The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication by Wayne C. Booth
Readable.
Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004) was published in a series called “Blackwell Manifestos.” Booth’s passion is equal to the series’ task, whether he is preaching the gospel of “listening-rhetoric” (really getting at underlying truths in conversation versus “bargain-rhetoric” where your goal is to mediate a truce or “win-rhetoric” where your goal is to engage in monologue and so browbeat the conversation partner into submission) or ranting about the rhetorical missteps of the George W. Bush government, there is no lack of passion.
But perhaps the clearest message and the one I take with me is the notion that every piece of communication carries (furthers?) some rhetorical purpose. Every communication has a purpose. And to sit passively receiving without considering what the author/rhetor hopes to accomplish is to allow myself to be taken advantage of. Whether I’m watching a commercial on TV (even a good one), listening to a sonata, hearing a preacher or even reading the prophet Amos or some other ancient text, I’m at my best when I consider—and possibly reject or even accept—the message coded into the communication.
A text wants a response.
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We Need Your (Creative) Briefs
Unsettle the brain and spirit to move forward.
Don’t just paste in your purpose from the last creative brief. Don’t fill your creative brief with numbers and trivia that aren’t sharpened to make your point. Especially don’t dump in the jargon your client prattled on about. Make your brief work first as a communication tool and then as a community-building tool, because (you know this already) you’ll get the best work from your creative team by engaging them with more than facts. You’ll want them excited. Not excited about a tactic, but excited about what this communication (and what this product) will accomplish out in the world.
Don’t let your creative brief be just another check mark on your ever-expanding list of things to do to get a project started (and thus off your desk). Make your creative brief a thing of beauty and curiosity, like Cicero made his speeches: put in an exordium to get the team riled up about the opportunity. Put in some narrative that explains the full scope of the issue at hand, but sharpen it so your copywriter feels the pain the audience feels (and also feels the opportunity revving up your client). Confirm the why of your point: what are the salient details your copywriter can use? Then refute your point: what reasons will your detractors trot out to show how wrong you are? Then send the team off with a stirring conclusion (peroratio) that sums things up and blends pathos (emotion), ethos (your own sterling character) and logos (reason) in the most unsettling way. I always write my best copy when something isn’t sitting right in my soul.
Some of these ancient guys (like Aristotle and Cicero) have a few things to tell communicators today. How to rouse a team to action is one of those things. We need that.
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What Does it Take to Listen? Amos on Hearing.
The power was in the message not the prophet.
For several weeks a few of us have been talking our way through an ancient text written by a shepherd named Amos. He came to the task of writing with no credentials and claimed only to be articulating stuff the Almighty had been roaring.
Like a finger circling a map before punching hard on the destination city, Amos’ started with a talking tour that included cities and regions where residents had stepped away from honoring God. But eventually Israel was the focus of this roar. And by the middle of chapter two, it’s clear the relationship between God and people was broken. The prophet prompted the people to remember how the Almighty had acted in their lives: destroying enemies as they made their way from slavery through a wilderness to a place of promise. The Almighty even equipped them with people specially tuned to hear more of what He was saying: Nazirites and prophets. But the actions of the crowd drowned God’s voice. The nation happily trampled the poor if it meant more money for them. They damaged their marriages and invented their own gods. Whatever worked.
That the people thought this was no big deal was key to what happened next.
Stuff happens for a reason, the shepherd/prophet said (Amos 3.3-8) and present sufferings will give way to something much worse, so now is the time to return. The predictions only get more violent as the book progresses and Amos does not spare the detail. That the nation collapsed within the generation puts even more muscle behind Amos’ words.
By the end of chapter four, the people had refused to hear and continued to invent their own terms of engagement.
What I learned:
- If I want to hear something bigger then myself, I need to listen beyond my own desire. It’s a matter of pulling out of the evil I’m participating in (a prophet worth his or her salt would say “Repent!”) and “returning” (which occurs five times in Amos 4) to God before being forced to meet Him on much less ideal terms (compare Amos 4.6-11 with 4.12-13).
