Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

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Nonfluencies

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 Written texts give us a chance to polish our thoughts. But they come without the immediacy of ’embodied’ speech.

Researchers looking at manuscript copies of oral messages are often surprised to discover how broken, incomplete and scattered they can be.  Material written down is usually worked out to make an idea “scan.”  By contrast, conversation mostly happens “on the fly.” To see the second in the form of the first can be jarring. On the page, a conversation is full of thoughts that trail off, sentences left unfinished, pauses, irrelevant U-turns, and many “you knows” or “umms.”  Interestingly, conversation usually happens without much reference to hard information or confirmed facts.

And yet there is value in performing our attitudes in the scattered cadences of speech.

Functioning as the carrier of our own thoughts  is very different than sending them on their way in our absence.  We have increasingly embraced the idea of allowing what we think to exist only on the page or a screen.  But we often get more from communications that involve people ‘performing’ their passions. Our spoken rhetoric has a recognizable “signature.” The ways we say words can reveal our state of mind.  Some words are meant to be cradled as they are delivered.  Others are spoken as if in quotes, suggesting a personal distance we want to keep for the idea we are expressing.  And some sentences are initiated with so little conviction that we lose interest in finishing them. So we usually accept the messiness of the process as normal and revealing. The verbal riff that goes astray causes little worry.

Interestingly, stutterers sometimes report greater alarm over their momentary hesitations than those who listen to them. I had a college professor who tripped over the first syllables of words when he was his most animated. The small tic was actually effective. His nonfluencies signaled his enthusiasm for an idea.  His eyes would brighten as a worthy thought crossed his mind.  He’d begin to stammer a bit.  And soon his ideas would spill across the threshold of the verbal blockage at lightning speed. The effect was sheer eloquence.

Scriptwriters usually flatten the rough edges of conversation. The goal is to make every word count in the fragile medium of ear-based communication.  But some are able to suggest the serendipity and confusion that comes with words spoken in a rush. The best, like David Mamet, add depth and mystery to their stories by preserving the broken rhythms of natural dialogue. His terrific psychological thriller The Spanish Prisoner (1996) is a classic case.  The story about the theft of an industrial process is given depth by broken cadences of the characters’ interactions. Click below to see a representative scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjVk3Vjccps

It’s clear that nonfluencies are woven into the fabric of communication.  And there is something to cherish in the immediacy of embodied speech. But it’s also clear that we notice them more when oral speech is written down. The difference is a reminder that written prose is the nominal result of critical thinking. Words on the page or screen invite us to test and reconsider our thoughts. That’s usually a win for basic rationality, but not always. After all, the mindless rhetorical ejaculations from Twitter and elsewhere are also “texts.”

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The “Tragedy” Euphemism

Problem Practices, Rhetorical Mastery, , , , , ,

A rhetorical “covering” that allows us to miss important truths helps none of us, especially those who will lose their lives in the next mass shooting.

It’s an axiom of communication analysis that meaning resides in the receiver.  Words can be what communities want them to mean. Even so, when a term creates more fog than clarity, it overuse needs to be noticed.

The reporting in our national media has been calling the shooting deaths in Las Vegas “tragic,” as if the fates had some role to play in the bloody event. We are far too comfortable hearing man-made catastrophes like this massacre described with a term suggesting loss and grief, but deflecting the subject of agency.  The label is apparently meant to give an event the emotional gravity it it due. But its widespread usage lets Americans off the hook too easily.

Here’s what I mean. Americans love euphemisms. “Taking one’s own life” sounds slightly softer than “suicide.”  We ask directions to a “bathroom” when we need a toilet. These are perhaps harmless ways to moderate our language  to preserve the sensitivities of others. Yet we really must get over the kind of Victorian ‘covering’ of awful events that happens when a term effectively maintains a cultural blind spot. Regarding the event in Las Vegas, arguing direct culpability by a single innocent citizen may be too much. But no high-functioning society tolerates the kind of gun accessibility that exists in the United States. If one result is a “new normal” of deadly and routine mass shootings, then we all collectively bear some responsibility. The neutralizing euphemism of “tragedy” dims a light that needs to shine brightly into the dark corner of rampant gun violence.  Las Vegas is a less a tragedy than a  mass murder. It was domestic terrorism as a bloodbath.

To call an event “tragic” strips it of a focus on agents and means.  That’s a change from the oldest meaning of a tragedy, which was a theatrical form designed to let us witness flawed figures whose actions brought about their own demise. Think of Macbeth, Hamlet or even modern narratives of Richard Nixon. All have been rightly portrayed as participants in their own undoing. But we undo this emphasis on direct culpability by ignoring destructive and enabling social norms, giving ourselves unearned comfort in a term of compassion.

Of course the victims and families directly involved are justified in talking about their altered lives as a tragedy. But journalists have a duty to be more clear-eyed. A rhetorical “covering” that allows us to miss evidence of a culture that won’t change helps none of us, especially those who will lose their lives in the next mass shooting.