Never in the field of human conflict, every kingdom divided against us.
Not what your country can do for you.
One of the most memorable things ever written in English.
Wow.
As a writer, you're always picking words.
And great writers have always understood this.
If you have to have one rule, it's... David, you know what everybody's problem is?
What?
Too many words.
You're trying to say something in public right now and you want to get noticed and you want to get remembered and you want people to say wow, look at that.
It's so hard because there's a million other people all trying to do it at the same time.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So my project is trying to see what we can learn about how to deal with that problem by looking at people historically who've said things that work that way before.
Not because there is an Internet, but because there is kind of an Internet of time.
That time is kind of a tournament and things that still sound great after a long time after they were said.
You can say that's something that stood out.
That's something that was well said.
That's something that was notably eloquent.
You think of all the billions of utterances, and a few have risen to the surface and still we still look back at those things and say wow.
Well, if you're thinking about how to make people say wow now, sometimes it helps, I think, to look at how people have managed to say that over the years.
So let's talk about tools for the purpose.
That's what I want to do.
Well, one of the things you said to me is that everyone who speaks language is basically bilingual.
Everyone who speaks the English language.
Right, that's the thing.
Yeah, what do you mean by that?
What i mean by that is uh, in english there's basically two, almost always two words for everything.
There's sort of a bigger word, a more, a fancier one, and there's a smaller, humbler one.
So if i say a word, a verb like create, that'd be the fancier version of a of another verb, what's the other word make, make right.
Or if i say, if i say acquire, get to get right.
Or if i say i'm going to permit somebody to do something, what's that?
Let Yeah, you could let them do it.
What were you thinking?
No, it was what I was thinking.
It's just what I was thinking.
But you could do it with other kinds, with nouns.
What's a fancier word for light?
Illumination.
Exactly.
And a fancier word for something's last in order.
The final.
The final one.
Right.
Exactly.
Right.
Correct.
Exactly.
We got it.
David, you're rocking.
So...
Why is this important?
So this is not just a coincidence.
English is made out of two languages that were sort of tributaries into it.
You've got languages from invaders, from what we would now think of as Germany, who brought their language with them.
And then, about 500 years later, you have the invasion of the French, and they bring their language with them.
And they're the invaders.
They're the aristocrats.
So you've got these two coexisting languages.
You've got the French of the new invaders and you've got the Germanic language that was already there.
And it just mixes together for hundreds of years, and it turns into the language we have now.
So for everything in English that you want to say that matters, there's usually...
A word that sort of derives from old German and a word that derives from French, and before that from Latin.
The Germanic words we call Saxon usually, and the other ones we can call Romance words because they're from Latin, which is the language of Rome.
So it's Romance or Latinate words.
Uh, but you've got these two families and as a writer, you're always picking words.
Every time you want to say something, every sentence.
Right, you're choosing words and you're usually doing it unconsciously, you're not thinking about what word to use, but there's always a choice, and once you realize that that there are all these choices to make, you can start Playing with the choices and making them more deliberately to get the effects you want.
And great writers have always understood this, and they've always done it.
For good writers, if you have to have one rule is prefer Saxon words to Romance words or Latinate words.
Now, you don't need to actually know the difference.
Say, well, I don't know the difference between a Germanic word and a Saxon.
Well, look, prefer simple words to fancy ones.
But even if you don't know anything about Latin or French, you can figure out which words are which without too much trouble.
The words that are from French and before that Latin.
They're usually words that are easily turned into other parts of speech and expanded.
So acquire is the verb, but it can become acquisitive or acquisition.
With a Latinate word, you can often put a T-I-O in it.
You can create a form that puts a T-I-O in on that.
You can't do that with get.
For acquire, you can say acquisition.
For get, The word get, I mean, instead of acquiring it, you get it.
There's no way to put T-I-O-N on that.
You could say getting or gotten or something, but you can't do as much.
That's how Saxon words work.
They just sound different also.
Saxon words usually are shorter words.
You know, we think about our four letter words for expressing things colorfully.
Those are usually Saxon words, because Saxon words tend to be short and they've got hard sounds in them, like CK.
Think about how many of those words we're thinking about have those sounds in them.
And yeah, that's because they're basically Germanic and sharper.
And that's what you want when you want to say something with that tenor.
If you want to say something politely, you use the word from French.
They came in English from French.
So if you want to say it bluntly, you say kill.
But if you want to be polite about it, you say execute or terminate.
Because execute and terminate came into English from French.
And you can tell that because they can become words like execution, termination.
But kill doesn't do that.
Yep.
Just kill.
Killing.
Show me some examples.
Yeah, let's do some examples.
So if you want to say something really important, you say it in Saxon.
So, and God said, let there be light.
And there was like Genesis 1-3, one of the most memorable things ever written in English.
It's an amazing utterance in part because what do we have here?
Let's see, 11 Saxon words and nothing but.
And the King James Bible is very famous for that, for the tremendous simplicity of the language.
It's all one syllable words, words that have been in English for a very long time.
And I think that the authors of the King James Bible, the translators, they understood instinctively, and probably more than instinctively, why that was so valuable.
Because you're compressing something so significant and profound and important into words that are so humble that it creates this sense of strength and power that you just wouldn't have with fancier words.
Some people think you need fancier Latinate words to create a sense of strength and power in your writing.
You sometimes wonder, why do people say acquire when they could say get?
Why do they say create when they could say make?
Well, even the drafters of the Bible said in a couple of verses earlier God created the heaven and earth.
They thought about that too.
But it's always a choice.
Which way do you say it?
They could have said God made it.
Well, they decided not to do that.
If you're the drafter, which way do you say it?
It's a good question.
But because you're not drafting the King James Bible, you're drafting whatever you're drafting.
But asking that kind of question, which is, there's always a choice.
Why do I want to use this word?
Which word has the connotation I want?
And often people will pick the Latinate word because they think it sounds a little more impressive.
Because think of the heritage of it.
The Latinate words go back to the original aristocracy that came in from France.
So they still have that whiff of class or sometimes of pomposity.
And some people go for them because they think it'll make them sound smarter.
And it turns out that when you really know what you're talking about, one way to know is you can explain yourself in Saxon words.
That's how you really know when you understand something well enough, it seems to me.
But in any event, it's just an example of the tradition of heavily Saxon English in the King James Bible, which is a very interesting thing we can come back to.
Let me show you a different example that I know is dear to you, David.
I know you'll enjoy, everybody will enjoy this.
Famous words from Winston Churchill.
Let me read it.
Yeah, you want to read it?
You do it.
We shall fight on the beaches.
We shall fight on the landing grounds.
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets.
We shall fight in the hills.
We shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill, 1940.
House of Commons.
That's right.