- It’s good to remember the milestones and turning points God creates in your life. In our family, we’ve got dozens of places where we’ve sensed a divine hand reaching down and turning the course of our lives. Those times make for good stories—plus they actually inform present dark times with hope and light.
- God does stuff to get our attention. It’s better to develop a listening spirit than not.
Start listening at 5:15
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Great Moments in Rhetoric: Climate Change and the IPCC Mission
Good communicators are transparent about their purpose.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mission to take “sophisticated and sometimes inconclusive science, and boil it down to usable advice for lawmakers.” The article speculates (via scientists working with the IPCC) that institutional bias toward oversimplification is what lies behind the erroneous projection that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
If there is anyone out there who still believes in truly objective science—or truly objective anything—I’d like to meet them. It should surprise no one that we constantly arrange facts to meet our pet goals. And we infuse those facts with the urgency that fits our purpose rather than an urgency arising from the facts themselves. This is a human trait and we should expect it in every communication. Facts are facts, yes. But facts are also small pieces of a rhetorical puzzle that can (and will) be built together in a number of different ways. Is there ever a time when we experience facts in isolation—without some rhetorical flourish—that is, without some political aim that wishes to move us toward a favored action?
No.
But persuasion is not wrong. It is a necessary piece of human life on this planet. All our actions, all our thinking, all our communication, all our learning, all of most everything is organized by political pulls. That’s not overstatement: even the best among us are always motivated by partisan or self-serving objectives. Rather than resist this fact of human life, it makes more sense to look closely at the objectives that drive us. Of course, there are two sides to every story, including this large story on climate change. Sure the WSJ is written from a conservative perspective and this article was meant to shine light on hypocritical methods of their opponents, which always makes for good reading and sells newspapers.
It’s just important that we keep in mind what stake our communication partners have in moving us one way or another. And perhaps as communicators, we do best when we state our goals early. In fact, I think our audiences are put in a positive state of listening when they hear our disclosures up front.
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Is Freelance Writing a Career?
[I’m reposting this from about a year ago when I posted it on The Official Blog of Kirkistan, where I’ve stopped writing. This issue just keeps coming up.]
Before you say “Yes. Of course!” (with proper righteous indignation), consider that a career seems to move a person toward increasing levels of responsibility, toward tasks that require more maturity, toward more money (one can dream). Pick any company and follow the career path of say…well…how about a communication specialist? The communication specialist will write, manage projects, take care of details. They do well, so they are promoted to communication manager. In that position, they do some of the same tasks, though in lesser quantities, plus they manage people. They do well and graduate to director. In that position they have no project work, write only memos and emails, sit in meetings discussing what they’re teams are doing, aren’t doing and should be doing. And so a career proceeds until stopped at the individual’s level of incompetence.
This management person who was (possibly) a writer is now not writing at all and is instead directing others who carry out communication tactics. To many that is a satisfying, perfectly reasonable trajectory. And even for those who write or love to create, they can find opportunities in those positions to use their creativity to positively influence others. I’ve known some creative folks who have risen to management positions and done very well at creating imaginative and loyal teams and organizations.
But for others, this career path represents gradual movement away from craft, and away from the heart of what made work fun in the first place. A career presupposes that new skills are developed even as vision widens, which lands a person in a different job. But that is not quite the case for freelance writers. They often entertain dreams of, well, writing. It’s what they want to do. And so a career path for a freelance writer is less about successive positions (especially since freelancing is by definition outside typical corporate structures with their fixed paths) and more about finding work and the work itself.
The work itself is the career path for a freelance writer. Where there is joy in completing the work, where there is curiosity about how communication tools can fit to new situations and how those tools can resolve substantial problems—those are the milestones on the freelance writer’s career path. And over time, the writer finds herself or himself accomplishing a set of tasks with maturity and grace (one can hope). And looking back, the craft that helped accomplish tasks and assignments will have the distinct look of a career.
