The study of rhetoric stretches back to classical Greece. Today the term is most commonly taken pejoratively, meaning bombastic or exaggerated language. But rhetoric also has a neutral meaning, which is how Nuts and Bolts uses it—rhetoric as the art or science of persuasion by means of stylistic and structural techniques. The study of rhetoric is useful because it encourages us to think of writing (and speaking, for that matter) as a series of strategic choices. Every attempt to put words together includes choices about which words to use and how to arrange them. In this sense all writers, like it or not, use rhetoric.
Even simplicity is a rhetorical and political choice: George Orwell, for instance, was a master of the plain style, and used it to devastating effect in his political journalism and novels like 1984 and Animal Farm (for more on the rhetoric of simplicity, see Hugh Kenner, “The Politics of the Plain Style,” in Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Norman Sims [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990]).
Rhetoric is also useful because it encourages thinking about one's audience. Different audiences require different rhetorical choices. In the following section, I'll list some of the most pertinent rhetorical techniques, or tropes, when writing for academic audiences.
DictionPerhaps the first rhetorical choice a writer makes—and all writers make this choice, whether they realize it or not—is diction, or what words to use. Different words, even if they ostensibly mean the same thing, have different connotations, as the poet W. H. Auden well understood. And different audiences have different expectations about appropriate diction. Academic writing requires a more formal diction than everyday talk or journalism, and within academe writing in the natural sciences requires a more formal diction than writing in the humanities. I'm no great fan of formality in writing, but on the other hand one does need to know and respect the conventions of academe and other professional forums for serious writing:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONThe layers of dirt were not messed up at all. / The sedimentary levels were undisturbed.
In general, the more specialized training a profession requires, the more it develops its own jargon as a way of differentiating those who have acquired the proper training from those who have not. Twist a policeman's arm, for instance, and you still probably couldn't get him to say car or robber or gun or hit or saw: long professional training has habituated him to vehicle, alleged perpetrator, firearm, strike, and observed. This kind of Official Style diction is all around us. Students tend to learn it as the epitome of "adult" discourse, and to go too far in incorporating it into their own writing.
My general advice regarding diction is to prefer plain to fancy unless the scholarly field expects a particular word. Since appropriate choices vary within specific disciplines, and sometimes between individual scholars, my suggestion to students is to locate model authors within their chosen fields, and study those authors' diction and other rhetorical strategies. Your professors can help you find good models: ask them to recommend respected scholars who write well. There are always at least a few in every field.
ParallelismParallelism is one of the most useful and flexible rhetorical techniques. It refers to any structure which brings together parallel elements, be these nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, or larger structures. Done well, parallelism imparts grace and power to passage:
The prince's strength is also his weakness; his self-reliance is also isolation.In Machiavelli's world, Sheldon Wolin observes, moral ends have been replaced by ironies; answers have been replaced by questions.
The characters are all watching one another, forming theories about one another, listening, contriving . . . .
One side sees Lincoln as a bold and shrewd leader, sincerely committed to abolishing slavery; the other sees him as an opportunistic politician, concerned only to defend the union in any way possible.
Problems with faulty parallelism are very common, because many people know (or think they know) what they want to say, and don't scrutinize what they actually write. In the following examples the parallel elements in the revisions are emphasized:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONSomeone acquiring knowledge is similar to finding a new path in a dense forest. / Acquiring knowledge is similar to finding a new path in a dense forest.
Machiavelli advocates relying on one's own strength, leaving as little to chance as possible, and the need to get rid of sentimental attachments. / Machiavelli advocates relying on one's own strength, leaving as little to chance as possible, and ridding oneself of sentimental attachments.
Touchstone satirizes courtly manners, woos Audrey, and he tries to avoid marriage. / Touchstone satirizes courtly manners, woos Audrey, and tries to avoid marriage.
