September 24, 2004
Rhetoric for fun and profit. Variant: God is in the grammar.
Around here at Good&Happy we have more than one old-fashioned English major, as well as practitioners of neurolinguistic programming. We entertain awe for the effects of all kinds of rhetorical device, word choice, sentence structure, figures of speech, rhythm, verb tense, the formal and informal elements of discourse. As one of the pioneers of NLP famously notes, there's a big difference between, "(s)he's ugly, but rich;" and "(s)he's rich, but ugly."
Star scholar Stanley Fish, dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, clearly no running dog in the pocket of President Bush, puts his famous post-modern analytical fascination with "the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time" to work on excerpts from the two presidential candidates' speeches.
His freshman writing students were instructed to set aside their political preferences and attend only to the articulation of the candidates' positions. They complained about John F. Kerry's Sept. 8 Greensboro, N. C. speech, finding it "skippy," "confusing," too-informal. Forget flip-flops over a period of time. Fish shows where one argument skittishly changes direction in the space of three short sentences.
Prof. Fish's freshmen declared themselves more satisfied by George W. Bush's speech delivered the same day in Missouri, having as it did the staples of freshman composition--a topic sentence, sequential argument in support of the topic, euphony, parallelism, a conclusion.
Rhetoric carries a moral undertone. Lies, ad hominem attacks, and misdirection via logical fallacies are obvious violations of moral life in a society. "Freshman composition" excellences are subtler. The tools of rhetoric offer landmarks, shared handholds, signals about intention, so that the listener or reader neither suffers uncomfortable and distancing confusion, nor feels stupid.
This kind of rhetoric is not flattery, nor high-falutin', nor something extra and decorative. It's respect. Even equality. And it usually takes work.
Friends of the Democratic campaign have been urging a "message." Fish's New York Times piece gives a pattern suitable to dress it for prime time.
UPDATE September 26--In light of today's New York Times, maybe the Kerry Rhetorical Style is Socratic.
At meetings, Mr. Kerry poses contrarian questions in an often wandering quest for data and conflicting opinions, a style that his aides, sometimes with a roll of the eyes, call Socratic.
Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania says he advised Senator Kerry about the value of brevity in speeches, especially to outdoor audiences.
"I've given up," Mr Rendell said. "He listens sometimes, and he doesn't listen sometimes."
Socrates, incidentally, is remembered for maintaining while submitting to his own capital punishment that an individual citizen—even when wronged by the state—can never justifiably refuse to obey the laws of the state.
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