The Rhetorical Stance1IIiiiiil..1IiiiII@

Wayne C. Booth

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 14, No.3, Annual Meeting, Los Angeles,1963: Toward a New Rhetoric. (Oct., 1963), pp. 139-145.

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The Rhetorical StanceWAYNE C. BOOTH

LAST FALL I had an advanced graduatestudent, bright, energetic, well-inform­ed, whose papers vvere almost un­readable. He managed to be pretentious,dull, and disorganized in his paper onE1nma, and pretentious, dull, and dis­organized on Madame Bovary. On TheGolden Bowl he was all these and ob­scure as well. Then one day, toward theend of term, he cornered me after classand said, "You know, I think you wereall wrong about Robbe-Grillet's Jealousytoday." We didn't have time to discussit, so I suggested that he write me anote about it. Five hours later I foundin my faculty box a four-page polemic,unpretentious, stimulating, organized,convincing. Here was a man WllO hadtaught freshman composition for severalyears and who was incapable of commit­ting any of the more obvious errorsthat we think of as characteristic ofbad writing. Yet he could not vvrite a-decent sentence, paragraph, or paperuntil his rhetorical problem was solved-until, that is, he had found a definitionof his audience, his argument, and hisown proper tone of voice.

TIle word ~~rhetoric" is one of thosecatch-all terms that can easily raisetrouble when our backs are turned. As itregains a popularity that it once seemedpermanently to have lost, its meaningsseem to range all the way from some­thing like ~~the whole art of writing onany subject," as in Kenneth Burke's

Author of The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961),Mr. Booth is a member of the English De­partment at the University of Chicago.

The Rhetoric of Religion, through "thespecial arts of persuasion," on down tofairly naITO'" notions about rhetoricalfigures and devices. And of course \vestill have with us the mealling of"enlpty bombast," as in the phrase"merely rhetorical."

I Supfpose that the question of therole of rhetoric in the English course ismeaningless if we think of rhetoric ineither its broadest or its narrowestmeanings. No English course couldavoid dealing \vith rhetoric in Burke'ssense, un-der whatever nrone, and on theother hand nobody would ever advocateanything so questionable as teaching"nlere rhetoric." But if we settle on thefollowing, traditional, definition, somereal questions are raised: "Rhetoric isthe art of finding and employing themost effective means of persuasion onany subject, considered independentlyof intellectual mastery of that subject.';­As the students say, "Prof. X knows hisstuff but he doesn't kno\v how to put itacross." If rhetoric is thought of as theart of "putting it across," considered asquite distinct from mastering an "it"in the first place, \ve are immediatelylan-ded in a bramble bush of contro­versy. Is there such an art? If so, whatdoes it consist of? Does it have a con­tent of its own? Can it be taught?Should it be taught? If it should, howdo we go about it, head on or obliquely?

Obviously it would be foolish to tryto deal with many of these issues intwenty minutes. But I wish that there\vere more signs of OUf taking all ofthem seriously. I wish that along with

139

140 COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

our new passion for structural linguis­tics, for example, we could point to thedevelopment of a rhetorical theory thatwould show jllSt how knowledge ofstructural linguistics can be useful toanyone interested in the art of persua­sion. I wish there were Inore freshmantexts that related every principle andevery rule to functional principles ofrhetoric, or, where this proves impos­sible, I wish one found more syste­matic discussion of why it is impossible.But for today, I must content myselfwith a brief look at the charge thatthere is nothing distinctive and teach­able about the art of rhetoric.

The case against the isolability andteachability of rhetoric may look at firstlike a good one. Nobody writes rhetoric,just as nobody ever writes writing. Whatwe write and speak is always this dis­cussion of the decline of railroading andthat discussion of Pope's couplets andthe other argument for abolishing thepoll-tax or for getting rhetoric back intoEnglish studies.

We can also admit that like all thearts, the art of rhetoric is at best verychancy, only partly amenable to syste­matic teaching; as we are all painfullyaware when our 1:00 section goes mis­erably and our 2:00 section of the samecourse is a delight, our own rhetoric isnot entirely under control. Successfulrhetoricians are to some extent likepoets, born, not made. They are alsodependent on years of practice and ex­perience. And we can finally admit thateven the firmest of principles aboutwriting cannot be taught in the samesense that elementary logiC or arithmeticor French can be taught. In my firstyear of teaching, I had a student whostarted his first two essays with a swearword. When I suggested that perhapsthe third paper ought to start withsomething else, he protested that hishigh school teacher had taught himalways to catch the reader's attention.

