Rhetoric is the art of communicating through the spoken and written word. It is the channel through which ideas are transmitted. Everything we learn, we learn through the use of rhetoric. The best students and teachers, the best communicators, parents, and business-people have a solid grasp of what rhetoric is and how to use it. When students understand rhetoric, they more quickly understand the strategies their teachers are using to communicate. When teachers, and anyone else involved in sharing ideas, apply the time-proven principles of rhetoric, they are more successful in accomplishing their tasks.
Understanding and applying rhetoric involves understanding what is at the heart of the skill. James Stobaugh writes that the metaphor is the heart of rhetoric. The definition of the word ‘metaphor’ captures the essence of what rhetoric is. Simply, a metaphor is a word picture. Metaphors connect familiar concepts with unfamiliar ones. As a value debater, I’ve been taught the importance of using analogies (metaphors) to help judges understand concepts like human rights and justice, but I didn’t realize the intimate connection between rhetoric and the metaphor until I read the introduction to James Stobaugh’s British Literature course. Then, the relationship became quite clear. We use rhetoric to communicate unfamiliar ideas to others. We accomplish this by relating the new, unfamiliar information to something tangible or familiar - by using a form of metaphor!
When we use rhetoric, we’re communicating to an audience whose mind (like ours) resembles an unfinished puzzle. Our goal is to broaden the picture by adding a new piece or two to the puzzle. We accomplish this by connecting the new pieces to an old piece, by relating the unfamiliar to the familiar. The connectors that enable the new piece of information to remain in place are metaphors. Connectors are essential to the puzzle, and the metaphor is essential to rhetoric. In fact, if we move towards mastering the metaphor, we move towards mastering the art of rhetoric itself. Our technique will need to be polished, and our word pictures may want refining, but we will have grasped the heart of what rhetoric actually is – the use of word pictures.
Everywhere rhetoric is useful, the metaphor is useful, even essential, as well. This is especially true in the area of Christian apologetics. What we know about apologetics, we know because we’ve studied the rhetorical work of masters like St. Augustine and Francis Schaeffer. What we teach as apologists, we teach through the use of similar rhetoric. If rhetoric is critical to apologetics, then the metaphor is as well. Thus, in order to succeed as defenders of our faith, we must master the metaphor.
2 comments:
Bravo!
They say a picture is like a thousand words. If a good metaphore is words+picture...Oh, the possibilities!
It's an old post but a good one, and I hope my thought but compliments the concept:
I believe it was Thomas à Kempis who discussed the complication of words as relate to long-term communication, viz., a proper rhetoric is one thing, but a rhetoric that reduces the possibility of ambiguity in interpretation is another masterpiece altogether. He proposed the problem to be philological in that it was the words themselves being misunderstood as an expression of thought from the speaker or writer. The complication, he proposed, was thus: there are such words with a equivocal meaning (e.g. love - "I love ice cream", "I love God", "I love my mother", "I love my wife"), and others with a univocal meaning (e.g. agape), but as the example implies, these meanings are difficult to preserve without a strong pretext. It was Thomas à Kempis who then suggested a third form of speech which is analogical, and this, he offered, was one powerful reason why Christ spoke using parables: a way of effectively communicating a profound rhetoric across thousands of years. Neat.
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