Data Loading...
The Canons of Rhetoric Flipbook PDF
The Canons of Rhetoric
108 Views
83 Downloads
FLIP PDF 194.11KB
6
C hapter 1 The
Canons of Rhetoric
The Form of Rhetoric It is one thing to praise or condemn rhetoric; it is another thing to actually understand how it functions. Perhaps the most common misunderstanding about public speaking is that it is mostly concerned with conveying “information.” From this perspective, one might think of public speaking much as one thinks of a standard news article, whose business is to convey the latest happenings of the world as truthfully and as sensationally as possible. The underlying set of assumptions behind this perspective is that the most powerful methods of maintaining interest are surprise and suspense, surprise meaning that which appears suddenly,
5
Plato, Theaetetus, 174a. On the comparison between the three perspectives on rhetoric, see Everett Lee Hunt, “Plato and Aristotle on Rhetoric and Rhetoricians,” Reading on Rhetoric, 100–159.
6
The Form of Rhetoric
unexpectedly, and shockingly (like a surprise party), and suspense meaning that which has been promised to appear but whose actual qualities have been kept secret (like a birthday gift). From this perspective, rhetoric is about how to convey specific facts, details, events, or beliefs by packaging them correctly and delivering them at the right time.7 Although this type of perspective certainly applies to press conferences, dramatic announcements, water-cooler conversations, and blockbuster films, it has only minimal relevance to understanding rhetorical persuasion. This is because persuasion requires a kind of movement from one place to another, a mental journey that begins at a familiar place and sojourns toward somewhere new; and no amount of isolated facts, however surprising or suspenseful, ever really moves us anywhere. Such facts merely startle us by suddenly appearing out of nowhere. This is all to say that to understand rhetoric one must adopt a different psychology, a “psychology of form,” meaning a state of mind that is less interested in gazing passively at already completed objects and more interested in participating in how something comes together over time. Following Kenneth Burke, form is not an empty space waiting to be filled in with content, but rather an entire arc of temporal experience with an artifact that first arouses and then fulfills desires and appetites in an audience. For him, not everything has form in this sense. Rather, a work has form insofar one part of the work arouses interest in what follows and then provides gratification. In rhetoric, form is thus achieved when the end of the speech satisfies the desires that are aroused at its beginning, thereby generating a feeling of movement ending in a powerful emotional consummation; both necessary for people to come to new beliefs and attitudes. For instance, when Martin Luther King Jr. announces that he has a dream, makes us desire to observe the meaning of that dream, and then places that dream before us in a way that brings about feelings of hope, belonging, and unity—that is form. By contrast, a speech that merely declares the content of a dream and then provides a list of supporting facts has only minimal form, as it relies instead on the audience’s intrinsic interest in the facts themselves to capture and keep their attention. In other words, for a speech to have form, the audience must feel as if they are being carried forward on a wave while swimming toward a destination, meaning that the speech’s words propel them forward (the wave) but also encourage them to participate in the movement itself (the swimming). Without this active participation by the audience to reach a destination with the speaker, persuasion is impossible because everybody stands still. Form is therefore not a quality of the speech itself in isolation; it is an accomplishment that occurs when a speech “works” with an audience to move them to a new place. At all times, therefore, one must keep in mind that no specific technique or combination of techniques can ever amount to “form.” Form is only attained when a speech conveys what John Dewey calls a “sense of qualitative unity” that comes about when one arranges “events and objects with reference to the demands of
7
See Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 33.