So England's facing the prospect of invasion.
There's no actual recording of this speech.
Very much too bad.
There's a recording of him saying it later.
But, in any event, what do you?
There's a lot of.
This is one of the most famous speeches ever given in english and you know to what does it owe its immortality?
I mean, it sounds amazing now, it sounded amazing.
Then people read that and they say that's a speech.
There's a lot of reasons for it.
Uh, one of them is the, of course, this device that uh, in ancient times in greek was called anaphora, which is repeating the same beginning at the start of different sentences or clauses.
We shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight.
That's what most people think of when they think of this.
But there's more going on there.
And real quick, what does the repetition do for us?
Oh, we'll spend some more time on that.
But the repetition really captures the ear.
The beginning and the end of a sentence are the most important parts of it, the parts that tend to ring in the ear the strongest.
And so, starting repetitive sentences repeatedly with these words, it leaves those words hanging in the ear.
It's what you remember.
And you remember some of the details about where the fighting was going to occur.
You remember it was the beaches.
You remember the others.
But what you remember is we shall fight.
Well, real quick.
I almost think of it like a soccer game, where the game is normally at a certain volume and then the announcers get really loud as you get close to a goal.
And I think of this repetition as being the announcers getting really loud.
And the reason why I think of that analogy is you don't want the entire speech to be this kind of repetition.
He wants this to be main point, to basically say you, to basically get you to a place where you're listening up, to say this is important, because those words at the end are the crucial moments.
That's when the goal is scored.
But through repetition, he's subliminally signaling to you listen, this is important, man.
I think that's a fantastic point.
Uh, i mean part of what was another way to put what you're saying, it seems to me is uh, that the ordering of words and the uses of devices like repetition it can almost work like punctuation, would like an exclamation point, would or like a rising tone of voice, would.
I mean, this speech must have been amazing to hear.
It's amazing to read.
And one reason it's amazing to read is that, by using the repetition of phrases, it creates in the ear this thing you're describing.
That's why it reminds you of the announcer.
Because you're hearing that and not reading it.
But by reading this it creates some of that same feeling that the intonation would, if you could hear it out loud.
It's very interesting that way.
So this is a beautiful utterance for many reasons.
And it is surrounded by additional beautiful language that we can't all cover at once.
But one thing to notice about this that's remarkable is 32 Saxon words in a row.
That might not sound like a lot, but you go try to go write 32 Saxon words in a row.
And to say something that's worth saying.
It's not as easy as it sounds.
In English there's a natural.
I don't actually know the ratio, but there's sort of a range of natural ratios between Saxon and Latinate words in ordinary speech.
And to go 32 words in a row with no Latinate words.
Now you might think oh, he wasn't thinking about that.
Oh, he almost certainly was.
Churchill wrote about this.
He said... I mean, he wrote about rhetoric, and he said...
In English, the oldest words, the Saxon words are the ones that strike deepest.
And when you really want to strike deep, you stay there.
He said, you don't use the recent entries into the language that came here from French.
I mean, the funny part is, the recent entries came in, you know, only eight or nine hundred years earlier.
Right.
Way too recent for us.
But but he knew all he cared about that and he thought a lot about it.
So when he wrote this.
I don't know if he was sitting there thinking, gee, which was the etymology of that word.
Nobody thinks about etymology.
That's not the issue.
But he knew the sound he wanted.
He knew the force and strength he wanted.
He went back to the same well that the translators of the King James Bible went back to, which is keep it very simple and very Saxon.
The more profound the substance is.
And it really... creates a beautiful effect.
The profundity of the substance of what he's saying, packed into this long series of extremely simple unpretentious, unimpressive words.
It's like the words burst at their seams, you know?
Very beautiful.
Okay, as long as we're doing Churchill, how about this?
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Said in the House of Commons a few months after the last one.
This is another of those things anybody who's ever read or heard this remembers it.
This is said during the Battle of Britain, where the few he's talking about are pilots in the air over Britain fighting off Nazi air raiders.
It's a great piece of English.
For many reasons, there's a lot going on here.
It's just like the last one, where there's a certain amount of repetition.
So much, so many, so few.
That.
That's part of, just as in the previous one we had an Afro with the repetition at the start of the different sentences.
But there's also another drama going on in here, which is just between the kinds of words he's using.
Human conflict.
Those are Latin, a French words.
They can become things like humanity or conflictual.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
Was so much owed by so many to so few.
Everything after that, every word is Saxon.
Right.
And it's mostly one syllable words.
So he starts out, never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
This is a technique that a lot of great writers have used.
A tremendous effect, which is starting out with setting up the run of very simple words that you finish with with something a little fancier at the start to create that contrast.
It's sort of like you said with the football announcers.
You don't want everything to be the same in rhetoric.
You want to set up the Saxon words with the non-Saxon words.
So the ear has been hearing these other things and it's primed to really be struck by the contrast when those words come in, those little one-syllable stony Saxon words.
There's something else I wanted to mention about this as long as we're talking about it.
If anybody who's made it with us this far probably cares about words there.
So I wanted to point out, of course, this sentence isn't a passive voice, right?
It's a passive construction.
Owed by so many to so few.
You know something's passive when it either says...
It's owed by, or you could add by to the end of it.
But in this case, it's passive.
And you'll read in so many books about English, avoid the passive voice over and over again.
Whatever you do, don't use the passive voice.
It's the crutch of bad writers.
Of course, sometimes it is.
But some of the most beautiful things in English have been in the passive voice.
All men are created equal.
Wow.
Created equal.
You could put by on the end of that, couldn't you?
You could.
They didn't want to make it active.
He didn't want to make this active either.
If he made it active, what would he have said?
Never in the field.
I mean, because you could imagine drafting it.
Hmm.
This is passive.
My editor has told me I should never use passive constructions.
Perhaps I should change this.
You imagine the new Winston Churchill saying never in the field of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few?
That would be non-passive.
You could say that wouldn't be as good, because when you say it that way, when you say it this way, the many and the few are right next to each other, with so much owed by, and then what's left over is so many to so few.
So you get that beautiful contrast and the rhythm's better and different.
I'm not here to say the passive voice is this thing every people should use unthinkingly.
I just my view about the passive voice is just make sure you've got a good reason.
But that's what i'd say about everything in writing.
There's no rule except make sure you've got a good reason for what you're doing.
As far as i'm concerned, that that's the master rule.
I mean, i follow all rules of style and grammar and encourage others to, but If you need to break a rule well, just make sure you know why you're doing it.
Yep.
All right.
Ready for another?
Bring it on.
Back to the Bible.
Let me read it.
Go.
Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.
One of the things that the last one had, that this one has too, is a sense of contrast.
Yep, and you have black and white, light and dark throughout the bible as well, and there was so many, so few.