One frequent source of trouble is nested lists—when one sublist occurs within another list. The writer of this sentence lost track and thought the final comma signaled the last item in the main list:
Open faculty positions are advertised in all regional city and community newspapers, in national outlets such as the Higher Education Journal, the publications of the Hispanic American Association of Colleges and Universities, and the African American Association of Colleges and Universities.The trick is to recognize that this is actually a nested list and maintain parallelism within each list:
Open faculty positions are advertised in all regional city and community newspapers and in national outlets such as the Higher Education Journal and the publications of the Hispanic American Association of Colleges and Universities and the African American Association of Colleges and Universities.The list is technically okay, but its complexity makes it a bit hard to read. One could rearrange the list to emphasize different elements and allow some pauses.
Open faculty positions are advertised in all regional city and community newspapers, in national outlets such as the Higher Education Journal, and in targeted outlets like the publications of the Hispanic American Association of Colleges and Universities and the African American Association of Colleges and Universities.Note that among other changes the revision adds the word targeted, which makes it easier to get the list's logic. As ever, revision is equal parts rewriting and rethinking.
One other problem with parallelism is fairly common, though this is a stylistic rather than a grammatical lapse. Writers often repeat too much in the parallel elements, detracting from parallelism's economical elegance:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONSocrates led a private life, as opposed to a public life. / Socrates led a private rather than a public life.
Parallelism can be employed in many different ways. One spin is inversion or chiasmus, in which parallel elements are carefully reversed for emphasis. A famous example comes from President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address (1961):
Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.Inversion often gains power by focusing attention on the ends of sentences, where readers and listeners naturally pause. Kennedy's example shows this, as does the next example, from a 19th-century religious leader defending his honesty despite his change of religion:
I have changed in many things: in this I have not.By putting the prepositional phrase in this at the beginning of the second clause, the speaker is able to end on that emphatic final not.
RepetitionRepetition is one of the most useful tools available to writers. Repetition allows a writer or speaker to hammer home an idea, image, or relationship, to force the reader or listener to pay attention. Two classic examples of the incredible power of repetition are Mark Antony's "They are all honorable men" speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (3.2), and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963.
But many writers, especially young writers, fear repetition, apparently believing that repeating a word within a single sentence or short passage is bad style. H. W. Fowler, author of the old but still recommended Fowler's Modern English Usage (1st ed., 1926), called this tendency elegant variation, and observed, "There are few literary faults so widely prevalent."
Here's an example of a student working hard to avoid repeating words within a sentence. It doesn't work well; the revision repeats words and reads more easily:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONThe test group got an average of seven test questions correct; the mean for the control category was thirteen valid responses. / The test group averaged seven correct answers; the control group averaged thirteen.
The original's nervous avoidance of repetition (for instance using first group and then category) makes it a bit hard to follow. The revision, by contrast, is easier to follow because it repeats words and syntactical structures. Note that repetition allows the writer to cut some repeated elements and focus attention on the key information, the contrast.
Practiced writers will also employ all sorts of variations on this pattern of repetition:
The test group averaged seven correct answers, the control group thirteen.The test group averaged seven correct answers to the control group's thirteen.
Another example of a writer afraid of repetition:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONFirst the North Koreans made an incursion almost all the way down the peninsula; then Americans and South Korean forces drove back into the north. / First the North Koreans drove almost all the way down the peninsula; then American and South Korean forces drove back into the north.
In the revision, the writer realizes that repeating the verb drove helps reinforce the passage's symmetry.
Let's close with one of the classic instances of repetition, from a speech by Winston Churchill after the British evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. France had fallen to Nazi Germany, the United States was still neutral, and Britain stood alone:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, 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. . . .Churchill's thundering we shall fights fall like hammerstrokes, building to that emphatic, defiant, and irresistible we shall never surrender. In 1940 Churchill's rhetoric was perhaps the most important weapon deployed against Adolf Hitler.
Using tenses consistentlyTense refers to the time (past, present, or future) in which actions occur. If you start a passage in one tense, don't change the tense without reason:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONThough Machiavelli has said that religion is vital to politics, he dismisses Christianity as harmful. / Though Machiavelli says that religion is vital to politics, he dismisses Christianity as harmful.
The historical present
One convention in academic writing that often gives students difficulty is what tense to use when discussing a text. One's first inclination is probably to use the past tense when discussing a book written in the past. But that's not what is usually done. Most textual analysis and commentary is written in the present tense, a convention sometimes called thehistorical present:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONMachiavelli also said that Christianity made people slothful. / Machiavelli also says that Christianity makes people slothful.