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Blinders, Diamonds and Choices
Do our life choices change the reality around us? Or do our choices fit us with a set of blinders so we pay attention only to what is of immediate interest? Winifred Gallagher in “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life” argues that our senses are fine-tuned to track the smaller set of interests that are important to us. Her masterful book shows the physiological and neurological changes—and the enormous benefits—that happen when we pay attention. But it is also true that life choices change the reality around us.
You'll be glad you read this.
A few of us have been reading the minor prophet Amos. Amos spoke against the treatment of the poor—over and over again. That’s what prophets do: with little personal authority (Amos was a shepherd), they get tricked-out with a much larger message (larger audience, bigger content, massive ramifications) and they…say it. Out loud. Come what may.
Which is what Amos did. He spoke out against nation after nation for taking advantage of their helpless (among other things). He had a special harangue against nations that should have known better, nations who should have had top-of-mind recollection about how they were recently saved from helplessness themselves.
As we talked about Amos, I mentioned how the poor seem almost invisible today. There are the homeless, but because I’m not paying attention (I’m not actively looking for them), I don’t see them. A couple students in my “Writing for Community” class are doing a masterful job bringing attention to the faces and people-ness of the homeless here. But how can I, how can we begin to see the poor among us? And more importantly, how can I/we keep from choices that trample on them? This spot hints at the effect of our choices:
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Write news based only on Facebook and Twitter?
In our “Writing for Community” class yesterday we discussed the difference between blogging and journalism. It’s getting harder draw a firm line between who is doing what, but the code of ethics about fact-finding and fact-checking remain key differentiators.
Stan Schroeder at Mashable offers the story of five French journalists who lock themselves in a farmhouse in France for five days and “write news based only on what they read in Twitter and Facebook.”
The success of their news gathering and sifting for facts will require great ingenuity. But I’m reminded of Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk whose influential writings about current events were based largely on letters he received rather than rapt attention to media.
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Passion is the Preferred Communication Tool
"Haircut, please." "Meet me in your lot in 15."
Clay Shirky, writing in “Here Comes Everybody,” argues effectively that with the lower transaction costs for forming groups (caused by social media), there are more possibilities than ever to pull a group together for most any reason. Dan Pink wrote yesterday of a social media-driven mobile hair-cuttery he saw at Google headquarters. Whether your focus is major profits, minor prophets or mingling in Provence, there are all sorts of new opportunities for banding together around a passion. All it takes is strategic use of the tools freely available, plus the willingness to reach out.
I’m asking my Writing for Community class to brainstorm the contours of the opportunity before them as they seek to build communities. With a passionate leader encouraging group sharing, what sorts of things are possible? We’re already seeing examples every day, from the high-schooler who tried to get released from being grounded by amassing thousands of fans on her Facebook page (her parents remained unimpressed) to the seemingly spontaneous “I’m with Coco” protests.
Depth of passion may well be the limiting factor. Just what am I willing to do to make my point? How far out will I reach?
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Entering an Ancient Text
Our small group is reading an ancient text together. It’s reproduced in a contemporary volume and to my eye looks like the same English words and punctuation I might find in today’s StarTribune. But the prophet Amos is writing from a very different time and place. He was a shepherd back in the B.C.’s when kings ruled the peoples. And though he was (again) just a shepherd, he spoke a message that came from the God whose roar could wither a mountaintop and drop a pasture into mourning.
The text works on the reader
John Walton, in his introduction to “The Lost World of Genesis One” (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009) writes that understanding an ancient text is not a matter of translating the culture but entering that ancient culture—as much as possible. I picked up Walton’s book because I am fascinated by the huge task taken on by the writer of Genesis 1 and mirrored in John’s Gospel (John 1). Who doesn’t wonder how everything began? And this: what do those deep roots say about life today?
Entering into Amos’ ancient culture will be our task. We’ll do it as a group. We’ll bring supporting sources and texts that point us toward that ancient culture as we walk through those nine chapters. We’ll look at how the author uses his words, what he repeats, what he emphasizes. How he frames his argument. We’ll take a bunch of conversational stabs at understanding the text and I expect to be deeply challenged about the ephemerals I fixate on.
And…I’m expecting God to show up. I’m listening for that roar.
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conversation is an engine 