And here we have against itself.
Let's see, does this one have the contrast in the same way or no?
Well, i think it does.
But i mean, let's put it this way, does anything strike you as saxon about this?
Are there, are there moments shall not stand, is what i see, right?
I mean so so, so part of what you're, part of what i'm trying to show, show here is in the last couple of examples i've showed.
This is that in english i said if you have to have one rule, let it be.
Prefer saxon words to latin eight words.
But the great writers, they don't use one rule, they use saxon old, you know simple, old-fashioned words and bigger ones, and they mix them a little bit to create these beautiful effects by contrast.
So every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.
Why don't I tell you that's Latin.
It's got the TIO and right on the end of it.
Right.
And same with divide.
It could be division.
Right.
This is a fancier passage in every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.
And this is also the King James Bible.
Right.
All these Bible examples are King James Bible, which has had such a gigantic influence on the, on the language, in such wonderful ways.
And we'll do an example right now.
Next slide.
You're going to see the slides.
We don't use slides around here.
This isn't school war.
All right.
Just look at how the two halves of this end.
Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, Latinate.
And every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.
And it comes down to this close.
And that's a very classic rhetorical pattern.
It's just like the previous one, where we talked about the field of human conflict, is the Latinate beginning.
And then never so much been owed by so many to so few.
Saxon, Saxon, Saxon.
Same general idea here.
First say it.
Notice how these sort of restate each other a little bit, just on a different scale.
Start it out Latinate, but bring the sentence to a close.
If you're trying to think about advice for writing, the idea would be Saxon words tend to work better than Latinate words to create forceful, memorable prose if they're properly arranged, but especially at the end.
Simple Saxon words are a great way to end a sentence or a paragraph, especially one that wasn't all that Saxon beforehand.
Finishing that way really leaves an impression and those words really stand out because of the contrast in sound and style.
It's a very subtle thing.
Nobody's going to pause and think, oh, look at that, they finished with Saxon words.
What they might just think is, that was well said.
All right.
Now, I promised... discussion of the influence of the bible a great example is the influence of the king james bible on abraham lincoln who read the bible i think more or less upset the king james bible more or less obsessively that in shakespeare and lincoln if you ask me was the uh greatest master of prose we've ever had in our public life so it's very interesting to think about how did he get that way like how did lincoln become lincoln and the answer is you know thousands of hours of immersion in Shakespeare in the King James Bible.
How about that?
Not what you think a president's spending their time on, but that's what he was spending his time on.
Right.
Isn't that amazing?
It's amazing to think about now.
Think about presidents who hold up with their Shakespeare in the Bible.
All right.
But look what he said.
This is right after Lincoln had received the Republican nomination for Senate in Illinois.
And slavery, of course, was the The topic of the day.
So this before he's president, before he's even running for president, he's running for Senate against Stephen Douglas.
It's going to be this race is going to rivet the whole country.
It's going to set him up to run for president.
And he gets up after getting the nomination and he says, I do not expect the union to be dissolved.
I do not expect the House to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
Here, I mean, this is a very obvious example.
There are a lot of interesting ones that are less obvious of the influence of the Bible on the way that Lincoln wrote and spoke.
There's all these cadences and word choices and phrases that you can hear in his writing and speech are echoes of the of the King James Bible that he was reading all the time, and sometimes Shakespeare too.
His attachment to the Bible is better known, but the Shakespeare attachment.
We can talk about it later or another day.
But here you can just see he's basically quoting the excerpt from Matthew that we saw a minute ago, although there's another passage just like it in Mark, but it doesn't make any difference.
Again, start at the end.
The most important part of a sentence is typically the end.
So you want to work, if you think about impact, work backwards from the end of the sentence.
It will become, or the passage, it will become all one thing or all the other, okay?
The classic Saxon finish.
But it's more than that.
Notice how he's basically repeating what he said.
Lincoln loved to say things twice.
We said at the beginning, everybody in English speaks two languages.
And he says it first in, it's like he says it first in this language, then in that language.
Imagine a politician who says it in Spanish and says it in English.
Right.
Like he says it in Latinate, then he says it in Saxon.
Because he's trying to appeal to the mind and the ideals, and then he wants to get you in the gut, in the heart.
He wants you to feel it.
So he'll say, I do not expect the union to be dissolved.
Union and dissolved are Latinate.
I do not expect the house to fall.
That is Saxon.
And it's basically repeating the same.
He's just saying the same thing twice, once more poetically, once more biblically.
But I do expect it will cease to be divided, Latinate.
It will become all one thing or all the other.
It will cease to be divided is the same thing as saying it will become all one thing or all the other.
A modern editor would probably cross one out.
You're saying it twice.
Say, I know I'm repeating it.
I'm speaking two languages.
I'm saying it in Latinate that I'm saying it again in Saxon.
Yeah.
And that's what he did a lot.
And if you see his speech, say, well, and Churchill does the same thing.
He'll say it.
Then I'll basically repeat it.
When you think about it, you say, you know, those two sentences are almost saying the same thing.
This one's got the longer words in it and the other's more words of one syllable, or it's more picturesque.
Maybe it's a metaphor.
But that's often what these really memorable speakers and writers do to create impact is they don't say it once?
They say it twice.
They say it differently in different kinds of words that appeal to different capacities of readers and listeners.
And that's a very useful idea when you're trying to think about how to get through to somebody.
You may have to say it in more than one language.
So Latin, then Saxon, and end with the Saxon.
Yeah, well, just the alternation is powerful.
That's what I'm trying to say is that if you read simple books about how to write good English, they'll just tell you prefer simple words, prefer Saxon words.
And of course, that's true as a preference.
But the really great effects aren't created by just going in one direction.
They're created by contrast, by mixing elements.
It's like in music.
Chords aren't that interesting.
What's interesting is the chord change in music.
Right, and it's like that in english.
I mean, you can just stick to simple and you at least want to make a fool out of yourself.
But if you want to get beyond that, but beyond just being efficient, to be memorable and eloquent, you've got to be a student of contrast.
I think because that's what all the the great writers understand, either instinctively or through study or both is that it's is, is it?
Anything that's great is tends to be greater when it's set off against what it isn't, because that prepares the ear for it, it lets you be struck by it.
You know we only really detect differences.
You know we human creatures.
So uh, lincoln was a great artist with differences and with writing language that used those differences to really uh, create memorable stuff.
All right, oliver wendell holmes jr said this in one of his opinions Wow.
Now, so many people have said things like this historically.
But this is one of the expressions of this idea that's really stood the test of time.
That's a heck of a quote.
Yeah.
People quote this.
They remember it, but I just think about how many efforts there have been to express this idea.
Why does this one rise to the top?
