to stop running. The most she would tell me was to tone it down a bit. Imagine how much harder it is for an HA patient at a higher weight to get appropriate care.

Women with HA appear healthy

Doctors often believe that HA is an “extreme” condition that only happens to elite athletes or women who are anorexic. And while HA is certainly more prevalent in these populations, you don’t have to be an extreme athlete or extremely thin to lose your period. Often, it’s someone who takes the advice to eat well and exercise a little too far.

Ideally, doctors would be trained to recognize these cases for what they are: evidence of dangerously low energy availability, regardless of how healthy the patient appears. But frequently, these patients are told that they’re fine without any further investigation.

And even when lab work does happen, it can be deceiving. The normal range for reproductive hormones is wide—it has to be, because these levels vary dramatically throughout the menstrual cycle. But that means someone with perpetually low estradiol and no period might be told, “Wow, you’re a medical mystery: no period but normal hormone levels!” When in fact, it’s not normal at all to have estradiol levels that are consistently on the low end of the range.

Doctors aren’t equipped to really help

Reversing HA requires lifestyle changes sustained over a period of months. The lifestyle changes are clear—eat more, exercise less—but that doesn’t mean they’re easy. Even when a doctor does understand the severity of HA, the treatment isn’t something they can address during a 15-minute appointment.

Women who develop HA tend to be exactly the women for whom these changes are hardest. They’re disciplined, high-achieving, and deeply attached to exercise as a core part of their identity. Telling someone like that to stop exercising and gain weight is like telling them to become a completely different person. Giving up running was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and for many women I’ve mentored, the psychological challenge of reducing exercise and tolerating weight gain is the single biggest barrier to recovery. This is not something a 15-minute appointment can address, even with a provider who recognizes HA as serious.

Recovering from HA was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But also one of the best. I went on to conceive my two children without needing fertility treatment. Freed from my unhealthy dependence on exercise, I pursued a successful career in digital health. And I was able to return to running without ever losing my period again, because I learned how to fuel properly. In the end, recovery was 100% upside. My only regret was not doing it sooner.

And with better support from the medical system, I’m certain I would have.

Over the past few years, a wave of companies have recognized that certain populations are being systematically underserved: Midi for menopause, Origin for pelvic floor therapy, Equip for eating disorders. HA strikes me as a nearly perfect candidate for this kind of approach: a well-understood condition with clear clinical guidelines, a large and underserved patient population, and a treatment that requires exactly the kind of sustained, specialized support that the traditional healthcare system is structurally unable to provide. I keep turning over in my mind what a purpose-built care model for HA would look like. One that combines proper diagnosis and lab work with the ongoing behavioral and psychological support that recovery actually demands.

I don’t have all the answers, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’d love to hear from others who’ve thought about similar problems. If you’ve built or worked on virtual care models for underserved conditions, I’m curious what you’ve learned: What works? What doesn’t? How do you reach patients who don’t even know they have a condition? And if you’re a woman who’s experienced HA, I’d love to hear your story too. Please reach out, I’d love to start a conversation!

The steelman version goes something like this: People aren’t rational. If you want them to care, a logical argument isn’t enough. You can’t just bombard them with facts, you need to tell a story.

I agree, of course, that people aren’t rational. But the idea that you need a story to make your argument matter is based on a misunderstanding of what an argument really is. That’s what I aim to clear up in this essay: I’ll explain why arguments might not be quite what you thought they were, and why they are a better frame than story for connecting with an audience and making them care.

What is an argument?

The advice about telling stories envisions argument and story almost as opposites. Stories are warm, human, emotional. Arguments are cold, hard logic. The argument might be the “truth” of the matter, but story is the spoonful of sugar that makes it go down.

But this is a limited view of what argument is. We know from Aristotle that arguments have three modes of appeal:

• Ethos - appeal to authority

• Pathos - appeal to emotion

• Logos - appeal to reason

Some arguments lean more into one mode than another, but an argument that leans heavily on pathos or ethos is still an argument.