Now the teacher was right, but theapplication of even such a firm princi­ple requires reserves of tact that weresomewhat beyond my freshman.

But with all of the reservations made,surely the charge that the art of persua­sion cannot in any sense be taught isbaseless. I cannot think that anyone WI10

has ever read Aristotle~s Rhetoric or,say, Whateley's Elements of Rhetoriccould seriously make the charge. Thereis more than enough in these and theother traditional rhetorics to prOvidestructure and content for a year-longcourse. I believe that such a course,when planned and carried throughwith intelligence and flexibility, can beone of the most important of all educa­tional experiences. But it seems obviousthat the arts of persuasion cannot belearned in one year, that a good teach­er will continue to teach them regard­less of his subject matter, and that weas English teachers have a special re­sponsibility at all levels to get certainbasic rhetorical principles into all ofour writing assignments. When I thinkback over the experiences which llavellad any actual effect on my writing, Ifind the great good fortune of a splendidfreshman course, taught by a man whobelieved in what he was doing, but Ialso find a collection of other experi­ences quite unconnected 'vith a speci6cwriting course. I remember the instruc­tor in psychology who pencilled oneword after a peculiarly pretentiouspaper of mine: bull. I remember the daywhen P. A. Christensen talked with meabout my Chaucer paper, and made meunderstand that my failure to use ef­fective transitions was not simply atechnical fault but a fundamental blockin my effort to. get him to see my mean­ing. His off-the-cuff pronouncementthat I should never let myself write asentence that was not in some wa,Yexplicitly attached to preceding andfollowing sentences meant far more to

THE RHETORICAL STANCE 141

me at that moment, when I had some­thing I wanted to say, than it couldhave meant as part of a pattern of suchrules offered in a writing course. Sim­ilarly, I can remelnber the devastatinglessons about my bad writing that Ron­ald Crane could teach with a simplequestion mark 011 a graduate selninarpaper, or a pencilled "Evidence forthis?" or "Why this section here?" or"Everybody says so. Is it true?"

Such experiences are not, I like tothink, simply the result of my being alate bloomer. At least I find my col­leagues saying such things as HI didn'tlearn to write until I beca.me a nevvs­paper reporter," or "The most importanttraining in writing I had ,vas doing adissertation under old Blank." SOIne­times they go on to say that the fres}l­man course was useless; sometimes theysay that it was an indispensable prepa­ration for the later experience. Thediversity of such replies is so great as tosuggest that before we try to reorganizethe freshman course, ,vith or withoutexplicit confrontations ,vith rhetoricalcategories, we ought to look for what­ever there is in common among our ex­periences, both of good writing and ofgood writing instruction. vVhatever wediscover in such an enterprise ought tobe useful to us at any level of ourteaching. It will not, presulnably, de­cide once and for all what should bethe content of the freshman course, jfthere should be such a course. But itmight serve as a guideline for the de­velopment of widely different programsin the widely differing institutional cir­cumstances in which ,ve must work.

The common ingredient that I find inall of the writing I admire-excludingfor now novels, plays and poems-issomething that I shall reluctantly calltIle rhetorical stance, a stance 'Vvhichdepen·ds on discovering and 111aintainingin any writing situation a p'roper bal­ance among the tlu'ee elements that are

at work in any cOlnmunicative effort:the available arguments about the sub­ject itself, the interests and peculiaritiesof the audience, and the voice, the im­plied character, of the speaker. I shouldlike to suggest that it is this balance, thisrhetorical stance, difficult as it is todescribe, that is our main goal as teach­ers of rhetoric. Our ideal graduate willsb'ike this balance automatically in anywriting that he considers finished.Though he may never COlne to thepoint of finding tIle balance easily, h.ewill know that it is \vhat makes thedifference between effective communi­cation and mere ,vasted effort.

What I mean by the trlle rhetorician'~

stance can perhaps best be seen by con­trasting it with two or three corruptions,unbalanced stances often assunled bypeople who think they are practicingtIle arts of persuasion.

