Squeeze a slice of today’s society into a petri dish, watch it for a while, and you’ll inevitably realize that most of those brightly colored little clusters fluttering in the slime are powered by a potent and barely visible drive from to dominate. Raise the lens another fold or two and you’ll notice that these same, now larger, multi-motivated groups spend virtually all of their time trying to penetrate, twist, and manipulate the minds of every one of the millions of fools. free floating cells contained in the same large gray gelatinous slime that clouds the dish.
(Disregarding the metaphor for the sake of clarity: interest groups, political parties and corporations, in order to influence legislation/get funding/gain power/generate revenue, need to present their positions and messages persuasively to attract audiences.) public support/maintain customer loyalty).
Roll the time machine back 2,500 years and you’ll see that while the technology isn’t exactly what it is today, most of the best penetrating and twisted tactics have stayed the same for millennia.
That is why Aristotle’s Rhetoric should be a must-read for all well-rounded modern professional communicators.
The introduction of a novel way of directing society, democracy, in the V century BC. C. placed political power within the reach of all who could influence and kill juries and assemblies. Ergo, the demand for media training, the art of speaking and presenting persuasively, exploded (as, I would imagine, it did for sales training when humanity first became aware of the business of bartering/trading). Over the next century, textbooks on argumentation, methods of arousing emotions, and select figures of speech flew off the shelves as fast as papyrus stalks are pulled from the ground.
According to former University of Toronto classics professor GMAGrube, many of these works, particularly Rhetorica Ad Alexandrum, displayed completely cynical and amoral attitudes, concerned only with how to use arguments and rhetorical devices to best effect, regardless of intention. It is as an attack against this amoral background that Aristotle’s Rhetoric must be appreciated.
Plato, before Aristotle, said that if Rhetoric was to be an art, its practitioners required knowledge both of the human soul and its different parts and functions, and of different kinds of arguments and their appeal to different kinds of men. Aristotle offers this in the first two books of the Rhetoric. In the third, he deals with style, a very important topic, on which the rest of this article will dwell, citing with some liberties, a series of selected examples of the advice offered:
These three things should point to: the metaphor (ie, the loss of the cities’ youth during the war was as if spring had been removed from the year); antithesis (ie, in crossing the Hellesport and digging through Mount Athos, they sailed over the land and marched over the sea); and vivacity.
The style and delivery, while really superfluous, need to be deployed due to the depravity of the audience. The power of the written word depends on style rather than content.
The first principle of style is to use good Greek (English, French), also to use specific rather than general terms, and to avoid ambiguity, unless one deliberately seeks it (ie, has nothing to say). What we write should be easy to read and easy to speak.
Speech does not do its job unless it is clear. Actual nouns, adjectives, and verbs contribute to clarity.
One must appear to be speaking in a natural and unstudied way, because what is natural is convincing, what is studied is not. People are wary of rhetorical tricks as much as they are wary of adulterated wine.
The epithets add something. They can emphasize the worst or embarrassing side of things, or their best aspect. Orestes, for example, can be called the matricide or avenger of his father.
An audience always shares the sentiments of a passionate speaker, even when there is nothing in what he says.
Metaphors, antithesis, humor, parody, clarity (or lack thereof), style, epithets (‘Branding’), passion, action, movement, music, rhythm, repetition, name recognition, shaping your message to your audience , all play important roles in the business of persuasion, all were originally identified by Aristotle. And, while he may not have anticipated how technology now allows us to create worlds of competing Boorstinian pseudo-realities, much of his wisdom on rhetoric is at stake in the media culture we live in today.
