Chapter IV: The Argument Written Out (2)

Even where as in Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America," abstractness is not vagueness, the style would be more effective for the richer feeling that hangs over and around a concrete vocabulary. The great vividness of Macaulay's style, and its bold over so many readers, is largely due to his unfailing use of the specific word. If you will take the trouble to notice what arguments in the last few months have seemed to you especially persuasive, you will be surprised to find how definite and concrete the terms are that they use.

Accordingly, if you wish to keep the readers of your argument awake and attentive, use terms that touch their everyday experience. If you are arguing for the establishment of a commission form of government, give in dollars and cents the sum that it cost under the old system to pave the three hundred yards of A Street, between 12th and 13th streets. The late Mr. Godkin of the New York _Evening Post_, in his lifelong campaign against corrupt government, to bring home to his readers the actual state of their city government and the character of the men who ran it, used their nicknames; "Long John" Corrigan, for example (if there had been such a personage); and "Bath-house John Somebody" has been a feature of campaigns in Chicago. The value of such names when skillfully used is that by their associations and connotation they do stir feeling. Likewise if you are arguing before an audience of graduates for a change from a group system to a free elective system in your college, you would use the names of courses with which they would be familiar and the names of professors under whom they had studied. If you were arguing for the introduction of manual training into a school, you would make taxpayers take an interest in the matter if you gave them the exact numbers of pupils from that school who have gone directly into mills or other work of the kind, and if you describe vividly just what is meant by manual training. If your description is in general terms they may grant you your principle, and then out of mere inertia and a vague feeling against change vote the other way.

A rough test for concreteness is your vocabulary: if your words are mostly Anglo-Saxon you will usually be talking about concrete things; if it is Latinate and polysyllabic it is probably abstract and general. Most of the things and actions of everyday life, the individual things like "walls" and "puppies," "summer" and "boys," "buying" and "selling," "praying" and "singing," have names belonging to the Anglo-Saxon part of the language; and though there are many exceptions, like "tables," and "telephones," and "professors," yet the more your vocabulary consists of the non-Latinate words, the more likely it is to be concrete, and therefore to keep your readers' attention and feelings alive. Use the simple terms of everyday life, therefore, rather than the learned words which would serve you if you were generalizing from many cases. Stick to the single case before you and to the interests of the particular people you are trying to win over. To touch their feelings remember that you must talk about the things they have feelings about.

The use of similes and metaphors and other figurative language raises a difficult question. On the whole, perhaps the best advice about using them is, Don't unless you have to. In other words, where a figure of speech is a necessity of expression, where you cannot make your thought clear and impart to it the warmth of feeling with which it is clothed in your own mind except by a touch of imaginative color, then use a figure of speech, if one flashes itself on your mind. If you add it deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note; if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of insincerity is fatal to the persuasiveness of an argument.

The value of the figure of speech is chiefly in giving expression to feelings which cannot be set forth in abstract words, the whole of whose meaning can be defined: in the connotation of words--that indefinable part of their meaning which consists in their associations, implications, and general emotional coloring--lies their power to clothe thought with the rich color of feeling which is the life. At the same time, they serve as a fillip to the attention. There are not very many people who can long keep the mind fixed on a purely abstract line of thought, and none can do it without some effort. Professor William James is a notable example of a writer whose thought flowed spontaneously into necessary figures of speech:

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretending to decide things out of his private dream.[63]

One cannot go to sleep over a style like that, for besides the obvious sincerity and rush of warm feeling, the vividness of the figures is like that of poetry. On the either hand, one must remember that it is given to few men to attain the unstudied eloquence of Professor James.

Fables and anecdotes serve much the same purpose, but more especially throw into memorable form the principle which they are intended to set forth. There are a good many truths which are either so complex or so subtle that they defy phrasing in compact form, yet their truth we all know by intuition. If for such a truth you can find a compact illustration, you can leave it much more firmly fixed in your readers' minds than by any amount of systematic exposition. Lincoln in his Springfield speech, for example, threw into striking form the feeling which was so common in the North, that each step forward in the advance of slavery so fitted into all earlier ones that something like a concerted plan must be assumed:

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are, the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten cut at different times and places and by different workmen,--Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance,--and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding,--or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in,--in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.

