Rhetoric

Continuing on with “stuff I should have learned in high school,” I’ve been reading up on rhetoric. The second dumbest thing I believed in high school—after “working hard is for people who aren’t that smart”—was “I’m good at math, so I don’t need to learn how to write.” As it turns out, even programmers have to collaborate, and thus need to be able to express their thoughts clearly and coherently. It also turns out that I suck at math, so the kind of software I work on is much more about solving human and business problems than scientific ones, which means bridging the cultural gap between programmers and non-. I’ve done okay with that over the years, but I still feel like I don’t really know what I’m doing, that there must be some ground rules, some basic body of knowledge I’m missing out on.

Apparently, that would be rhetoric. It’s been characterized as “the art of persuasion,” which makes it sound kinda skeevy, but it’s really just the fundamental craft of communicating. If I’m trying to explain an idea, make a plan, solve a problem, or just have a bonding chit-chat, that’s rhetoric. It’s not necessarily formal or fancy speech; being “plain spoken” is just another style of rhetoric. (Rhet nerds are fascinated by George W.) It seems it isn’t really taught as its own thing these days. Some part of it is still found in composition classes, jumbled in with spelling, grammar, and correct bibliographic citation format, but the rest has been exiled to advanced courses in literary theory, sociology, etc.

So the first reason to study rhetoric is that I’m already using it, just unconsciously and poorly. The second is that anytime someone else is talking, they’re using it on me (and maybe not so unconsciously and poorly). I like to think I’ve got a pretty good bullshit meter, but it can only help to have a more formal understanding of the tools of persuasion used by politicians, pundits, and advertisers, and to know the terminology to call them on it.

But rhetoric doesn’t have to be mean-spirited or manipulative. In fact, it’s what allows us to have reasoned discussions instead of fights, to replace force with persuasion. It’s the basis of law and democracy. It gives us the tools to build an argument and then dissect it, to distinguish logic from emotion and form from content. The better we all are at that, the better off our society is.

It’s not rocket science; it’s remedial stuff I should have learned long ago: How to structure an essay or presentation, how to tune it to your audience, and how to make it interesting and compelling. In brief, an argument is either deliberative (future action), forensic (what happened in the past), or epideictic (praise/blame in present); it’s based on ethos (trust in the speaker), pathos (emotional appeal), and logos (reasoning); its stages of construction are invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery; and its structure is introduction, narration, division (identify points), proof, refutation, and peroration (closing). You’ll want to read a book to get a proper explanation of all this, but that’s pretty much it for theory. There are lots of Greek and Latin terms which identify specific figures of speech, but those are more for analysis than composition.

Going back to the “smart vs. hard-working” fallacy, I always thought that being a good writer was about in-born eloquence and creativity (perhaps because high school English class = literature). At the high end of the scale, that probably is what makes the difference, but basic competence is a matter of teachable skills and practice. I still have a lot of work to do, but I’ve got a bit more clue about how to plan and evaluate my writing.

The book I really enjoyed and learned the most from—and I’ve read a couple others—is Words Like Loaded Pistols. Ironically, it’s the only one I’ve seen that effectively uses rhetoric to teach rhetoric. It’s a delight. It revels in the sheer joy of language while laying out the basics of the craft, conducting a tour of its origins in antiquity, and showcasing some of the greatest smackdowns and blunders in history. How can you not love a book that opens with a quote from The Simpsons and closes with a detailed analysis of the “Kyle’s Mom is a Bitch” song from Southpark?

So this is another thing that I’m both excited to be learning and embarrassed to be learning so late. Oh well. Did all of you already know this? Were you taught a different set of processes and structures for essays? Or were you just assigned papers to write without a formal understanding of how? I kinda hope it’s just that I’m a dumbass.