Rhetoric is the art of discourse, wherein a writer or speaker strives to inform, persuade or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. It is the art of identifying communication needs and strategically responding to them.
The rhetorical canons are a set of tools you can apply to preparing and performing speeches.
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Invention: Coming up with content
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Arrangement: Putting it in an order for an audience of listeners.
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Style: Finding the most effective language.
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Memory: Getting your speech into your head to support good delivery.
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Delivery: Performing the content effectively for this audience.
Speaking and writing are different mediums:
- Language is acquired; writing is learned.
- Language evolved; writing was invented.
- Language is ubiquitous; writing is not.
So, write speeches for the ear, not the eye.
Listeners need cues to easily and quickly decode talk:
- Contextual cues provide situational information.
- Prosodic cues (pitch, rate, etc.) provide auditory information.
Argument is a claim with warranted support:
- Claim: an assertion that you want the audience to take as valid.
- Support: evidence used to validate your claim.
- Warrant: What links the support to the claim.
Patterns to use to come up with arguments:
- Short term/long term
- Past/present/future
- Increase/decrease
- Cause/effect
- Division
- Definition
Support should show validity and provide details.
- Facts and statistics
- Examples and testimony
- Metaphors and analogies
Generally, aim for a diversity of support types.
- Subordination: all your key points relate to the topic.
- Coordination: key points work well together.
- Discreteness: key points shouldn't overlap.
- Craft short phrases
- Use evocative words
- My organization investigates biomedical industries.
- We can equip people to be better consumers.
- We push for industry improvements to make patient treatments easier.
- Put the key terms in important positions
- Use parallel phrasing
Practice your speech 3-7 times.
PSA (Public Speaking Apprehension) - is a communication-based anxiety where speakers, in response to an actual or expected presentation, experience physiological, cognitive, and behavioral responses.
Causes:
- We misinterpret our body’s signals.
- We misremember what happened.
- We misperceive what the audience saw.
How to reduce PSA:
- Systematic desensitization. Picture yourself in different speaking situations.
- Visualization. See yourself doing well in each of the four stages of speaking: anticipation, confrontation, adaptation, and release.
- Cognitive modification. Try to evaluate your fears.
- Practicing. You gotta log in the hours of practice.
What to focus on for good delivery:
- Breath control: we need a good volume of air, diaphragmatic breathing can help.
- Projection: try to expand the pharynx to add to your resonance,
- Pitch: maintain good contrastive tone.
- Rate and pauses: deliver important lines more slowly, use pauses and repetition to direct attention.
- Gestures: have controlled gestures, use gestures to augment and emphasize the content.
- Movement: be committed; your movement shouldn’t look unconscious; rather, more purposefully.
- Don’t use your slides as your notes.
- Don’t confuse your slides as a form of publishing.
- Keep slides simple.
- Limit the text and elements.
- Focus on one or two concepts per slide.
- Break up dense slides into multiple slides.
Persuasion - the deliberate attempt to affect audience beliefs and behaviors through communication. This definition implies that audiences have free choice to accept or reject our persuasion. Persuasion thus differs from force and coercion. Influence is a broader category that includes factors that lie beyond our deliberate control.
Good persuasion requires careful planning:
- Begin by assessing the board. Where is movement possible? Where is it blocked?
- Identify audience predispositions. Where and how do audience members agree or disagree?
- Identify your target audience. Who do you most want to reach?
- Identify realistic speech objectives. Given their predispositions, how do you want that target audience to move?
Aristotle’s three proofs:
- Logos - an appeal to logic, or something that seems logical.
- Pathos - an appeal to emotions.
- Ethos - an appeal to credibility.
Ethos is the performance of your credibility on an issue. Ethos is a long-term strategy aimed at making you generally trustworthy.
Ethos involves:
- arete / excellence - when speakers demonstrate their arete/excellence/dynamism they exemplify a valued trait (passion, commitment, etc.)
- phronesis / practical wisdom - allows an experienced person to strike upon the right course of action. Including lots of examples can help show depth of experience. Avoiding jargon can help show depth of understanding.
- eunoia / goodwill - showing that you have the audience’s interests in mind. You have good will towards the audience.
Good persuasion responds to questions of fact, policy, and value:
- Fact propositions: what is/isn’t, what happened or didn’t, etc.
- Value propositions: what is good/bad, moral/immoral, etc.
- Policy propositions: what we should do/avoid, good/bad procedures, etc.
Most issues are a mixture of these different types of claims.
Status quo - the existing state of affairs. What is currently in place?
Burden of proof - obligation to prove your assertion.
In law, the prosecution has the burden of proof and the defense has presumption. In argumentation, "those who assert should prove". If you are arguing for a change to the status quo, you have the burden to prove that action is better than inaction.
Legal standards for burden of proof (USA):
- Some evidence
- Reasonable indications
- Reasonable suspicion
- Reasonable to believe
- Probable cause for arrest
- Some credible evidence
- Substantial evidence
- Preponderance of the evidence (balance of probabilities) - the standard required in most civil cases
- Clear and convincing evidence
- Beyond reasonable doubt - typically applies in criminal proceedings
When thinking about advocating/opposing change, there are three key questions:
- Is there a need for change?
