Disappointment or Misunderstanding

I was somewhat disappointed by this chapter. In reflecting on the reading, I gravitated towards the opening of the section on Delivery of Written Discourse on page 411:

“Are rhythm and physicality confirmed to the spoken word? Does written discourse extend to the eyes and ears of the audience? Certainly it is impossible to stomp one’s feet in written prose, yet there are ways in which written discourse nevertheless attends to the ears and eyes of the audience” (411).

After reading this, I think I mentally uttered a resounding—Yes! This is the stuff that I live for! Being an English teacher to a population of significantly apathetic teenagers who see words and writing as solely a utilitarian means to get a grade, I had hoped that this would provide some epiphany as to how to encourage them to be as powerful and animated in their writing as they are orally.

And then discussion of punctuation, spelling, and grammar followed.

Some of this discussion, as a teacher, I disagreed with namely because this is the very advice that provided my students with misconceptions about things like comma placement that causes their written, academic writing to be incorrect. An example being the advice to “read your writing aloud, like the ancients did, and mark the places where you pause. Put punctuation in these places” (413). Grammatically this is incorrect; when students do this, they end up separating subjects from verbs or further complicating the clarity of their message.

Another section that caused me pause was the section on page 416 on Correct Rules II: Traditional Grammar and Usage. Here, I found the writing to be greatly biased against certain approaches to grammar that have been and are currently taught in our education system. The authors even admit these biases, “A more biased and yet more accurate definition is this: usage rules are the conventions of written English that allow Americans to discriminate against one another” (417). The fact that the authors admit their bias, but then depict this bias as more accurate, left me with a negative outlook on this whole section.

This is not to say that I disagree with some of the philosophies in this section, but the strong, overt opinions that came across from the authors distracted me from the content that I typically would have agreed with. I think that this was an odd choice to end the book in this manner. So much of the earlier chapters allowed for the authors to show their biases. Which they probably did, yet not in such an overt manner; and I appreciate that. In material that is meant to be an educational source, in particular a textbook, personally I like to see as little influence from the authors’ personality and opinions as possible.

However, after my experiences in this class, I realize that in searching for a work free from personal input and bias, I might just be searching for the impossible. Everything is based in rhetoric and it is nearly impossible to find a piece of writing, art, architecture, or the like that does not present its crafter’s views in some manner. Yet, why make your views so apparent and risk offending in a textbook about rhetoric and the chapter on delivery in the section on grammar, nonetheless.

Coming full circle to my original point, I think that my initial negativity in approaching this chapter was because I wished for it to be more like the chapter on style. Style in my view is how figuratively to make feet stomp in your writing. Tropes such as repetition, figurative language, figures of thought and the like accomplish this task. So then delivery must be simply how you make your arguments look and sound.

Ahhh! Hence why much of the chapter focused on appealing to the eye and ear in both oral, written, and digital discourse, “All delivery is concerned with two different things, namely voice and gesture, of which one appeals to the eye and the other to the ear, the two senses by which all emotion reaches the soul” (409).

So in approaching the canon of delivery, it is necessary when dealing with rhetoric to appeal more to the spoken word or how your writing rhythmically flows than how it serves a grammatically correct purpose:

“The early origins of punctuation were therefore rhetorical, and while punctuation functions these days to mark more than pauses for breathing, it is nonetheless important to bear in mind the rhetorical value of punctuation. It seems to us that practitioners of modern rhetoric sometimes forget the rhetoric of punctuation in favor of rules about sentence structures” (412).

In reflecting back on this statement, I whole heartedly agree with its premise. Yet, the fact that the discussion on these sentence structures was biasedly delivered consumed so much of my energy in reading this chapter, that had it not been for this blog post—perhaps I would have never came to this realization.

On an ending note, a highlight of this chapter for me was the commentary on font types affecting ethos, “some fonts, like the ones designed to resemble the type used in comics, are not really appropriate for serious matters” (421). Comic Sans is probably the most hotly debated font in society today. I instantly remembered the ridicule of the Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cavaliers, in writing a letter which featured the font dominantly:

Cavs owner's letter mocked for Comic Sans font

Clearly illustrating the point that Crowley and Hawhee make in this section about the importance of how you present you information, and it also confirms how delivery, as the fifth canon, is not any less important in exposing your thoughts and opinions than the earlier four.