I woke up this morning with some ideas on how to help you in your writing and arguing. Although I certainly do not have time to be typing this all out this morning, the feeling was that this was important and useful, harvestable, so here goes – quickly dashed.
Let's use just three headings: aim/tone, word choice & semantics, and argument/organization. Attention to these, or growth in these, will make you more able in putting forth your point. Certainly writing like this will gain you higher grades. More importantly, making these habits will cause people to listen to you more carefully. Isn't that what you want: to persuade?
Aim/tone
Always keep in mind what your goal is. You goal is to persuade, right? High emotions tend to distract. Thus the aim of the communication sounds like you want to tell people how stupid they are. Or you want to simply vent. Keeping in mind the higher aim of communicating for the benefit of those you are writing or speaking to will make your rhetoric better.
[We say “argumentation” in academia, but that word has a negative connotation outside academia. I just mean declarative communication that attempts to put out a particular perspective on a position, rather than another. In academia we know that we are “playing with ideas;” we know that we have changed out minds many times, and that it is our job to continue to learn, so normally, there is not so much personal feeling and negativity around “argumentation.” However in wider society, people do not have the mindset that their major job is to learn. Similarly, increasingly there is so much anti-authoritarianism, rebellion, or pride, that learning from any other given human seems offensive to them – even, we smile, from the professor in whose class they are. When I say “argumentation” then, I mean it in the academic sense, and not in the strife laden sense of wider society. Rhetoric may be correct, but fewer people use that word.]
If you keep your aim in mind, then your tone will be more correct. Remembering your audience will keep your tone correct. You “speak” differently in a formal academic paper than you do on the street in a slum, of course. Why? Because you want to speak in the tone, the register, in the manner in which your hearers or readers can understand you.
Word Choice
Tone will suggest word choice. Just as you would pick different words and ways of saying things if you were in a sticky situation on a slum street, so would you in academia. Similarly, there are gradations depending on what level of society you are in, what region, what thought community. In cases that are neutral, such as the internet, you are faced with the challenge of writing in a way that will offend the least number and communicate to the highest number. Standard English, slightly lower than academic English is normally the best choice for this sort of forum.
If you choose a register and word choice that is too low, you are not taken seriously. For instance, perhaps when you hear Ebonics, you don't immediately give as much credence to it as when you hear someone speaking – more like your favorite speaker.
Everyone has a set of vocabulary that sounds right to them. College educated people have a higher set. Vocabulary identifies status in the hierarchy, not only in terms of SES, but also of education. Anyone using a limited vocabulary sounds less smart. Smart and educated are NOT the same thing, but in the quick pace of communication, these will inevitably be confused.
Furthermore, anyone using a limited vocabulary, has fewer tools with with to communicate. You can make finer distinctions with more words, better words. Thus your thinking will actually be clearer – as well as clearer to the hearer/reader.
Here are some examples.
I sounded bitchy. Vulgar, low class, and not on target
I now judge that I was in a spirit of strife. On target, but maybe archaic
I apologize for a negative, complaining tone. Everyone can understand
The word “bitch” as you probably know means a female dog. That is not what you mean. By extension it has been used vulgarly to mean a ... a complaining woman. I doubt that you want to sound vulgar, slight women, or talk about dogs. You see how better word choice better conveys your meaning.
These people must be stupid.
These folks must have been grossly uninformed.
The first is harsh, limited, and therefore unpersuasive. The second is much more academic, and therefore more persuasive. (I softened it by the addition of the folksy “folks” I am often charged with mixing tone. I say, I want to communicate most clearly. One watches the emotional impact of one's words. Not merely expressing oneself, but doing one's best to evoke the response one hopes for from the other person. Words are like arrows, or rocks. Watch how it hits others. Does it penetrate, or bounce? Or activate a wall?)
You are wrong.
I believe you might be mistaken.
An educated, powerful person would never say the former. If they wanted to persuade, they would say the latter.. A lawyer talking to a maid and would know better than to do like the former. Firstly, lawyers know that some ideas are wrong, but they have enough education to know that it is not adroit to express it in that way. Secondly, they know how people work, and if they want the person to consider an alternative position, they are not going to harden the first position by the challenge (to the flesh) of the former word choice. You will see that lawyers are suave and measured when they are doing their business. Understatement is powerful to the educated (and alas the media aims for the lowest.)
Semantics are important, if you are communicating. We don't want to be in strifes of words, so we sometimes smooth over an argument that is not really so important by saying “it is just a semantic difference” but that is exactly why we must be more and more skillful with our words, our semantics, so we can come to agreement. We want to allow the other person to come to agreement with us, right?