And I think there's a lot of reasons, but one of them is just what we've been discussing.
Look at how it ends.
Remember, always start at the end when you think about impact.
Freedom for the thought that we hate.
Wow.
That's a run of hard Saxon words.
It's a great way to end, especially with that last word, freedom for the thought that we hate.
That last word is the one that rings in your ear.
He sets it up that way.
Punch in the face.
Right.
But then look what comes before that.
The beginning of this is pretty Latin-y, right?
Principle, constitution, imperatively, right?
Attachment.
That feels like the kind of writing I read in school.
Right.
So you're reading that and you're thinking I mean, maybe you're being uplifted by it, but it's just like Lincoln.
He's starting out with this sort of more Latinate wording that kind of appeals to the mind.
You really need to use your mind to get this.
You've got to think about what he's saying, because he's using concepts, and you've got to translate the concepts into things that matter to you.
But then he restates it.
It is the principle of free thought.
He then restates.
And then he said, let me boil this down to you in Saxon language, okay?
You don't want me to put it in a highfalutin way?
Let me put it this way.
Freedom for the thought that we hate.
Get it?
That's the principle I'm talking about.
I'll say it to you in Saxon words.
And here, you don't have to think about it.
It's not conceptual.
Everybody gets it immediately.
That's the thing about Saxon words.
It's like you metabolize them instantly.
You talk about hate and um, you feel it.
Yeah, you feel you feel that word.
You know it was to use a latin word like there must be the difference between, uh uh, hate and and and hatred, enmity.
You know enmity means that, but but you gotta, you gotta think about it in a minute.
You gotta think about hate everybody else.
That means right in the gut, and that's what, that's what saxon words tend to be like.
So you reserve them, and after and so, and so obviously the starkest word in the sentence is the last word in the sentence.
And so I say again why does this utterance hold up over time?
Well, Oliver Wendell Holmes was a real craftsman.
He was the son of a very famous literary figure in 19th century America.
And Holmes is, I think, the best writer American law has ever had.
But he had the most beautiful collection of judicial opinions, but also letters.
If you want to study varieties of great English, you sort of want to apprentice yourself to somebody who's worth it.
Abraham Lincoln's worth it.
You read Lincoln and you really think about how it sounds and why.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is like that too.
If you like law, he's somebody you could apprentice yourself to.
You could think about why did he write it that way?
And Holmes didn't linger forever over his writing.
He wrote Standing Up.
He probably didn't spend a lot of time on this.
He didn't need to.
He just grew up understanding it because he was immersed in the environment.
He had the genetic gifts of just extreme sensitivity and he knew, by the time he said all this, it was time to wrap it up at the end, which is down to earth, if you want to make your point, sure?
Yeah, all right, enough of that.
How about a change of subject?
We've been talking about saxon at latin, eight words.
But if you study rhetoric which is my bag and this is uh, If your readers enjoy this sort of thing, they got a whole book they can read.
Let me just do an unapologetic plug for your book.
I never do this, but I... If you insist.
No, I absolutely love your books.
They're so simple.
They're so fun to flip through.
And everyone who's serious about writing should have definitely rhetoric and style.
Just like lying over their house and you can flip through them.
I just love those books.
But David, what about the metaphor book?
I haven't read that one.
I just really like the other two.
Well, I appreciate your putting in a good word for the books.
He said you could flip through them and it's very true.
I wrote these books to try to make them what i would call browsable reference books, where you can pick it up and open and learn from it and enjoy it.
So it's not like if you get the book you got, you got the prospect of i've got to go read 300 pages to get the point.
You can spend 10 minutes with it and you'll be 10 minutes better off in your knowledge of rhetoric.
Okay, enough about the books.
I want to talk about a different rhetorical device than we have yet discussed.
It's called epistrophe.
And here we have an example from Lincoln.
So will you take it away?
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
So this is Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 1863.
So this is five years after the ones that we were talking about earlier.
That's right.
It's five years later.
Now we're not worried about the house being divided in a civil war.
We're in a civil war.
And it's a few months after the Battle of Gettysburg, which is the bloodiest battle of the Civil War.
About 7,000 people are killed and tens of thousands of others are maimed.
So he comes and he makes this extraordinary speech.
And if we wanted to look at the speech through the lens of the last topic, we could.
It's a very Saxon piece of English.
We've already talked about Lincoln and Saxon language.
So let's just point out another thing going on here.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but can never forget what they did here.
Ending with here and here.
That's a device called epistrophe.
Epistrophe means ending uh, consecutive sentences or clauses with the same word or words, the same word or phrase.
It's sort of the opposite of anaphora, when we talked about that we shall fight on the beaches speech that churchill did.
That's a classic case of anaphora.
That's sort of.
That's starting with the same words we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight.
This is the opposite.
It's ending with the same word.
Good to have both tools, because the start and the end of a sentence are really the most important positions in it for rhetorical emphasis.
Now the ending, if anything, is more important, because the last thing you hear for purposes of that sentence and therefore it can ring in the ear.
So I think that's why I always talk about starting at the end.
But in any event, Lincoln loved epistrophe.
And if you read him, you'll see that he often comes back to this.
And the King James Bible likes it too.
There are some famous examples there.
But in this case combining the Saxon approach with the here here ending.
It's a very resonant and, in this case, a very somber thing to say.
Of course, there's this little irony in it because uh, the world has long remembered uh what, what he said there, and i don't know if it's remembered as well what they did here, so he may have had it backwards, but it was a beautiful thing to say.
Uh, speaking of epistrophe, i promise you that lincoln liked it and use it elsewhere.
He even used it in the same speech that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Yeah.
Well, what's cool about this is not only is it the same speech, but by the people, for the people, and then of the people before those.
I hear that all the time in government.
I actually didn't know that it came from this.
Is this the original version of that?
More or less.
So you can find prior examples in this from Daniel Webster, or there are a couple of other examples that are discussed in the book, of sort of predecessors to this.
Like he probably heard people say things a little like this and then he tweaked it a little and but the tweaks made a great difference in making it sound perfect.
And and then he added at the end the website, the version by daniel webster basically ended with the government uh, with people, and then he adds this shall not perish from the earth.
So there's several things going on in this to make it great.
Just like with everything all the other examples we've seen.
One is just the epistrophe, the repetition at the end of the people right.
Government of the people, by the people, for the people.
That's epistrophe three times.
It follows the rule of three.
It makes it sound so beautiful.
Yeah, it's rhetorically perfect.
And then notice that, after the epistrophe it ends with, shall not perish from the earth, which the earlier version, by the similar statement by Daniel Webster, had not done.
That perish from the earth, That is a lifting from the book of Job.
I think there's also a usage of that phrase in Jeremiah, but I think he probably took it from Job.