- What the plan to solve the need?
- Does the plan meet the need?
Stock issues address these questions:
- Ill: Is the problem you're addressing. It’s the need for a change.
- Quantitative ill: How big is the problem? Statistics and facts generally help show this.
- Qualitative ill: How bad is the problem? Stories and testimony generally help show this.
- Blame: Why does the ill persist? Blame is a blockage. What’s preventing the status quo from solving the problem?
- Structural inherency: A formal block, like an existing law.
- Attitudinal inherency: An informal block, like negative attitudes or simply a lack of awareness.
- Gap inherency: Existing cures are insufficient
- Cure: What should we do? The cure is the plan you’re proposing.
- Solvency: Does the plan solve the need?
- Workability: Is the plan feasible?
- Everything hinges on the cure. Ill and blame build to it; consequences flow from it.
- Consequences: What happens if we act? Consequences are what happens if/when we adopt the cure.
- Material consequences: How much does this cost?
- Social consequences: How might this change attitudes or interactions?
If you are arguing for change, you should prove most stock issues. Ignorance or apathy sides with the status quo. Meaning, if someone doesn't know about the issue, you have the burden to prove it to them. If you are arguing against change, you can disprove all the stock issues, but you may not have to.
Fallacies are deficient moves in argumentative discourse.
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Something is missing
- Begging the question: the speaker supports a claim with the claim itself. The argument lacks external support.
- Hasty generalization: the speaker lacks sufficient support for a claim.
- False dilemma: the speaker forces a complex situation down to only two options. The argument lacks a sense for all the reasonable courses of action.
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Flawed causality
- Slippery slope: the speaker identifies a chain of events, but doesn’t prove the individual steps. Also beware of Slippery slopy fallacy fallacy https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/717230770105028608
- Post hoc: the speaker mistakes a chronological sequence of events for a causal one.
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Bad evidence
- Ad populum: a claim rests only on popular support.
- Non sequiter: unclear relationship between claim and support.
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Bad response
- Straw argument: attacking an argument not really held by the opponent.
- Red herring: raising a distracting argument.
- Stylistic devices are equations for eloquence.
- Weave style into your speech; avoid jarring shifts from low to high style.
- Select some of your key words to build into your stylistic devices.
Stylistic devices:
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Sound repetition.
- Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds
- Consonance: The repetition of consonant sounds
- Alliteration: The repetition of initial consonant sounds.
- Asyndeton: Omitting normally occurring conjunctions.
- Polysyndeton: Inserting extra conjunctions.
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Phrasing repetition.
- Anaphora: Repetition at the beginning of phrases.
- Epistrophe: Repetition at the ends of phrases.
- Symploce: Repetition at the beginning and end of phrases.
- Style often shows up in threes. The first use begins the patter, the second use establishes the pattern, the third use resolves the pattern.
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Writing applause lines.
- Anadiplosis: Repeating a word at the end of one phrase at the beginning of the next.
- Antithesis: The pairing of contrasting words or ideas.
- Antimetabole: A pattern for antithesis, where the phases are structured: A B B A
- Maxim: A short, memorable phrase.
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"We shall fight on the beaches", Churchill, 1940, anaphora. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_shall_fight_on_the_beaches
- We shall go on to the end.
- We shall fight in France,
- we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
- we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
- we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
- We shall fight on the beaches,
- we shall fight on the landing grounds,
- we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
- we shall fight in the hills;
- we shall never surrender.
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This was their finest hour, Churchill, 1940, maxim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_was_their_finest_hour
- But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
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It takes a village, Hilary Clinton, 1996, anaphora. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintontakesavillage.htm
- to raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child,
- it takes a family.
- It takes teachers.
- It takes clergy.
- It takes business people.
- It takes community leaders.
- It takes those who protect our health and safety.
- It takes all of us.
- Yes, it takes a village.
- And it takes a President.
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Address at the Public Memorial Service for Robert F. Kennedy, Edward M. Kennedy, 1968, anaphora. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ekennedytributetorfk.html
- My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life;
- to be remembered simply as a good and decent man,
- who saw wrong and tried to right it,
- saw suffering and tried to heal it,
- saw war and tried to stop it.
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John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Education
Education is the keystone in the arch of freedom and progress. Nothing has contributed more to the enlargement of this nation's strength and opportunities than our traditional system of free, universal elementary and secondary education, coupled with widespread availability of college education.
For the individual, the doors to the schoolhouse, to the library and to the college lead to the richest treasures of our open society: to the power of knowledge - to the training and skills necessary for productive employment - to the wisdom, the ideals, and the culture which enrich life - and to the creative, self-disciplined understanding of society needed for good citizenship in today's changing and challenging world.
- Introduction to Public Speaking https://www.coursera.org/learn/public-speaking
- Public Speaking: Speaking to Inform https://www.coursera.org/learn/inform-speech
- Public Speaking: Speaking to Persuade https://www.coursera.org/learn/persuade-speech
- Public Speaking: Speaking to Motivate https://www.coursera.org/learn/speak-to-inspire-ceremonial-motivational-speeches