I’m an introvert. That’s why I love rhetoric.

The art of persuasion lets the shy and spectrum-adjacent act like stars.

I live in a town of 278 people in rural New Hampshire, between Boston and Montreal. Most of the town consists of a mountain and a protected lake. There are more moose, bears, and beavers than people. This is no accident. I’m an introvert living in an introvert’s paradise.

My office is a cabin on the edge of a 20-acre meadow. My wife, Dorothy, helped a 22-year-old timber framer build it back when I was working at my last legitimate job, miserably struggling to manage a group of magazine people.

The cabin lies some distance from my house.

I ski to work in the winter. When the snow is less than perfect, I enjoy complaining to Dorothy about my commute. (She drives to work.)

We live on 150 acres. This provides an effective barrier from the neighbors. In any case, our neighbors are New Englanders. Yankees aren’t the most outgoing people in the world, which suits me fine.

Yet you might consider me fairly social if you met me. That’s because I’ve spent many years studying rhetoric. The ancient art taught me how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on awkward occasions, and maybe even make some people like me when I speak. Rhetoric has disciplined me to think beyond myself, reading people and sensing their fears and desires (not so much as an empath; more like a sympath).

Rhetoric has hardly turned me into an extrovert. A dinner party still leaves me exhausted, and I die a thousand deaths before entering a room filled with strangers. But the tools of ethos, pathos, and logos—especially ethos—can actually make me enjoy social occasions now and then. Dorothy is an extrovert, a professional fundraiser, and I need to do the extrovert thing for the sake of our marriage. (Excuse the mess. Our cats did that. Introverts love cats.)

While I originally decided to write about rhetoric to help give a voice to women and traditionally excluded groups, these days I’m especially delighted when a shy student tells me that the tools I teach helped her win friends and influence people.

I like to think that we introverts ponder more deeply than our peers. (But maybe that’s just because I’m an introvert.) Give young introverts the means of selling ideas and the tools of leadership; then watch them save civilization.

Meanwhile, I’m happily writing alone in my cabin, spreading the rhetorical gospel, and thankful that you’re with me.