Hamlet told Ophelia he never loved her. / Hamlet tells Ophelia he never loved her.
But just to complicate matters, you don't always use the present tense in discussing a work. When you're presenting facts on its composition, you should use the past tense:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONMachiavelli writes The Prince in 1513. / Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513.
This also often holds if you're simply mentioning a work in passing, as support for some other argument:
ORIGINAL / REVISIONA century before the U.S. Constitution was written, John Locke articulates a vision of liberal government in his Second Treatise of Government. / A century before the U.S. Constitution was written, John Locke articulated a vision of liberal government in his Second Treatise of Government.
But if you went on to discuss Locke's Second Treatise in some detail, you might then switch to the historical present after this initial mention:
Efforts to safeguard individual liberty have a long history. A century before the U.S. Constitution was written, John Locke articulated a vision of liberal government in his Second Treatise of Government. In this famous work, Locke locates the origins of government in the desire to safeguard individuals and their property against the violence and insecurity of the state of nature....Alliteration
Alliteration means beginning two or more stressed syllables with the same letter or sound:
Throughout the play we are made to witness the force of politics to shape and shatter lives.As with any rhetorical techniques, alliteration doesn't make an argument more intelligent. Done well, however, it can please your reader and help make him more receptive to your argument. Like a strong spice, alliteration should be used sparingly.
The rule of threeThis is an old trick of the trade that doesn't get mentioned a lot nowadays (it's called tricolon in classical rhetoric), but that crops up all the time in good writing. The idea is simple: lists of all kinds (of things, qualities, actions, reasons, examples, etc.) tend to come across most powerfully when they contain three items. Of course that doesn't mean you should manipulate your material to make it fit. Sometimes you'll want to put two, four, or more items in a list. But when you've got flexibility in what to say, keep the rule of three in mind:
Coriolanus doesn't hide his contempt for the commoners, he doesn't flatter them, he doesn't try to soften his image.A generation ago most scholars believed that an overarching worldview—conservative, deeply Christian and essentially medieval in its commitment to order and hierarchy—shaped the concerns and defined the intellectual limits of Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists.
The third term is often slightly larger in its focus than the first two, enfolding them to make a more general point.
HumorHumor and other flourishes like slang should be used sparingly. Academic writing has room for wry observation and ironic observations, but belly laughs and outright jokes don't tend to go over very well. Something that seemed hilarious when you were writing it will likely seem foolish in the cold light of day.
First and second personAre the first and second person (I, me, my; we, us, our; you, your) appropriate in academic writing? As for the first person, yes, as long as it is used properly. It occurs in much writing even in the hard sciences. Scientists frequently speak of "our research" and "our findings" (though some teachers and editors agree with Mark Twain's disdain for the editorial "we"). As for the first person singular, one finds it even in the most serious scientific writing. E. O. Wilson, a prominent Harvard biologist, notes his formal use of the first person, but also the limits he observed: "very little emotion was expressed beyond the occasional 'I was interested in the problem of . . .' or 'It turned out, to my surprise, that. . . .' " Thus both sides of the debate over the propriety of the first person are in a sense right: it's okay to use I even in the most formal settings, but not to venture into editorializing and emotion. In less formal academic settings (including student writing, by and large) and in some fields like literary studies, it's even acceptable to write with a certain amount of personal reaction and feeling. The right amount of "me-ness" in one's writing will vary from field to field, journal to journal, teacher to teacher: as you gain expertise in a particular field, you'll learn what the rules are.
You is rather a different kettle of fish. It really doesn't belong in the most formal academic writing. Directly addressing the reader changes the dynamic of the essay or paper. In the hard sciences this would rarely be appropriate, though in the humanities one finds the second person more often. I happen to use it a fair amount (in part because one of my favorite old authors, Machiavelli, used it very cleverly), but others will see it differently.
Questions and exclamationsDirect questions work well in academic writing, but exclamations don't. See the discussion in Punctuation for further thoughts.