Broaden, simplify, personalize.
They're the secret to framing. You can use this trio to win any issue.
NOTE: I copied this from my Substack newsletter, ARISTOTLE’S GUIDE TO SOUL BENDING. Subscribe for free to receive twice-weekly posts on rhetoric, writing, and the power of words.
A student I met online—let’s call her Mina—came home from school and made herself a peanut butter sandwich. Her big sister sat at the kitchen table, glaring. “That’s the last of the peanut butter. You’re such a pig! You never think of other people.”
During one of the frequent video chats I hold with classes, Mina asked me what she should have said.
Now, she could have used the status defense, often used by trial lawyers and covered in a previous post. That would have entailed falling back on a series of rhetorical trenches, arguing over:
· Facts (There’s plenty left in the jar!),
· Definitions (By “other people” you mean you, right? Pretty selfish of you, don’t you think?),
· Quality (It’s only peanut butter. You won’t starve.), or
· Relevance or legal “standing” (You were here before me. You could have used the peanut butter yourself.)
But that’s a complicated strategy to keep in her head, especially when her character is under attack. Instead, I suggested a simpler if more nefarious approach…
Assume a look of deep sympathy and say:
“Are you okay? This isn’t about some silly snack, is it? Are you having trouble with your boyfriend?”
Yeah, that’s mean, and things could get ugly. Mina should make sure there’s a protective table between her and Big Sister. But I suggested this strategy to illustrate a key rhetorical concept, maybe the single best argument tool of all:
Framing
Framing entails more than just changing the meaning of words and our interpretation of an issue. The strategy follows a few steps.
1. Broaden the issue.
In my scenario, Mina expands the argument beyond peanut butter to cover her sister’s entire psychological state.
You can see this broadening tactic all the time in politics. Framing consultants (yes, there is such a thing) reframed the minimum wage into Americans’ ability to live on what they earn. Abortion bans grew into a “culture of life,” and guns became home security.
Rachel Carson used this tool brilliantly. For a book describing how the chemical DDT thinned the eggshells of raptors, she chose the title Silent Spring. This frame broadened the issue from the side effects of an agricultural chemical to the entire world.
2. Simplify.
Compress the issue within that broadened setting. Carson turned an environmental disaster into a world bereft of bird calls.
3. Make it personal.
Silent Spring zeroes in on our own backyard. The mental effect on readers is almost cinematic. Our internal camera moves through a laboratory with white-coated chemists, cuts to a farm field where an airplane sprays a scary white mist, and zooms in on a tree at the end of the field where a hawk sits on her eggs. Cut further to a backyard where a mother hangs her laundry (the book came out in 1962) and all we hear is…silence. She looks up, listens. Oh, that awful DDT!
Eight years later, Madison Avenue created a public-service ad for the Keep America Beautiful anti-littering organization. It shows an actor playing a native American, Iron Eyes Cody, paddling a birchbark canoe through trash-filled water while factories spew smoke in the background. He pulls up onto a shore speckled with plastic. A load of trash gets thrown from a passing car and lands right in front of the man’s deerskin moccasins. The camera now moves in on his stoic, lined face, and we see a single tear emerge from his eye.
This is classic framing: the careless act of littering gets broadened into a sin and then personalized into the mythical portrayal of a people who respect the land. Even better from a persuasion perspective, the ad triggered an emotional reframe in the audience. Our mighty planet suddenly seemed vulnerable, just like that Native American. Indians don’t cry!
The ad—since condemned for its stereotypical portrayal—ran countless times during the seventies, and it arguably led to widespread support for the environmental movement. That decade saw federal passage of the Endangered Species Act, the Superfund, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the EPA, the removal of lead from gasoline…and the banning of DDT.
If a reframed insecticide and tragic litter can do all that, imagine what reframing can do for a little sister, or for you. Fun!