The first I'll call the pedanfs stance;it consists of ignoring or underplayingthe personal relationship of speaker andaudience and depending entirely onstatements about a subject-that is, thenotion of a job to be done for a particu­lar audience is left out. It is a virtue, ofcourse, to respect the bare truth ofone's subJect, and there may even besome subjects which in their very lla­ture define an audience and a rhetoricalpurpose so that adequacy to the sub'jectcan be the whole art of presentation.For example, an article on· ~'The relationof the ontological and teleologicalproofs," in a recent Journal of Religion,requires a minimum of ada.ptation ofargunlent to audience. But most subjectsdo not in themselves imply in any neces­sary way a purpose and an audienceand hence a speaker's tone. The writerwho assumes that it is enough Inerelyto write an exposition of what he hap­pens to know on the subject will pro­duce the kind of essay that soils ourscholarly journals, written not for read­ers but for bibliograpl1ies.

142 COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

In 11ly first year of teaching I taug11ta whole unit on C'exposition:J' withoutever suggesting, so far as I can remem­ber, that the students ask tllen1selves\vhat their expositions were for. So theyvvrote expositions like this one-I'vesaved it, to teach me toleration of mycolleagues: the title is "Family relationsin More's Utopia." "In this theme I\vould like to discuss some of the rela­tionships \vith the family which Thomas~10re elaborates and sets forth in hisbook, Utopia. The first thing tIlat I\vould like to discuss about family rela­tions is that overpopulation, accordingto More, is a just calIse of war." And soon. Can you hear that student sneeringat me, in this opening? What he is say­ing is sornething like "you ask for ameaningless paper, I give yOll a mean­ingless paper." He kno\vs that he has noaudience except me. He knows that Idon't \vant to read his summary of falu­ily relations in Utopia, an'd he kno\vsthat I know that he therefore has norhetorical purpose. Because he has notbeen led to see a question which heconsiders worth answering, or an audi­ence that could possibly care one wayor the other, the paper is worse than nopaper at all, even though it has no gran1­111atical or spelling errors and is organ­ized right down the line, one, two,three.

An extreme case, you may say. Mostof us ,vould never allo,,, ourselves thatkind of empty fencing? Perhaps. But ifsome carefree foundation is willing tofinance a statistical study, I'ln ,villingto wager a month's salary that we'dfind at least half of the suggested topicsin our freshman texts as pointless asmine was. And we'd find a good dealmore than half of the discussions ofgrammar, punctuation, spelling, andstyle totally divorced from any notionthat rhetorical purpose to some degreecontrols all such matters. We can offerobjective descriptions of levels of usage

from now until graduation, but unlessthe student discovers a desire to saysOluething to somebody and learns tocontrol his diction for a purpose, we'vegained very little. I once gave an assign­n1ent asking stu'dents to describe thesame classroom in three different state­rnents, one for each level of usage.They vvere obedient, but the only ones\vho got anything froin the assignmentwere those who intuitively impoited therhetorical instructions I had overlooked-sucll purposes as "Make fun of yourscholarly surroundings by describingthis classroom in extremely elevatedstyle,'" or "Imagine a kid from the slumsaccidentally trapped in tl1ese surround­ings and forced to write a descriptionof this room." A little thought mighthave shown me how to give the wholeassignment some human point, andtherefore some educative value.

Jnst ho\v confused we can allo\v our­selves to be abollt such matters isshown in a recent publication of theE'ducational Testing Service, called"Factors in Judgments of Writing Abili­ty." In order to isolate those factorswhich affect differences in gradingstandards, ETS set six groups of readers-business men, writers and editors,lawyers, and teachers of English, socialscience and natural science-to readingthe same batch of papers. Tllen ETSdid a hundred-page "factor analysis"of the amount of agreement and dis­agreement, and of the elements whichdifferent kinds of graders emphasized.The authors of the report express acertain amount of shock at the discov­ery that the nledian correlation \vas only.31 and that 94% of the papers receivedeither 7, 8, or 9 of the 9 pOSSible grades.

