Speaking in Coherent Paragraphs (again)

My recent observation about Andrew Keen's "ability to speak in coherent paragraphs" has made me more aware of the communicative skills of others when facing an ostensibly intelligent audience. My own words revived in my consciousness yesterday while I was watching a recording I had made (again from Book TV) of Dennis Ross talking about his book Statecraft. From the very beginning of his talk, Ross made it clear that the very concept of "statecraft" was far to subtle to be neatly wrapped up in a few "take-away" clichés. Consequently, the entirety of his talk, prior to taking questions from the audience, was designed to familiarize the audience with the concept without either reducing it to triviality or drowning it in complexity. Ross is one of those rare speakers who seems to have no urge to "perform" (in the showy sense of the word); he believe that the center of attention should be his topic material, rather than himself. I do not think I can say this about many lecturers. Even Keen seems to know how to deliver the right amount of performance when administering his logic; and, for all my admiration of the man's ideas, I doubt that anyone would accuse Harold Bloom of scrimping on the performance factor!

The other thing that struck me about Ross was his (possibly intuitive) command of text type theory. Ross approaches his subject through the text type of description. This means, at least for me, that he sets up a representational framework for the concept and then proceeds to develop each of the components of that framework. Each such development is basically expository, which, for me, is a matter of situating the component in a suitable context. That context, in turn, can be established through the remaining two text types. Argumentation is invoked when the context is a matter of examining evidence and justifying conclusions drawn from that process of examination. However, since Ross' qualification to speak on the concept of statecraft in the first place is grounded on his personal experiences in practices of diplomacy, he can also establish context through narrative accounts of those experiences.

The result was a truly compelling lecture that "spoke for itself" without any "cheap tricks" of rhetorical performance. Of course the structure was sufficiently elaborate that I strongly doubt that it was delivered extemporaneously. Most likely Ross had prepared a text in advance; so there was an element of performance. I suppose, then, that what I am really trying to say is that the performance element was sufficiently subdued that the prepared text was neither tedious nor overwhelming. At the conclusion of this portion of the event, I was ready to go out an read Ross' book, which, I suppose, was the primary motive behind his preparing this talk in the first place!

Why Story Needs Discourse

Strictly speaking, that Burke pentad, to which I referred earlier today, focuses on only have of the domain of narrative analysis: the description of the events being recounted. In the terminology of Seymour Chatman, from whom I acquired my working knowledge of narrative theory, this half is called the story; and its complementary half is called the discourse. If the story is concerned with those elements that need to be accounted for, the discourse is concerned with how those accounts are rendered, such as the rhetorical devices that guide the reader of the text through the accounts. The significance of discourse is illustrated in almost painful clarity in a report of a recent sociological study about racism that is now available, as summarized by the author, at the Nieman Watchdog Web site. Here is the critical text of the summary:

In this experiment, I hired young men to pose as job applicants, assigning them resumes with equal levels of education and experience, and sending them to apply for real entry-level job openings all over Milwaukee. There were two teams, one white and one black. The two members of each team also alternated presenting information about a fictitious criminal record (a drug felony), which they “’fessed up to” on the application form. During six months of fieldwork, the two teams audited 350 employers, applying for a wide range of entry level jobs such as waiters, sales assistants, laborers, warehouse workers, couriers, and customer service representatives. The results of these studies were startling. Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background. Racial disparities have been documented in many contexts, but here, comparing the two job applicants side by side, we are confronted with a troubling reality: Being black in America today is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job.

This is about as good an illustration as we can hope for of the critical role that discourse can play, regardless of the strength of the "underlying facts" of the story. The greatest virtue of this account is the way in which it presents its key result in a manner that is as vivid as it is meaningful. The implication that the "level of the playing field" for a black with a clean record is the same as that for a white with a felony conviction cannot fail to grab the attention of the reader! It would be nice to believe that the strength of that formulation will be enough to incite action to change this imbalance, but I am not holding my breath!