Furthermore, any scholar knows that he or she has a limited understanding, anyway, and so wants to hold out appropriate humility in case they are the one that needs to learn this time. Perhaps the interlocutor has a point.
Argument clarity and organization.
My students seldom can think clearly. Those who attempt to think at all, are used to sliding from one thought into another based more on feeling than logic. Their arguments show it. If they practiced good word choice, made clear sentences, and outlined their papers, they are much more likely to do well, because they can slow down their thinking enough to attempt to get clear thoughts into a logical argument. When people talk about things that are at all important, and especially when they are talking as opposed to writing, this sloppiness is encouraged and abetted by emotionalism. This makes them all the more agitated and unable to persuade. So now, they are making illogical, unclear, and thus, unpersuasive statements.
Of course, it is important to make claims clearly and then also as exactly well as humanly possible. Our own verbal ability is limited and so our claims are always inexact, and the more we are familiar with them, and the more relaxed we are, the more likely that these claims will come out inexact. However, younger students, often :) do not have all the facts, and they don't yet know it. A person with a doctorate knows very well how much he does not know about other fields precisely because his or her depth of knowledge in one shows how much there is to be known. One learns in upper sophomore level courses, I guess, to always make limited and evidenced claims. “Men tend to taller than women in any given ethnicity” and not “men are taller than women.” But new students say, “Well, he had to be taller than her.” Sounds good, but clearly may be incorrect. The more controversial the subject, the more important to be exact and right. Given inexperience, work harder at this. Undergraduate students end up defaulting to citations: “Brown says this....” And alternative is to put things in the interrogative, “Doesn't it seems to you that....?”
Any lack of rightness, exactness, or logic will be immediately noticed by an interlocutor of opposite opinion. Sometimes their differing perspective is based exactly on the blind spot that the first has. Usually this is the case. Sometimes, however, one has the truth, but only has not communicated it clearly.
Thus, as always taught in writing class, clearly admit the argument of the other person. First this demonstration that you have heard their position, will gain a hearing for yours. Secondly, doing this well, demonstrates the power of your argument. Conversely, what often happens, and particularly I am sad to say with many of the nonacademic teachers you and I enjoy, is that they have not well understood the opponents, or choose not to, and so set up straw men. For instance, I was recently in a lecture against trinitarianism, claiming that they were polytheists. Well, one can argue for monotheism all day long and not convince a trinitarianism of his error, because trinitarians ARE monotheists. The argument was based on a misunderstanding of the academic term “person.” Trinitarians do not mean when they say “the second person of the Trinity” (translation from Greek, and from an archaic, centuries old disputations) that it is a different person (modern parlance). The second person of the Trinity (Jesus) is not asserted by theologians to be a different person from God the Father. That is not what they mean. But if a oneness guy takes them to mean that, and bases his whole argument on that, he will find he is unpersuasive to the trinitarian. Similarly, if a person arguing against the new health care reform bill goes on a long tirade against communism, he will not thereby convince a liberal from the northeast who is looking at all the inefficiencies of our existing system, our deficit, and feeling a duty to help more people have health care. Now the first fellow might have a point, but if the aim is to persuade, then he must first address the concerns of the other up front, and only later set up how his perspective relates. Otherwise he will be discounted as only a madman. So this goes back to aim. Notice, however, how important organization is.
Sentences must be clear and exact. They must also be organized in a logical fashion so that the other person, with the opposite viewpoint can follow.
Conclusion
So instead of venting emotion, using lower class word choice, and sounding illogical and crazy to the people we really would wish to persuade, with discipline we can instead, appeal to them through demonstration of our prowess in having thought through the issue and our ability to communicate, and help them see the clarity and rightness of our point, having avoided merely hardening them in their former opinion – and probable prejudice of not only our perspective but of our person as well. Emotion will elicit emotion. Lower word choice will sound lower class. If we sound illogical then we give credence to their original disregard of our position. But our aim is to appeal, to persuade.
College educated people will be prejudiced against the non-college educated. The higher SES against the lower. The smarter against the less. Don't you know everyone thinks people who agree with them are smarter and those whose points they don't see are less smart! Thus especially when one is carrying an idea that is identified with lower educated, less monied, and perhaps even anti-academic viewpoints, and an issue that is volatile, you want to be extremely careful to be as clear, logical, and kind as possible – that you might win some.
Book for Christian high schoolers approaching college is not yet written, but I do have a book written for my community college students on www.lulu.com.
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