Words Like Loaded Pistols by Sam Leith

• Rhetoric is, as simply defined as possible, the art of persuasion: the attempt by one human being to influence another in words. It is no more complicated than that.
• When we think we’re speaking plainly, we’re in fact filling our every sentence with rhetorical trickery. All of us are rhetoricians by instinct and training.
• Language happens because human beings are desire machines, and what knits desire and language is rhetoric.
• The whole art of oratory was the most and greatest writers have taught, consists of five parts: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. These five parts roughly correspond to the sequence in which you might imagine putting a speech--or, more broadly, any persuasive appeal--together.
• Invention is doing your homework: thinking up in advance exactly what arguments can be made both for and against a given proposition, selecting the best on your own side, and finding counterarguments to those on the other.
• There will almost always be more lines of argument available than it will be possible or prudent to use. The skill is to find the ones that will hold most sway with your intended audience.
• The ethos appeal is first among equals. How you present yourself--ordinarily the job of the opening few moments of your address--is the foundation on which all the rest is built. It established the connection between the speaker and the audience, and it steers how that speech will be received.
• Your audience needs to know (or to believe, which in rhetoric adds up to the same thing) that you are trustworthy, that you have a locus standi to talk on the subject, and that you speak in good faith.
• Your arguments will tend to prosper if they are founded on the common assumptions of your audience--or, in special cases, if the audience is minded to defer to your authority. Likewise, your hopes of stirring the audience to anger or pity depends on the extent to which they are prepared to identify with the anger or pity yourself seem to feel.
• The most effective off-the-cuff speeches are premeditated, and the best premeditated speeches appear off the cuff.
• If this is the ground on which your argument stands, logos is what drives it forward: it is the stuff of your argument, the way one point proceeds to another, as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one, but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one. If in the course of it, you can make your opponents sound venal or even deranged, so much the better.
• The syllogism is a way of combining two premises and drawing a fresh conclusions that follows logically from them.
• The enthymeme is like that, only fuzzier. It is, if you like, a half-assed syllogism; typically one that, rather than having its premises right out in the open, has a hidden assumption somewhere.
• Another extraordinarily common, effective persuasive appeal in logos is analogy.
• It can’t be repeated too often: what you’re talking about when you talk about logos in persuasion not proof absolute. That is why, when you look at judicial rhetoric in the UK and US, the standard stipulation is that “proof” means not certainty, but the ability to demonstrate a set of propositions “beyond reasonable doubt”.
• For the conspiracy theorist, the very paucity of evidence to support their contention is what passes as proof. The lack of evidence is evidence of a cover-up.
• The wise persuader starts from one or two commonplaces he knows he has in common with his audience--and, where possible, arrives at one too.
• Pathos is the appeal to emotion--not just sadness or pity, which is what a film critic will tend to mean when describing this or that scene as “full of pathos”, but excitement, fear, love, patriotism, or amusement.
• Emotion in a persuasive appeal is only effective inasmuch as it is shared emotion. One of the reasons laughter is so effective as a tool for persuasion--and any stand-up comic who has ever seen off a heckler with a zinging one-liner knows this--is that laughter is involuntary assent.
• It’s worth saying: an appeal to pathos is not in and of itself a “cheat”. Feeling--and through it, fellow feeling--is the basis of pretty much everything that most of us regard as important in being human. Without is, we wouldn’t fall in love, nurture children, build communities, enact laws, remember our dead, or throw dinner parties. Feeling may not be logical, but to sway feeling is every bit the legitimate object of rhetoric.
• Logos usually takes its place as number three in the trinity of persuasive appeals--the small voice of reason blown hither and thither by the emotional muddle of ethos and pathos.
• Successful persuasion depend on an audience’s being able to identify with the speaker--and we are much more often like the devil than we are like the almighty.
• Ad Herennium sets the parts of a speech out as follows:
• Exordium: This is where you set out your stall. It’s the point at which you establish your bona fides as a speaker, grab the audience’s attention, and hope to keep it. The strongest up-front ethos appeal will tend to come here.
• Narration: This is where you levelly and reasonably set out the area of argument, and the facts of the case as generally understood.
• Division: Here’s where you set out what you and your opponents agree about; and the areas on which you disagree.
• Proof: This is where you set out the arguments supporting your case. Here’s where logos comes to the fore.
• Refutation: More logos. This is, as the name suggests, the part of an orations in which you smash your opponent’s arguments into little tiny pieces.
• Peroration: The grand finale. If you have flourishes, prepare to flourish them now, and if you have tears, prepare to shed them. In the peroration, you sum up what has gone before, reiterate your strongest points, and drive to your conclusion. It’s usually the place for the pathos appeal to reach its height.
• The purpose of the exordium is to put the audience into a receptive and attentive frame of mind. It’s helpful to tell them--like the nightclub host who greets you, “Ladies and gentlemen: have we got a show for you tonight!”--that important, new, and unusual matters will be offered to their ears. And it’s helpful to make clear why it’s you who will be discussing them.
• Ad Herennium want the narration to have three qualities: brevity, clarity, and plausibility. Note above all others the third of these. When setting out the facts of the case, the orator is no less able to shape the debate this purposes than he is when openly mounting an argument--indeed he is probably more so because he speaks under cover of ostensible neutrality.
• Narration is the who, what, when, and where of the case--the solemn reading from the policeman's notebook before he fur begins to fly.
• The narration is one of the prime areas of a speech in which you are able to spin, and framing the terms of the debate is half the battle won.
• As this squirm-making instance illustrates all too well, the time to define your terms is in advance, not as part of a rear-guard action. Narration isn’t the most exciting part of a speech--but it can be subtly influential on its outcome.
• Technical proofs are the arguments that the orator contrives. Nontechnical proofs are there already: available to be sued rather than needing to be invented.