Let me show you exactly what I mean. Here’s an online dating profile:

Wait, why aren’t you laughing? He said he was funny.

The fact that you didn’t laugh shows something that you already know intuitively: the way to persuade someone that you’re funny isn’t to just say that you’re funny. It’s to do something funny.

This guy is still making an argument about what kind of person he is. It’s just not the one he intended to make. So it’s really easy for someone to stand out in this environment by making a better argument. The way to do that is to recognize that style is argument. The feel of your language, the emotion you convey, the character you inhabit: those aren’t just things you sprinkle on top.

Here’s another online dating profile:

This online dating profile uses a very different strategy than the first one. The entire argument happens through style. You could call this “show don’t tell” but that’s not quite right, because you can’t only tell. You’re always showing something.

To bring this back to story: when we say “logic doesn’t convince people, you need a story,” what I think we really mean is: you didn’t construct an effective term of appeal. You didn’t think about ethos, pathos, or logos. The way to fix that isn’t necessarily to tell a story. It’s to make a better argument.

Stories are a type of argument where ideas are linked by cause and effect, AKA plot. In a story, plot is the engine that moves you from one idea to the next. But this isn’t the only way arguments can move between ideas. The secret isn’t a particular type of movement, but that there is movement at all. That that movement makes sense, and in the best case, that it feels both surprising and inevitable.

That’s what gives an argument its energy and makes people care.

When you go into a situation asking, “what story should I tell?” you’re limiting yourself to one particular mode of expressing an argument. But there are lots of other argumentative forms that might work better for what you’re trying to do, without boxing you in.

The advice about telling stories is like saying, “Oh, you want to learn how to cook? Let me tell you everything there is to know about making sandwiches.” The advice about arguments is like saying, “Let me tell you about salt, fat, acid, and heat.” This doesn’t tell you what to make for dinner, but it tells you how to make anything you want … maybe even something that’s never existed before.

On top of this, stories have some specific limitations that arguments don’t have. People reach for stories because they’re familiar. They tend to follow known archetypes, like the hero’s journey or the underdog. This can be useful if you want to claim that you’re the hero or the underdog. But that means you’re fitting into an existing frame.

Arguments don’t have a frame. They’re the art of creating the frame. You can ask a totally different question than the one that appears to be in front of you. Arguments let you set your own terms.

One way to understand this better is to think about what you’re NOT doing when you make an argument. You’re not just listing things. In the first online dating profile, not only did the guy not show that he was funny, his entire mode of appeal was to list out facts about himself: I’m funny. I’m optimistic. I love music.

This is the same move a lot of my clients make when they’re trying to explain what they do. They list their features and functions: we’re an adaptive AI powered solution AND we do real time monitoring AND we’re revolutionizing women’s health. That’s not an argument, it’s a list. You can turn it into an argument by asserting a relationship between the things on the list:

We believe X and so we built Y to let customers do Z.

The key is that you’re not just presenting information. You’re combining the raw ingredients in a novel and perhaps surprising way. You might decide to lean more into logic, or authority, or emotion. But no matter how you frame it, the key is that you are framing it. That’s your contribution: the frame.

Arguments in the Wild

Let’s look at some examples of good arguments and how they operate.

1. Argument as reframing

In the early 80s, IBM was by far the dominant personal computing company. No one had Apple. IBM’s advertising made a simple argument: “We’re faster, we’re cheaper, we’re reliable.” And they were.

That put Apple in a tough spot. They were more expensive and less strong on the merits than the competition. What argument could they possibly make?

Apple decided not to compete on features or product. Instead, they made an argument about who they were, about ethos. They shifted the terms of the conversation completely away from what IBM was talking about, and in the process, made fools of IMB. They said, essentially: “Buy Apple and you, too, can be a rebel and a free thinker like us.”

