Rhetorical Stance

Wayne Booth is considered one of those principally responsible for the revival of the study of rhetoric, a skill that was valued by the Greeks in their debates and later re-visited by enlightenment-era neo-classicists. His concern for the matter couldn't have been more timely; the late 1950's and early 1960's saw the first televised debates (such as those between John F.

Kennedy and Richard Nixon,) the popularity of shows such as 'Meet the Press, a substantial growth in the legal profession, and a new emphasis on the study of media by MacLuhan and others. Because Booth is proposing a formula for the proper criticism of essays, we are tempted to approach his essay with an attitude of extreme scrutiny; we are thus able to discern the critical from the merely hypocritical.

Booth illustrates the necessary construction of a speech or essay as a trichotomy: the author must present facts, appeal to his audience, and maintain a proper tone. As a nod to the progenitors of rhetoric, he gives these aspects of proper speech Greek names; he calls them logos, pathos, and ethos. He begins his essay by deriding a hapless graduate student for being a mediocrity, boring his audience with attempts at over-intellectualization.

He refers to the stance that this hapless student makes as the Pedant's Stance: the essay is too factual and dry. Pedantry is considered by most people to be pretentious and boring; one is reminded of the child that memorizes baseball statistics or the gangly teenager who memorizes lines from Star Trek episodes and never dates. Booth's pedant is a brain without charm, unfortunately, he claims, academia is replete with such personalities.

Pedants make the fundamental mistake of refusing to consider the concerns of their audience or make their speeches clever and instead regurgitate data in order to please themselves. Any research-intensive field is plagued with this problem. The second rhetorical position he critiques is the Advertiser's Stance. This stance has too much pathos; an essay geared towards the audiences tastes without making a point.

Such essays may often include pleasantries in order to win someone over: we might see this as the Dale Carnegie approach, as Carnegie considered all constructive criticism utterly pointless. This is the approach favored by salesmen; it completely gears a set of ideas at an audience. We are left to think: if the audience is pleased, from where can we derive our objective impetus for criticism? It is usually under more careful analysis that such speeches or essays are revealed to be devoid of content.

The third rhetorical position is the Entertainer's Stance. Such a stance has too much ethos; the deliverer is more concerned with matters of form and poise than of content. Such a speaker or writer could be witty or clever without saying anything of value.

The entertainer doesn't even have to say anything agreeable in the 'advertiser' sense to be entertaining: there are plenty of pointless songs on the radio that are geared at teenagers in love that people outside the target audience listen to, just as foreigners often watch American movies despite having little understanding of the social or cultural contexts. He also describes someone with Ethos as being one who maintains a proper tone of voice.

When we audit Booth's rhetoric, what strikes us is that the ideas he presents are fairly cut and dry. In many respects, he takes efforts to not be too pedantic for his audience, which mostly consists of university students. He is concise and fairly articulate. He doesn't use much humor in his essay, but he does use a number of fairly well-defined allegories, which serve the same purpose.

He repeats a popular gimmick in academia; breaking a certain problem, such as the nature of public speaking, into a simplistic illustration with only three permutations. People have been doing this for centuries; even things as special and beautiful as love were broken down into easy-to-digest components by academics that possessed a desire to over-simplify for a broad-based target audience. The best example of such a breakdown proving to be wildly wrong was that of the elementals: Earth, Water, Wind and Fire.

The litmus test of Booth's ability to illustrate a proper architecture for rhetorical speech is to be found in whether or not its conceptual employment is universally applicable. The three stances Booth illustrates are in many respects three of six - one can.