7
8
C hapter 1 The
Canons of Rhetoric
complete and unified perception.”8 By qualitative unity, Dewey means the feeling that one can sum up that entire arc of experience within a single term, as when one associates exhilarating with climbing a mountain, tragic with the death of a loved one, joyous with the family reunion at a holiday, or inspiring at the conclusion of a passionate speech. A speaker always wants someone to leave a speech feeling “That was a ____ speech!” in which the blank is filled with some single dominating quality that lingers with the listener even after the specific facts may have been forgotten. Although mastering the individual techniques is essential to becoming an eloquent speaker, one should never allow attention to the parts (the “matter”) to distract one from attending to the whole (the “form”). Perhaps one of the best efforts to translate this notion of form into a concrete rhetorical technique is Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. Alan Monroe was a professor of speech at Purdue University who developed a special sequence designed for policy speeches that encourage immediate action. Although its “method” is simply made up of basic public speaking strategies, Monroe’s sequence incorporates the strategies into a form that is explicitly based on arousing the audiences’ desires and then moving them, through the use of visual narrative, toward a promised satisfaction that results in concrete judgment and action. The five steps of attention, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action therefore follow neatly Burke’s understanding of form and conclude with Dewey’s understanding of qualitative unity. 1. Attention: Like any good introduction, get the attention and interest of your audience: “Little Margaret was an otherwise happy child. She liked television, she liked ice cream, and she liked to play with dolls. She also was six years old and weighed over one hundred pounds.” 2. Need: Another word for “problem,” need establishes the necessity to address some issue by graphically articulating why we “need” to act: “Childhood obesity is becoming a national epidemic. Over 30 percent of children under the age of eight are now considered obese. This leads to poorer school performance and chronic health problems.” 3. Satisfaction: Another word for “solution,” satisfaction lays out what is required to be done in order for audience members to feel that their needs have been satisfied: “We need to implement an aggressive health campaign in this nation that brings healthy lunches and active gym classes to the schools and also delivers a targeted marketing campaign to parents to encourage healthy eating and exercise.” 4. Visualization: This step relies on heightening emotions by visualizing the wonderful state of affairs that will occur after satisfaction: “With such steps, Little Margaret could achieve a more active and energetic lifestyle in which she and other children leave the couch to play outside in the fresh air and sun.” 5. Action: Now that the audience has been suitably inspired, this step tells them what they can do to help by laying out specific things to be done: “These changes must come from you. Become an active member in your school
8
John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree Books, 1934), 142.
The Form of Rhetoric
board and advocate changes at a local level while writing your congressional representative to support new health initiatives.” Because of the simplicity and clarity of the steps, there is almost no better method to start with than Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to begin to understand the importance of form to rhetorical persuasion. It is a method that applies not only to politics and social action but also to our everyday interpersonal interactions in which we try to motivate our friends to choose a college major, our family to go on vacation to a certain place, or our colleagues to support a new office policy that will increase sales and morale. The rest of this chapter will look at some of the most common techniques employed by the speaker to arouse and fulfill the desires of an audience by organizing them under the “Five Canons of Rhetoric.” These canons were formalized in the Roman work Rhetorica ad Herennium, written anonymously in the first century b.c. but generally credited to be the work of Cicero, a Roman orator and senator. These canons represented the five essential methods necessary to employ in creating a successful speech. Subsequent teaching of rhetoric, up to the present day, largely follows this organization. The author writes: The speaker, then, should possess the faculties of Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery. Invention is the devising of matter, true or plausible, that would make the case convincing. Arrangement is the ordering and distribution of the matter, making clear the place to which each thing is to be assigned. Style is the adaptation of suitable words and sentences to the matter devised. Memory is the firm retention in the mind of the matter, words, and arrangement. Delivery is the graceful regulation of voice, countenance, and gesture.9 These canons effectively summarize the basic rules of the game, and any student of rhetoric—no matter how naturally talented—must follow them to achieve success beyond accident or luck. Yet these rules are merely a precondition for participation, not a guarantee of success. Just as knowing the rules of baseball does not make one a good player, knowing the technique to “be humorous” in an introduction does not mean that one knows how to be funny to particular audiences in particular circumstances. The hard work comes in finding out what, exactly, is funny to whom and when, but this requires a great deal of wit, situational understanding, and insight into human nature. Handbooks can tell us where we might find these things, but they do not tell us what we will find or what to make of them.
9
Rhetorica ad Herennium (Loeb Classical Library, 1954). Available from the University of Chicago (accessed 16 April 2010).
9