But it's just an example of seeing the King James constantly work its way into Lincoln's expressions.
Even four score and seven years ago is an adaptation from biblical language.
I want to tell you about the only app that I use to read articles and it's called Reader.
So tell me if this sounds familiar.
You read something brilliant, like an amazing quote, the perfect article.
But then one day you go back, you're looking to find it and it's just gone.
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That used to drive me crazy.
But then I found this app called Reader and it's become the backup system for my brain.
Here's how it works.
So whenever I'm on my phone, I'm on my computer, I'll come across a new article.
And what I do is I just toss it into reader.
And then, whenever I'm ready to read, I can find all the articles pre-downloaded, with no ads and no clutter.
But here's the kicker.
Every time I highlight something, Reader automatically saves it for me.
So then, if I'm writing and I need that perfect quote, that perfect example, it's just right there waiting for me.
And because of that, I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore.
And that means that I can focus on writing.
Reader is the sponsor of today's episode.
And look, I got to love a product in order to promote it.
And I can tell you that I use Reader every single day.
So this is what I did.
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And there's a link in the description below.
All right, back to the episode.
I mentioned people you can apprentice yourself to.
Winston Churchill, just like Lincoln, has a claim to being the greatest user of the English language and the history of English-speaking public life.
Not American, but English speaking.
And Churchill is somebody whose whose speeches, as well as his other writings, really repay study.
He had a beautiful feel for the language and he earned it by reading a lot of really extraordinary English when he was young.
But all depends now upon the whole life strength of the British race in every part of the world and of all nations, our associated peoples and of all our well-wishers in every land, doing their utmost, night and day, giving all daring, all enduring, all to the utmost, to the end.
So it's 1940 and the british are facing down the nazis, and he's trying to inspire his friends, including his friends in this country, to step up and help them stave off the threat.
And i just want to point out in this that at the, in the beginning Uh, there's some different techniques we could look at, but I really want to focus on the epistrophe and the anaphora at the end.
Right.
Because that's what sticks in the ear is how to fit.
You probably don't remember very well with the first half of that, but the last, the very ending, it's very dramatic.
It's like the, the, uh, the football announcers.
Right.
The rhetoric's always in the second half of the sentence, not always in the English language, but basically in all the examples that you've given us.
There's a lot to that.
There are some examples of the other way around, and those who can't get enough of examples can find them in the book.
But you're right, it's a very classic pattern.
It's not the only one, but it's very classic.
Giving all, daring all, enduring all.
The classic repetition thrice of something using epistrophe.
To the utmost, to the end.
See, he reverses from epistrophe to anaphora.
He goes from repeating at the end of each clause to a couple of rounds of repeating at the beginning.
It's a great effect.
And it's just another example.
It's like moving between Latinate and Saxon words.
Moving between repetition at the end to repetition at the beginning.
Changing with repetition occurs.
That kind of contrast really brings the device to life.
That's really what I'm trying to emphasize.
There are a lot of principles in English like prefer sax and words.
But the power behind those principles is really at its best when it's combined with contrast, which is prefer sax and words but set them up.
Repeat at the end, but then repeat at the beginning.
Sure.
Because it's the mix, it's the chord change that really grabs the ear.
The ear is really grabbed by difference.
And these are different ways to beautifully create difference.
All right.
Here's a more modern example.
We're doing a lot of...
Lincoln and Churchill.
How about Lloyd Benson?
So he was.
He was the.
This is just for fun, but he was a senator from Texas and he was on the Democratic ticket in 1988.
And you know he was the vice presidential nominee with when Michael Dukakis was the presidential nominee.
And vice presidential debates are so boring.
And nobody ever remembers them.
This may be the only memorable thing I can remember from any vice presidential debate.
We'll still talk about it later.
Dan Quayle was the Republican candidate, and poor Dan Quayle because he got posterized by Lloyd Benson.
But he had been saying that, although he'd been criticized for not having enough experience as a legislator to be in this position, he said well, I have about as much as John Kennedy did when he got elected.
And so Lloyd Benson says, Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy.
I knew Jack Kennedy.
Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.
Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
Yeah.
And so the House erupts.
And, and now this ends up being the only thing anybody remembers from the debate which may, which may show.
I mean, you compare this to the kinds of debates that Lincoln and Douglas had.
I'd rather be in Lincoln Douglas land.
But still, you can see some rhetorical skill here.
And it's basically an epistrophe.
I mean, this is a very memorable insult.
If you want to give a memorable insult well, ancient Greek rhetorical devices can be very useful in that way.
In this case, it means ending successively with Jack Kennedy.
But it's not even just that.
It's a little better than that.
I served with Jack Kennedy and knew Jack Kennedy.
Then he reverses it.
Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine, right?
End, end, beginning, end.
It's much better that way than just having relentless epistrophe.
Epistrophe, then relief.
Then back to it, because the ear wants it, it wants that repetition back right.
It got used to it here and then you started here and now you return to it and it creates that satisfaction, which is why everybody who ever saw that, they still remember it.
It's not just because it was harsh and sort of funny, it's because it was constructed in a way that really satisfies the ear.
Feels like a rap battle.
Yeah, a little bit like that.
Yeah, between two late 1980s politicians.
Anyways, I just wanted to show that this example is a little more modern, a little more accessible.
It's all the same basic rhetorical tools used for different reasons, maybe to inspire people, maybe to move them to tears, maybe to make them laugh.
Or knock somebody else down.
Yeah, or indeed embarrass somebody and make them hard to elect.
But, you know, it's a game at which both sides can play.
But in any event, okay.
All right.
David, I think we spent enough time on up history, don't you?
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
I've got another tool that's very practical, very interesting, very useful.
This one's known as the chiasmus.
Now, I know you've talked about this before.
The classic chiasmus.
Yeah, I know you've talked about this before with other guests, but let's see if we can say something about it that might be useful and that you haven't yet covered.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
The most famous example of chiasmus probably in English is from Kennedy's inaugural speech in 1961.
The issue to me is it's easy to admire a chiasmus and say, well, isn't that pretty?
Very memorable.
But how do you make one?
I mean, because how do you know when it's time to make one?
I mean, you can't make one out of anything.
It's not like everything you say.
If I said, David, why don't you talk to me in chiasmus for the next five minutes?
It's not going to work.
Only certain kinds of sentiments or things you'd want to say lend themselves to this rhetorical trick.
What is the trick?
It's reversal.
It's basically, think of it as an A, B, B, A structure.
So you've got A elements on the outside and B on the inside.
So it's going to be not what your country can do for you, what you can do for your country.
So the A part would be country.
That's on the outside.
The inside of a chiasmus would be you, right?
These are the B elements.
So it's country, you, you, country.