But what could they have expected?In the first place, the students weregiven no purpose and no audience whenthe essays were assiglled. And then alltllese editors and business men an'dacademics \vere asked to judge the pa-

THE RHETORICAL STANCE 143

pers in a complete vacuum, using onlywhatever intuitive standards they caredto use. I'm surprised that there wasany correlation at all. Lacking instruc­tions, some of the students undoubtedlywrote polemical essays, suitable for thepopular press; others no doubt imaginedan audience, say, of Reader's Digestreaders, and others wrote \vjth theEnglish teachers as implied audience;an occasional student with real philo­sophical bent wOllld no doubt do acareful analysis of the pros and cons ofthe case. This would be graded low, ofcourse, by the magazine editors, eventhough they would have graded it higllif asked to judge it as a speculativeconbibution to the analysis of the prob­lem. Similarly, a creative student whohas been getting A's for his personalessays will write an amusing colorfulpiece, failed by all the social scientistspresent, though they would have gradedit Wgh if asked to judge it for \vhat itwas. I find it shocking than tens ofthousands of dollars and endless hoursshould have been spent by students,graders, and professional testers analyz­ing essays and grading results totallyabstracted from any notion of p·urpose­ful human communication. Did nobodyprotest? One might as well assemble agrOllp of citizens to judge students' ca..pacity to throw balls, say, ,vithout tellingthe students or the graders whetheraltitude, speed, accuracy or form wasto be judged. The judges \vould bedrawn from football coaches, hai-Iaiexperts, lawyers, and English teachers,and asked to apply whatever standardsthey intuitively apply to ball throwing.Then we could express astonishmentth·at the judgments did not correlatevery well, and we could do a factoranalysis to discover, 10 and behold, thatsome readers concentrated on altitudesome on speed, some on accuracy, som~on form-and the English teachers weresimply confused.

One effective way to combat thepedantic stance is to an·ange for weeklyconfrontations of groups of studentsover their own papers. We have donefar too little experimenting with ar­rangements for providing a genuineaudience in this way. Short of suchdevelopments, it remains true that agood teacher can convince his studentsthat he is a true audience, if his com­ments on the popers show that somesort of dialogue is taking place. AsJacques Barzun says in Teacher inAmerica, students should be made tofeel that unless tIley have said some..thing to someone, they llave failed; tobore the teacher is a worse form offailure than to anger him. From thispoint of view we can see that tllecharts of grading symbols that mar eventhe best freshman texts are not the in­nocent time savers that we pretend.Plausible as it may seem to arrange formore corrections with less time, theyinevitably reduce the student's sense ofpurpose in writing. When he sees in­numerable W13's and PI9's in the mar­gin, he cannot possibly feel that the artof persuasion is as important to hisinstructor as when he reads personalcomments, however few.

This first perversion, then, springsfrom ignoring the audience or over­reliance on the pure subject. TIle sec­ond, which might be called the adver­tiser's stance, comes from undervaluingthe subject and overvaluing pure effect:how to win friends and influencepeople.

Some of our best freshman texts­Sheridan Baker's The Practical Stylist,for example-allow themselves on oc­casion to suggest that to be controver­sial or argumentative, to stir up anaudience is an end in itself. Sharpenthe controversial edge, one of thelTIsays, and the clear implication is thatone should do so even if the truth ofthe subject is honed off in the process.

144 COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION

This perversion is probably in the longrun a more serious threat in our societythan the danger of ignoring the alldi­ence. In the time of audience-reactionIneters and pre-tested plays and novels,it is not easy to convince students ofthe old Platonic truth that good persua­sion is honest persuasion, or even ofthe old Aristotelian truth that the goodrhetorician must be master of his sub­ject, no matter how dishonest he maydecide ultimately to be. Having toldthem that good writers always to somedegree accommodate their arguments tothe audience, it is hard to explain thedifference between justified accommoda­tion-say changing point one to the finalposition-and the kind of accommoda­tion that fills our popular magazines, in\vhich the very substance of wllat issaid is accommodated to some precon­ception of what will sell. "The publica­tion of Eros [magazine] represents amajor breakthrough in the battle forthe liberation of the human spirit."

At a dinner about a month ago I satbetween the wife of a famous civilrights lawyer and an advertising con­sultant. "I saw the article on your bookyesterday in the Daily News," she said,"but I ·didn't even finish it. The title ofyour book scared me off. Why did youever choose such a terrible title? No­body would buy a book with a titlelike that." The man on my right, ,vhomI'll call Mr. Kinches, overhearing myfeeble reply, plunged into a conversa­tion with her, over my torn and bleedingcorpse. "Now with my last book," hesaid, "I listed 20 possible titles and thentested them out on 400 business men.The one I chose was voted for by 90percent of the businessmen." "'That'swhat I was just saying to Mr. Booth,"she said. "'A book title ought to grabyou, and rhetoric is not going to grabanybody." "'Right," he said. "My lastbook sold 50,000 copies already; I don'tknow how this one will do, but I polled

200 businessmen on the table of con­tents, and . . . "

At one point I did manage to ask himwhether the title he chose really fit thebook. "Not quite as well as one or twoof the others," he admited, ~'but thatdoesn't matter, you know. If the book is-designed right, so that the first chapterpulls them in, and you keep :tern in,who's going to gripe about a little in­accuracy in the title?"