On the other hand, there is the danger of being florid or of playing the clown if you tell too many stories. Whether your style will seem florid or not depends a good deal on the part of the country you are writing for. There is no doubt that the taste of the South and of a good deal of the West is for a style more varied and highly colored than suits the soberer taste of the East. But whatever part of the country you are writing for, just so soon as your style seems to those special readers overloaded with ornament it will seem insincere. In the same way, if you stop too often to tell a story or to make your readers laugh, you will produce the impression of trifling with your subject. In both these respects be careful not to draw the attention of your readers away from the subject to your style.

The ultimate and least analyzable appeal of style is through that thrill of the voice which in written style appears as rhythm and harmony. Certain men are gifted with the capacity of so modulating their voices and throwing virtue into their tones that whoever hears them feels an indefinable thrill. So in writing: where sounds follow sounds in harmonious sequence, and the beat of the accent approaches regularity without falling into it, language takes on the expressiveness of music. It is well known that music expresses a range of feeling that lies beyond the powers of words: who can explain, for example, the thrill roused in him by a good brass band, or the indefinable melancholy and gloom created by the minor harmonies of one of the great funeral marches, or, in another direction, the impulse that sets him to whistling or singing on a bright morning in summer? There are many such kinds of feeling, real and potent parts of our consciousness; and if we can bring them to expression at all, we must do so through the rhythm and other sensuous qualities of the style which are pure sensation.

How is that to be done? The answer is difficult, and like that concerning the use of figurative language: do not try for it too deliberately. If without your thinking of it you find yourself becoming more earnest in speech, and more impressed with the seriousness of the issue you are arguing, your voice will show it naturally. So when you are writing: your earnestness will show, if you have had the training and have the natural gift for expression in words, in a lengthening and more strongly marked rhythm, in an intangibly richer coloring of sound. In speech the rhythm is apt to be shown in what is called parallel structure, the repetition of the same form of sentence, and in rhetorical questions. In writing, these forms more easily tend to seem either excited or artificial. Sustained periodic structure, too, can be carried by the speaking voice, when it would lag if written. Every one recognizes this incommunicable thrill of eloquence in great speakers and writers, but it is so much a gift of nature that it is not wise consciously to cultivate it.

59. Fairness and Sincerity. In the long run, however, nothing makes an argument appeal more to readers than an air of fairness and sincerity. If it is evident in an argument of fact that you are seeking to establish the truth, or in an argument of policy that your single aim is the greatest good of all concerned, your audience will listen to you with favorable ears. If on the other hand you seem to be chiefly concerned with the vanity of a personal victory, or to be thinking of selfish advantages, they will listen to you coolly and with jealous scrutiny of your points.

Accordingly, in making your preliminary survey to prepare the statement of the facts that are agreed on by both sides, go as far as you can in yielding points. If the question is worth arguing at all you will still have your hands full to get through it within your space. In particular waive all trivial points: nothing is more wearisome to readers than to plow through detailed arguments over points that no one cares about in the end. And meet the other side at least halfway in agreeing on the facts that do not need to be argued out. You will prejudice your audience if you make concessions in a grudging spirit. Likewise, wherever you have, to meet arguments put forward by the other side, state them with scrupulous fairness; if your audience has any reason to suppose that you are twisting the assertions of the other side to your own advantage, you have shaken their confidence in you, and thereby weakened the persuasive force of your argument. Use sarcasm with caution, and beware of any seeming of triumph. Sarcasm easily becomes cheap, and an air of triumph may look like petty smartness.

In short, in writing your argument, assume throughout the attitude of one who is seeking earnestly to bring the disagreement between the two sides to an end. If you are dealing with a question of fact, your sole duty is to establish the truth. If you are dealing with a question of policy, you know when you begin that whichever way the decision goes, one side will suffer some disadvantage; but aim to lessen that disadvantage, and to discover a way that will bring the greatest gain to the greatest number. An obvious spirit of conciliation is a large asset in persuasion.