A, B, B, A. Okay.
That's the basic structure of a chiasmus.
What kinds of things that you might ever want to say would be clues to you that you know.
Maybe I could frame this as a chiasmus.
But there are certain occasions.
This shows one of them, which is if you're trying to tell somebody you've got it backwards.
Right.
You've got the wrong end of the stick.
Right.
It's the other way around.
Anytime you're thinking those thoughts, you can think aha, this is the kind of rhetorical soil in which a chiasmus might grow.
So you can think how can I express how they have it backwards by framing the elements in terms of you say it's da-da-da, but it's actually da-da-da.
You can try it that way.
And you can try other rhetorical methods.
A lot of these chiasmus could be expressed with epistrophe if you want to rephrase them.
But I'm just saying that's a clue.
I think when you're trying to get the hang of using rhetorical devices, it's very helpful to learn about the different occasions, like for different kinds of things you might want to say.
They tend to lend themselves to these kinds of patterns.
And then you can smell it.
You can say, oh, okay, I get it.
I'm trying to say this kind of thing.
That's the kind of thing you can use this for.
If you don't have any of those patterns in mind.
It's easy to admire these devices, but it's hard to figure out when to or how to ever put them to work.
Once you have a sense of what the right kind of thing is that lends itself to this, much easier.
So with that one, the lesson is I'm trying to communicate opposites.
I'm trying to show that most people think A, but I want you to think B.
So, because... Most people have the relationship backwards.
It's not just they think one thing, they should think another.
They think it's A to B, but it's actually B to A. It's the other way around, what they think.
They think the country owes them something.
It's not like that.
They owe the country something.
They've got it backwards.
You're mistaking who owes what to whom.
You think I owe you money?
You owe me money.
Right.
Okay?
Right.
That's using epistrophe.
Yeah.
Do I owe you money?
You owe me money.
Right?
If you want to make a chiasmus, how would you say it?
Right.
You think the money is owed from me to you.
It's owed from you to me.
Right.
That'd be the chiastic way to express the same thing.
But I'm just pointing out, you can translate the, you got the wrong way around.
You can translate that at these different patterns that are all attractive if you care.
If you're writing a screenplay or you're writing a situation where you want somebody to have dialogue that really crackles, what you'll find is it's got a lot of these patterns woven into it.
So you've got to be sensitive to when.
Are you trying to say something that can lend itself to a pattern?
How about that?
I think it's been too long since we had a line from Lincoln.
Probably 10 minutes.
So this is Chiasmus again huh, don't you think?
Yeah.
So i'm just trying to figure out why this one, this jfk one, is more memorable to me than that one.
Like this i can hear once and boom, remember that one would take a little bit of effort.
And jfk he says ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
So what makes this one more memorable than that one?
Well, it might.
It might be the context or the substance of what's being said, and we but, but if we're just focusing on the english, I would just point out that is a pure chiasmus.
It's country, you, you, and country.
This one's not a literal chiasmus.
It's I, events, events, me.
It's sort of a conceptual chiasmus.
It's got the elements going from I to events to events to me, and I and me are the same person.
So it's a chiasmus in that sense, and it has that same nice ring, but it's kind of a half chiasmus, you might say, whereas that is a very literal one and so it's it's easier for the ear to be delighted by that although i think it's they're both pretty delightful actually but that's probably that's even more striking and of course it's it's very short um and it's saying something that at the time was considered a very meaningful thing to say so all of these things chip into the fame of that utterance and that utterance is sort of like lincoln talking about government uh of the people by the people for the people that's the the uh this example from kennedy too had antecedents before he ever said it oliver wendell holmes had said something like it and so had um Kennedy's boarding school headmaster.
But anyway, there's nothing new under the sun.
Here's another chiasmus.
I wanted to just keep talking about occasions for a chiasmus.
Here's an example.
It's as possible for a man to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing.
From this beautiful novel called Tom Jones by Henry Fielding.
I just bring this out.
It's an attractive piece of English.
But partly to say there's more than one occasion for a chiasmus.
Like I said earlier, if somebody has it backwards, they got it the wrong way around.
Your country doesn't owe anything to you.
You owe something to your country.
Then that might lend itself to a rhetorical device, maybe a chiasmus.
There are others too.
For example...
Anytime you've got give and take, I do this for you, you do this for me, you could have it.
Anytime you've got a mix-up where you've got things out of alignment, you can recite the elements in a way that can lend itself to a chiasmus where you could say is this possible to know something without having been at school?
As it is to have been at school and to know nothing.
Notice again, not a pure chiasmus, right?
What are the inside elements of the chiasmus?
Let's see.
Possible to know something without having been at school, as it is to have been at school and to know nothing.
So school is the interior part of the chiasmus.
The b, the outside of it, is something and nothing.
Not the same word, but the same.
You're referring to the same thing, which is how much you know, and they both have thing in them.
Right, it's some thing, right?
No, so maybe it's three quarters by chiasmus.
But you see what i mean.
Right, you can have a chiasmus that's structural rather than literal, and you can still get some of the benefits in your in the ear or in the mind from having the pattern line up.
That way it can be pleasing.
The literal is often the nicest, but it's not always possible, Just because the way English works, you can't always, you can't put I in me.
You can't put I in both places.
It's got to be I in me because that's how we speak English.
But you can still, it can still resonate in the ear.
And that's the point of the technique.
Okay.
And now our last example.
Back to where we started.
Okay.
The Bible.
Oh, yeah.
The Lord's Prayer.
Okay.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Now, you might never have thought of this. as a chiasmus but it kind of is huh that's that that's why i wanted to show this to you because it's not a classic chiasmus where you've got the same words uh we've got an a b b a and the a and the a are the same word and the b and b are the same word but look but watch right and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil where could the chiasmus be look at the simple words on the outside what do we have in the middle latinate words it's a combination of our first lesson and and this new theme in the middle you've got temptation and deliver which are the fancier words on the outside you've got uh and lead us not into but deliver us from evil so it starts and ends with these very simple words and in the middle you've got the longer ones and notice how it kind of retraces the substance which is you're being not led into temptation but delivered from evil so you go into the mix of the long word and then you come out uh at the end with the simple word it's it's it's a very beautiful passage and I'm just trying to point out that a chiasmus, as I say, can be something that works more conceptually than literally.
It's a subtler thing, but it's part of the reason why everybody remembers this.
There's a lot going on.
But that's part of the lesson is, you take memorable things and you slow down long enough to really take them apart or x-ray them and think what are the elements, what are the patterns under the surface of this that make it sound so great?
People don't sit around thinking about how impressed they are by your use of a technique.
If they notice the technique, it's bad technique.
What they might do, though, is be struck, That's well said.
I mean, once that's said that way, who wants to try saying any better than that?
