Rhetoric – 1

As the presidential primaries roller coaster towards what will ultimately be the selection of a Republican interlocutor to argue his case with a Democratic incumbent, it will be useful to look at some of the language (or rhetoric) that is likely to make up such arguments.

It’s a pity that rhetoric (now thought of as mere rhetoric) has moved from being one of the primary subjects of study for an educated person to something treated with suspicion if not outright contempt.

I suppose if you look at rhetoric as nothing more than a bag of verbal tricks designed to pull the wool over the eyes of an easily duped audience, it’s an easy category of human knowledge to dismiss.  But it’s never been clear to me that once we have rid ourselves of nasty and cynical old rhetoric, what exactly is supposed to replace it?  Will the world be transformed into a place where only honest and purely sincere discourse reigns?  Or is it more likely that those who have not chosen to ignore a study of rhetorical techniques (such as advertisers and politicians) will use those skills as they like, with the rest of the population no longer familiar that there is even a subject of rhetoric to be studied?

We’ve already talked about one component of rhetoric: Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion (logos, pathos and ethos).  But there are a whole host of rhetorical devices which, like fallacies, have mostly Latin names and are fun to illustrate with familiar (or wacky) examples.  And while we’ll take a look at rhetorical techniques over the next few postings keep in mind that (as with fallacies) one needn’t be familiar with every one of them to be on the lookout for ones most likely to be used in a modern Presidential campaign.

Let’s start off with the category that makes up the bulk of most lists of rhetorical devices: those that rely on linguistic styling.

Some of these will be familiar from the introductions to poetry we had in grade school, such as alliteration (repeating consonant sounds as in Spiro Agnew’s describing critics as “nattering nabobs of negativism”), assonance, the same technique with vowel sounds (as in “I Like Ike”), metaphor, simile, allusion and analogy (each of which relate one thing to another in a verbally interesting way - as in "no man is an island").  It should come as no surprise that word choice and sentence structure that make poetry and prose more interesting impact readers and listeners of political oratory in a similar fashion.

Then there are techniques relating to word sequencing such as antistrophe (repeating the same word or phrase - as in “Yes we can!” - at the end of successive clauses or phrases), tricolon (capping a part of a speech with a group of three words or phrases, as in Hilary Clinton’s appeal to "my supports, my champions…my sisterhood!”), and that perennial favorite chiasmus (relating two clauses via reversed structure as in “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”)

In researching this piece, I was surprised to discover that my own writing makes extensive use of the parentheses device, in which a word or phrase appears in the middle of a sentence (enclosed in either dashes or parentheses, like this).  This technique lets you disguise an important point as an informal aside, drawing attention to a critical component of an argument by making it almost seem a disposable afterthought.

My surprise derived from the fact that, like most of you, I have never formally studied rhetoric but have simply developed a writing style over time by both writing and reading the political writing of others.  And at some point during that period, I must have encountered political writing using this device that I found particularly persuasive, internalizing it in the process (along with other informal asides such as starting a sentence with “In truth,…” or “But stop and think for a moment…”). 

One of the reasons it’s good to start this discussion of rhetoric with linguistic examples is that they are harder to dismiss as intrinsically manipulative.  After all (there I go again), we want our politicians to engage us when they speak, not read out dry passages of text and policy proposals.  In fact (I can’t seem to help myself), any politician who does not pepper his or her speeches with interesting language choice and word sequences is likely to be dismissed as “boring,” “dry” or the dreaded “uninspiring.”

No doubt there are interesting psychological explanations as to why this word choices or cadences have a particular impact on human cognition and emotion.  But for purpose of this discussion, mastery of these techniques represent an entrance point for persuasive speech, an ethically neutral set of tools which can be used by anyone who masters them for good or ill.

And one of the best ways to ensure we are not manipulated by these or other forms of rhetoric is to develop and understanding of these techniques so that we can recognize and appreciate them (without being suckered by them, especially out of ignorance).