They were not opposing IBM. That would be operating within IBM’s framing. They taking the conversation in a completely different direction. That’s what arguments let you do.

2. Argument as pith

I know a guy who helps startups improve their pitch decks. His company is called Hate Your Deck—a name that makes a compact but complex argument.

Consultants are often in a situation with a potential client where we want to say something like: “You should hire me because I’m good at the very thing you suck at.” But of course, we can’t say that. And so we’ll often speak sideways a little, try to couch it in some way.

Hate Your Deck takes a different approach. It’s painfully direct: “I hate your deck.”

This is a pretty risky thing to say to a potential client! But the company seems to be doing just fine. Why does this work?

It works because it’s a good argument. His audience knows that this is risky. They know that he knows it’s risky. And the fact that he’s willing to say it anyway tells them exactly what they need to know about what it’s like to work with him. He’s not going to worry about hurting their feelings. He’s going to just tell them what’s wrong with their decks.

The title doesn’t just describe his service, it demonstrates it. It lets people experience his approach before they’ve hired him. He’s making an argument about what kind of person he is and differentiating himself. And he’s doing it in a way that’s much more persuasive and differentiating than a bullet point on his website that says “I give direct feedback.”

3. Argument as silence

Jonathan Stark helps consultants price their services based on value, not hourly rate.

But what he’s really doing is teaching people how the way you set your prices is itself an argument.

Charging by the hour argues that you’re a commodity. Value pricing argues that you’re an expert. This is an appeal to authority. Pricing, here, is how you present your character.

Stark has tons of suggestions for how to actually do this. But one of my favorites is when a potential client asks your hourly rate, Stark advises that you simply say, “I don’t have one.” Then stop talking. Let there be silence. Let them react.

Silence is an instrumental part of your argument. You say something unexpected, and resist the temptation to qualify it or soften it. That communicates confidence in your position. It’s an appeal to authority.

4. Argument as surprise

I went to UC Berkeley for college, and multiple times a day I would walk along Telegraph Ave. If you want to make an impression on your audience, it’s hard to think of a more competitive environment: it’s teeming with homeless people and addicts and Greenpeace activists and all kinds of weirdos.

I did my best to ignore all of this. I was just trying to get to class! But there was one person I encountered who I will never forget. As I passed him, he said to me, “Can you spare any sorries?”

“Sorry!” I said quickly, before I’d realizing the trap I’d walked into. He looked at me with a giant grin and said, “Thanks!”

Why did he stand out to me? He didn’t do it by telling a more powerful story than everyone else. I actually don’t think anyone is a better student of the advice to tell stories than the street people of Telegraph Ave. But you don’t believe those stories, because you hear them so often.

This guy made an appeal to emotion that didn’t have anything to do with story. He turned the tables on me in this very sly way. I was used to being the one with the power, I got to ignore or say no from a comfortable distance. But he reversed this dynamic. He used a different argumentative strategy, and in doing so, he made an impression on me that no story could.

The Joy of Arguments

I’ve been telling you all about the power of arguments and why they’re so great. I hope I’ve made a compelling argument for why they’re a better frame than stories for making your audience care. But I want to leave you with one more reason to care about arguments: they make the work you do more enjoyable.

When you’re coming up with an argument, you can never know in advance what it’s going to be. There’s no template. The whole work of an argument is making sense of this particular situation. You’re not applying a framework you brought with you, you’re inventing a logic that emerges from encountering something new.

Which means you can never really master arguments. You can’t be an expert. Becoming an expert is about accumulating knowledge and experience in a given domain. But when you’re coming up with an argument, expertise doesn’t really help you. Expertise helps you know the answer, but arguments are what you need when there isn’t one clear answer. Arguments start where answers end.

For me, that means coming up with arguments is always at least a little uncomfortable, because I can’t rely on my expertise. But it’s also thrilling. Arguments make me feel more alive to my work. I hope you discover that they do the same for you.

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