Why do people say that?
Why do people ever say that?
Well, most of the examples I've given you are things people have said that about for a long time.
And if you slow down and look at them, you can see there are patterns, and usually more than one, that these sentences follow.
And that's one reason why they stand out from the crowd.
And people still talk about them and admire them and are impressed by them, a century or two after they're said.
So can you do this for me?
Can you just give me a quick rundown of the three techniques that we've spoken about?
We started with Anglo-Saxon.
We spoke about epistrophe.
We talked a little bit about anaphora.
And then we got to the end and we talked about chiasma.
So just give me the post-game debrief.
Okay, sure.
So in English, there's usually two kinds of words for anything.
The fancy one and the simple one.
The fancy one we call derived from Latin or French and the simple one we call Saxon.
And lesson one is generally prefer Saxon words.
You want to make your prose stronger.
Go through it.
Look for words that are fancy.
Change them to Saxon.
It often makes a big difference.
But you can do better.
If you want great rhetorical effects, you've got to think about your choice of words and how the choice over here affects the choice over there.
How the use of fancier words over here means it's time for simpler ones, because your reader's ear is going to get tired.
The bigger ones.
Or you can use the bigger ones to set up that finale where you've got the run of short words that are very simple, very easy to picture, that get you in the gut, and you end with those and they ring in the ear.
That's a rhetorical technique that a lot of the greatest masters of English have used extensively.
So that was one tool.
Another is anaphora or epistrophe, which are fancy old Greek words for very simple ideas, which is repeating a word or a phrase at the beginning of several sentences in a row, or more than one or phrases, but at the start of several things you say, epistrophe is repeating at the end.
So martin luther king's, i have a dream speech, very famous use of an afro.
I have a dream.
I have a dream just like we shall fight.
We shall fight starting the speech with these, with these uh, repeating ideas, or finishing with it of the people, by the people, for the people.
Same idea uh, but just at the end of the sentence.
And the last tool we talked about is chiasmus, which is basically taking the structure of a sentence and reversing it.
So you've got A B but then B A, And you've got these A elements on the outside and these B elements on the inside.
And we saw those can be literally words.
The A elements can be an identical word in B and that's like your country you, you and your country.
But we saw there are a bunch of other ways you can take those elements and use them uh, to express.
It's very helpful to be sensitive to the kinds of occasions or substantive things you might want to say.
That the call for a certain rhetorical pattern.
So in the case of a chiasmus there are several that i mentioned, including um, somebody has something backwards, they have it the other way around.
The idea of, and vice versa.
Anytime you're anytime, what you mean to say is and vice versa.
You probably could write that as a chiasmus if you, if you stared at the situation long enough, it would.
It would come to you in that way, or that there's a mismatch.
It's like, i think, mark twain once said uh, The problem with life is that first we have the capacity to enjoy it without the chance, and then we have the chance without the capacity.
Oh, wow.
That's a great thing to say.
That's a beautiful chiasmus.
That's a literal one.
Whenever I hear something structured that simply, it also sounds more wise.
It's not just memorable.
It's more wise.
The very fact of it being memorable and so…
Beautifully compressed in like a nice little jingle, makes it have the hue of wisdom or something So.
So this is a good thing to know from the standpoint of all sword and shield.
I think right because all right.
It's very true that when you, when you, when you state something very eloquently, or in a chiasmus where it seems like a closed loop, It's very tidy at a bits of it admits of no interruption or objection.
It can really make what you say sound more true.
The shield part is beware, because things that are beautifully said sound more true and No reason to believe they are.
And I think part of the reason you study rhetoric is to inoculate yourself against the charms of people who put things beautifully.
And you don't want to be fooled into thinking that means they're right.
Then again, they might be, but they're two different issues.
What we've seen in a lot of these examples is people using beautiful rhetoric to advance beautiful causes.
You've got Lincoln in the Civil War, Churchill in World War II, the translators of the Bible attempting to express the Word of God.
In all of these cases, you've got rhetoric being put to work to inspire people.
In certain ways, and the combination of that substance with the rhetoric is a beautiful thing and heightens it.
But of course, you can use these tools for other ends, including bad ones.
And so I think the study of rhetoric in part is to make people more conscious and aware of the choices they make when they write and how they can, by really taking a close technical, patient interest in how they construct a sentence or a paragraph, make it more memorable, more striking to the ear, more sound, more persuasive, but also to be aware of the fact the other people are doing that.
People on the other side are doing that too.
And you've got to be very careful about letting rhetoric trick you into thinking that the more beautiful it sounds, the more true it is.
It ain't necessarily so.
So we've spoken about Churchill speaking to the Brits, the Gettysburg Address, these grand, big topics.
Of course, we need rhetoric.
Oh, my goodness.
The people, my nation, my great nation, they need to be inspired.
They need to listen up.
But how about just very practically saying, in my work, in a love letter, letter to a friend.
Maybe love letters aren't that practical.
But in just day-to-day life, how should we be thinking about using these rhetorical techniques?
Well, first of all, sparingly.
I think it's these these patterns are, as you said, it's like an announcer getting excited.
It's like an exclamation point.
These patterns call a lot of attention to the pros that they that they structure.
And so if you use them a lot, it can sound like you're trying too hard to sound impressive.
It's that sort of a staple of bad political speeches is the relentless use of too much repetition where you feel like lay off.
So I think a sort of subtle or gentle use usually is the best way to use these devices.
And also I've talked about how a chiasmus might sort of be suggested by certain kinds of situations.
But a lot of this, I think, is if you just immerse yourself in these examples.
I mean, the reason I write these books partly is to collect beautiful examples that you can read internalize study, think about.
But you don't imitate them.
I mean, anybody who imitates anybody sounds like a fool.
And I don't think that's how this ever works.
Think of Ecto-Lincoln.
Lincoln learned how to write like Lincoln by reading the Bible, by reading Shakespeare.
This is what we know.
But no, he never imitated them.
You never read them and think, oh, look at Abe Lincoln trying to sound like the Bible.
Look at Abe Lincoln trying to sound like Shakespeare.
That never happens.
Because he would never imitate.
He had to write like somebody from his times, just like we have to write like people in our times.
If you read good stuff it can sort of gently influence what your ear thinks is an attractive way to say something.
That's where Lincoln learned.
We can do some of the same by reading Lincoln, not to imitate lincoln, but just to sort of soak in his instincts, because another reason lincoln's so important for this is i think studying old examples is great.
I think the best writing of the of the you know, 19th century is beautiful stuff.
A lot of people, and maybe including a lot of viewers, might think that stuff seems very boring.
They use too many endless sentences, arcane language.
Well, Lincoln's a really good counterweight to that, because if you read Lincoln he's not like that at all.