With the conciliation make clear your sincerity. A chief difficulty with making arguments written in school and college persuasive is that they so often deal with subjects in which it is obvious that the writer's own feelings are not greatly concerned. This difficulty will disappear when you get out into the world, and make arguments in earnest. A great part of Lincoln's success as an advocate is said to have been due to the fact that he always tried to compose his cases and to make peace between the litigants, and that he never took a case in which he did not believe. If you leave on your audience the impression that you are sincere and in earnest, you have taken a long step towards winning over their feelings.

On the whole, then, when one is considering the question of persuasion, the figure of speech of a battle is not very apt. It is all very well when you are laying out your brief to speak, of deploying your various points, of directing an attack on your opponent's weakest point, of bringing up reserve material in rebuttal; but if the figure gets you into the way of thinking that you must always demolish your opponent, and treat him as an enemy, it is doing harm. If you will take the trouble to follow the controversies which are going on in your own city and state over public affairs, you will soon see that in most of them the two sides break even, so far as intelligence and public-spiritedness go. In every transaction there are two sides; and the president of a street railroad may be as honest and as disinterested in seeking to get the best of the bargain for his road as the representatives of the city are in trying to get the best of it for the public. There is no use going into a question of this sort with the assumption that you are on a higher moral plane than the other side. In some cases where a moral issue is involved there is only one view of what is right; if honesty is in the balance, there can be no other side. But, as we have seen, there are moral questions in which one must use his utmost strength for the right as he sees the right, and yet know all the time that equally honest men are fighting just as hard on the other side. No American who remembers the case of General Robert E. Lee can forget this puzzling truth. Therefore, unless there can be no doubt of the dishonesty of your opponent, turn your energies against his cause and not against him; and hold that the proper end of argument is not so much to win victories as to bring as many people as possible to agreement.

EXERCISES

1. Compare the length of the introductory part of the argument of the specimens at the end of this book; point out reasons for the difference in length, if you find any.

2. Find two arguments, not in this book, in which the main points at issue are numbered.

3. Find an argument, not in this book, in which a history of the case is part of the introduction.

4. Find an argument, not in this book, in which the definitions of terms occupy some space.

5. In the argument on which you are working, what terms need definition? How much space should the definitions occupy in the completed argument? Why?

6. In the argument on which you are working, how much of the material in the introduction to the brief shall you use in the argument itself? Does the audience you have in mind affect the decision?

7. How do you intend to distribute your space between the main issues you will argue out?

8. How much will explanation enter into your argument?

9. Find an argument, not in this book, in which the explanation chiefly makes the convincing power.

10. In which of the arguments in this book does explanation play the smallest part?

11. Examine five consecutive paragraphs in Huxley's argument on evolution, or _The Outlook_ argument on the Workman's Compensation Act, from the point of view of good explanation.

12. Find two examples of arguments, not in this book, whose chief appeal is to the feelings.

13. Find an argument, not in this book, which is a good illustration of the power of tact.

14. Name an argument which you have read within a few months which made a special impression on you by its clearness.

15. Find an argument in the daily papers, on local or academic affairs, which makes effective appeal to the practical interests of its audience. Analyze this appeal.

16. Name three subjects of local and immediate interest on which you could write an argument in which you would appeal chiefly to the practical interests of your readers.

17. Name two current political questions which turn on the practical interests of the country at large.

18. Name two public questions now under discussion into which moral issues enter. Do both sides on these questions accept the same view of the bearing of the moral issues?

19. Find an argument, not in this book, in which the eloquence of the style is a distinct part of the persuasive power.

20. What do you think of the persuasive power of Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"? of its convincing power?

21. Find an argument, not in this book, in which the concreteness of the language adds to the persuasive power.

22. Find two examples, not in this book, of apt and effective figures of speech in an argument.

23. Find an example of an apt anecdote or fable used in an argument.

24. In Lincoln's address at Cooper Institute, what do you think of his attitude towards the South as respects fairness?

25. In the argument on which you are at work, what chance would there be of inducing agreement between the two sides?