• Rhetoric is about connecting with an audience; that means finding shared assumptions. And those shared assumptions are usually pretty conservative: we don’t reinvent the world from scratch every time we float a theory.
• Proof and refutation are another of these linked pairs: In most adversarial situations, to prove your own case is to disprove your opponent’s--through rhetoric being as slippery as it is, the task is seldom precisely symmetrical.
• The skilled orator is out not necessarily to knock down his opponent’s case tout court--but to misrepresent his opponent's case in such a way as to make it easier to attack.
• You can indignantly answer a charge nobody made, or fiercely deny something adjacent to the truth.
• If your own case is weak, you may even want to reverse the order in which proof and refutation come: reduce your opponent to smoldering rubble in the hopes that nobody then notices how feeble the case you mount afterward is.
• The nature of the Western tradition in rhetoric (as in dielectric) is adversarial: it is better at dealing with either/or propositions then and/also possibilities or neither/nor.
• Recognize which battles you have no choice but to lose; then lose them on your own terms.
• As Aristotle tells us, pithanon tini pithanon: “What is convinginc is what one is convinced by”.
• The key thing about invective or ad hominem attack is that it is a sort of reverse ethos appeal: the purpose is to isolate your opponent from the community.
• As a rhetorical concept, decorum encompasses not only the more obvious features of style, but kairos, or the timeliness of a speech, the tone and physical comportment of the speaker, the commonplaces and topics of argument chosen, and so on. It is a giant umbrella concept meaning no more nor less than the fitting of a speech to the temper and expectations of its audience.
• Linguists talk about the phenomenon of “accommodation”--which is the way in which we seek to adapt our own language to fit into a speech community.
• Subcultures spawn languages, and there is decorum to how those languages are used.
• So decorum is, literally, speaking your audience’s language.
• Humor can be very persuasive.
• How a piece of rhetoric sounds--and this applies just as much whether it is heard out loud or scanned by the inner ear while being read on the page--is vital to its effectiveness. Here, again, we see where rhetoric and poetics share territory. Why does sound matter? It matters in rhetoric for the same reason that it matters in poetry.
• Poetry comes out of oral tradition, and it has long been suggested that most of the effects of sound and rhythm that characterise formal verse--from the alliterative and stress-based forms of anglo-saxon poetry, to end-rhymed classical prosody--originated as devices to make long poems stick in the mind.
• Repetition (because rhyme, alliteration, and the tick-tock of a pentameter are all, at root, no more than forms of respiration) makes things memorable, as we know from learning our times tables.
• Public speaking, like writing, is in many ways a confidence trick.
• One of the ways of harnessing that feeling of connectedness to history, as we’ll see later in the discussion of American political rhetoric, is to borrow and repurpose the resonant phrase of the past. This differs from ordinary plagiarism in that to be detected--subliminally at least--is half the point. Echoes of orators past are a way of taking possession of them--of implying that you are channeling those orators and all they represent.
• In most cases, with written rhetoric, the writer is remote from his or her audience so that dialogic aspect of the exchange is different. The audience's reaction is anticipated and hopefully shaped by the writer, but it can’t be taken into account during the event. A writer “reads” his audience in advance, not in real time.
• For someone giving a speech in person, however, reading the audience is a constant process.
• The question of delivery--it’s called actio in Latin and hypokrisis in Greek-is traditionally subdivided into control of the voice and control of physical gesture.
• For most of those of us who really are unaccustomed to speaking in public, probably the single most important point about delivery is pace. Most people, particularly when nervous, talk too fast. Slowing it down until it’s on the verge of feeling unbearable is just about the way to go.
• “Never laugh at your own jokes” is usually good advice.
• Even the professional die on stage from time to time.
• The best advice remains: be yourself--but that injjunction, as the commerce between rhetoric delivery and acting suggests, can be unpacked. The good speaker plays himself--and does so using the total immersion technique of a dedicated method actor. Good delivery ensures that what the orator is saying seems to come from his heart. Fool yourself first, and the audience will follow.
• Finally, be mindful that, though nobody wants to hear you announce, “I shall be brief”, they will want you actually to be brief.
• Aristotle said there were three types of rhetoric--widely known now as the three branches of oratory--and his distinction between them remains a useful one. One type seeks to persuade people about a course of action in the future, one seeks to persuade people of a version of events in the past, and one seeks to delight and impress in the present.
• The language of the speech is a tissue of allusion and quotation, drawing on stores of common knowledge and idiom that will resonate with the several audiences to whom the speech is addressed.
• The importance of staying in control of where you stand vis-a-vis your audience is vital if what you want to convey about the points at issue is to come across. That’s the truth. Handle it with care.
• Before it is anything else, a speech needs to be suited to the moment of its speaking.
• A good speechwriter doesn’t put words into a politician's mouth, and an effective politician won’t let one do so: for the former, the task of writing against character is too difficult; for the latter, the risks of putting someone else in charge of your mouth are too high.
• Rhetoric is everywhere language is, and language is everywhere people are. To be fascinated by rhetoric is to be fascinated by people, and to understand rhetoric is in large part to understand your fellow human beings.
• The Three Appeals
• Ethos
• Pathos
• Logos
• The Three Branches of Rhetoric
• Forensic (Judicial) -- Associated with the past
• Deliberative (Political) -- Associated with the future
• Epideictic or Display Oratory -- Associated with the present
• The Five Canons of Rhetoric
• Invention--Discovery of proofs
• Arrangement--Shaping of argument
• Style--Giving argument a form in language
• Memory--ABsorbing the argument
• Delivery--Putting the argument across
• The Six Parts of a Speech
• Exordium
• Narration
• Division
• Proof
• Refutation
• Peroration