Nobody thinks of Lincoln as being pompous, writing purple prose, trying to impress anybody, being rhetorically seeming fancy.
Lincoln has a reputation for being very plain.
But he was also rhetorically very sophisticated because, as we've seen yes, he was very plain, but look at all the patterns and artfulness in the way that he would deploy words.
His words.
So he's a great example in that way.
He shows you that there's a way to be a beautiful writer about very important things, even in private life.
I mean, a lot of the examples in the book from Lincoln's letters.
He said, what about a letter?
I've got lots of letters in the book of people using it just to express themselves, what they personally mean about something in a way that's memorable to their immediate audience.
You asked, where does this get used in life now?
So I think understanding the Gettysburg Address is important and valuable, even if you never plan to be writing or delivering a Gettysburg Address, because it's just a lesson.
It's a lot of lessons in how to arrange words so they're striking, so they're memorable.
Everybody wants to write words that are striking and memorable.
If you're running on Twitter or running a blog, you're competing against millions of people who are doing this exact same thing.
And the question is and you might even be expressing a lot of the same ideas they are how can you express whatever worthy idea you have in a way that's worthy of it?
Hey, look, a little chiasmus.
Maybe it's a half chiasmus.
I'll take a drink to that.
It's just water.
But, you know, I got to do a toast.
That was pretty good.
Cheers.
Is that the end of your answer?
I think that's the end of my answer.
Okay, so...
You're a professor and if you were teaching next semester at UT a class on writing and you said these are the things that people need to focus on, these are the main lessons I want to teach, besides what we've spoken about today, how would you structure the curriculum?
What are the main things that you would teach?
Well look, if you're trying to learn how to write lesson one is just learning to do it efficiently.
It's got to be extremely concise.
You've got to have an allergy to wasted words and really know how to scrutinize a sentence to make it as clear and easy for the reader as it can possibly be.
It's like learning how to draw before you try to become a painter.
You've got to be able to do that.
And so all the books that tell you about omitting needless words and how to structure a paragraph, that stuff's crucial.
My interest is in lesson two because I think for a lot of people their education in writing basically ends after lesson one.
Good writing is the most efficient writing.
End of story.
That's what I think is the sort of ethos behind most books on writing.
Your goal is to be clear and concise.
That's the end.
Well, of course, those are everybody's first goals.
But you can be clear and concise and mesmerizing, inspiring and memorable, or clear and concise and tedious and boring and nobody cares.
Many people are clear.
Lincoln was clear and concise, but many people are clear and concise and few.
Most of them aren't Lincoln.
So what did he know beyond that?
He must've known something else because he was more than clear and concise.
And the question is, what else did he know?
So for my class, and I've taught, you know, rhetoric classes and part of what I like to do is after we've gone over the basics, have students actually imitate, have them rewrite sometimes modern Supreme Court opinions as Oliver Wendell Holmes would have written them.
That's a very interesting exercise.
It's not because you want to go around imitating Holmes, because you'd sound like again.
You'd sound like a fool.
But if you have to imitate, you've really got to get in there and listen.
If you want to imitate somebody's writing, you've really got to understand it.
You've got to listen to it very carefully.
You're not going to sound right.
So you've really got to get in there and understand what made Holmes sound like Holmes?
What were the signatures of his style that made him so amazing?
So you read this, think about it, and then eventually your imitations get better.
And then you throw away the imitations.
You don't imitate anymore, but look at what you've learned by having to do that.
So imitation is actually a very useful thing.
Memorization, imitation, these things are underrated.
We've talked a lot about my writing examples project.
And whenever I write one of those, I always write out the quote.
I never do copy and paste, because as you write out the quote, you begin to see what's going on in the writing in a way that you can't just by reading.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, anybody can look at a piece of good writing and say, wow, that's impressive.
Okay, but the question is, can you understand why?
And then learn something from that about how to write yourself.
To me, that's the great question when you study good writing, or it ought to be.
It seems like it rarely actually is when people take courses on this.
But that's how I would do it.
And that's why I try to do it in the books I've written.
When you talk about imitation there, but then you said earlier that you don't want to be imitating other people's styles.
How do you divorce those two ideas?
I try to separate imitation from influence.
That's what i meant when i was discussed talking about how lincoln read the bible and shakespeare.
He wasn't imitating anybody, but it still affected him, and that's what i'd say is say it so it's natural to you.
Nobody's writing sounds right unless it's.
In my view, writing sounds best when you're basically speaking the words onto the page, when it, when writing has voice in it and it sounds like a real person saying something and talking to you.
That's the first thing.
It's got to sound natural.
So if you force your writing to follow some other rhetorical idea or somebody else's writing style, It's never going to sound right.
It's got to sound like you.
So how do you make you and the way you speak, your authentic way of expressing yourself, more eloquent and impressive?
And the answer is you just gently immerse yourself in good examples of people who are constantly talking that way.
That's I think that's the idea is you eventually you write and speak what you read to some extent.
You also write and speak the way your peers write and speak.
And that's a counter influence.
And right now, by the way, it's often a very bad one.
That's the issue, I think, is that one reason you study rhetoric in good English is to give yourself a break from the lousy rhetoric in English that you're surrounded by on social media.
I mean, social media is like a campus where rhetoric is taught.
It's not taught well, my opinion.
Yeah.
In other words, it's taught by bad example.
Yeah.
Thanks, Ward.
That was really fun.
You know what I liked about it?
It was a lot like our breakfast conversations.
The only thing we're missing was the crappy diner coffee.
I want that next time.
I wish I'd had that in the little white mugs.
We're sitting there at the same table.
You know the waitress.
We're just back there nerding out on writing.
Listen, I like that coffee, but I'm going to let it go.
You really care about coffee.
You're from the West Coast, right?
Yeah.
People out there care about coffee.
I like a good cup of coffee.
I'm going to use your rhetorical techniques to say a good cup of coffee.
So I totally enjoyed this.
I'm really honored that you decided that I was worth it.
And I also got to say I'm so impressed – by the quality commitment of this.
This is high end.
And I think God bless you for trying to take this topic that we both love, which is words, and give it the classy treatment it deserves.
It's just wonderful.
It's just a great thing you're doing, man.
And I feel like it's a real honor to have anything to do with it.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Well, for anyone who listens to this and is like I, want more of that, we only focused on three techniques.
And These books Rhetoric and Style Classical English Style Classical English Rhetoric.
They're part of a series
These are the two that I love, and especially this one about style.
The whole book, you can just open up to any page and you just find examples.
And if this is your jam and you listen to this conversation, you're like okay, I want to learn about that.
Well, this is your book.
All right.
David, thank you.
It was wonderful to be with you.
That was good fun.
All right.