Well, rhetoric is the art of persuading,not the art seeming to persuade by giv­ing everything away at the start. Itpresupposes that one has a purpose con­cerning a subject which itself cannot befundamentally modified by the desire topersuade. If Edmund Burke had decid­ed that he could win more votes inParliament by chOOSing the other side­as he most certainly could have done­,ve would hardly hail this party-switchas a master stroke of rhetoric. IfChurchill had offered the British "peacein our time," with some laughs thrownin, because opinion polls had shownthat more Britishers were "grabbed" bythese than by blood, s\veat, and tears,we could hardly call his decision a signof rhetorical skill.

One could easily discover other per­versions of the rhetorician's balance­most obviously what might be calledthe entertainer's stance-the willingnessto sacrifice substance to personality andcharm. I admire Walker Gibson's ef­forts to startle us out of dry pedantry,but I know from experience that hisexhortations to find and develop thespeaker's voice can lead to empty color­fulness. A student once said to me,complaining about a colleague, "I soonlearned tllat all I had to do to get an A\vas imitate Thurber."

But perhaps this is more than enoughabout the perversions of the rhetoricalstance. Balance itself is always harderto describe than the clumsy poses thatresult when it is destroyed. But we all

1-1-IE RHETORICAL STANCE 145

experience the balance whenever wefind an author "vho succeeds in chang­ing our minds. He can -do so only if heknows more about the subject than wedo, and if he then engages us in theprocess of thinking - and feelillg - itthrough. Wllat makes the rhetoric ofMilton and Burke and Churchill greatis that each presents us with the spec­tacle of a man passionately involved inthinking an important question through,in the company of an audience. T'hongheach of them did everything in his pow­er to make his point persuasive, includ­ing a pervasive use of the many emo­tional appeals that have beell falselyscorned by many a freshman composi­tion text, none would have allowed him­self the advertiser's stance; none wouldhave polled the audience in advance to'discover which position would get thevotes. Nor is the highly individual per­sonality that springs out at us fron1their speeches and essays present forthe sake of selling itself. The rhetoricalbalance among speakers, audience, andargument is with all three men habitual,as we see if we look at their non-politi-·cal writings. Burke's work on the Sub­lime and Beautiful is a relatively un­impassioned philosophical treatise, butone finds there again a delicate bal­ance: though the implied author of thiswork is a far different person, far lessobtrusive, far more objective, than theman who later cried sursum corda tothe British Parliament, he permeateswith his p,hilosophical personality hisphilosophical work. And thougIl thesigns of his awareness of Ius audienceare far more subdued, they are still

here: every effort is made to involve theproper audience, the au·dience of philo­sophical minds, in a fundamentally in··teresting inquiJ:y, and to lead thenlthrough to the end. In short, becausehe \vas a man engaged with men in theeffort to solve a human problem, onecould never call "vhat he wrote dull,however difficult or abstruse.

Now obviously the habit of seekingthis balance is not the only thing wehave to teach under the heading ofrhetoric. But I think that everythingworth teaching under that heading findsits justification finally in that balance.Much of what is now considered irrele­vant or dull can, in fact, be broughtto life \\Then teachers and stu'dents kno\vwhat they are seeking. Churchill reportsthat the most valuable training he everreceived in rhetoric "vas in the dia­gramming of sentences. Think of it! Yetthe diagramming of a sentence, regard­less of the grammatical systelTI, can bea live subJect as soon as one asks notsimply "How is this sentence put to­gether," but rather "WIlY is it put to­gether in this way?" or "Could therhetorical balance and hence the de­sired persuasion be better achieved by\vriting it differently?"

As a nation we are reputed to writevery badly. As a nation, I would say, weare more inclined to the perversions ofrhetoric than to the rhetorical balance.Regardless of what we do about thisor that course in the cUlfriculum, ourmandate would seem to be, then, tolead more of our students than we no\vdo to care about and practice the truearts of persuasion.