We don't need textbooks for examples of great rhetoric

Once again, thanks to Frank Bruni and his weekly blog for highlighting some great recent writing. I picked out four samples on varied topics to take a closer look at today.

Here is Robin Givhan’s take on Smith vs. Rock at the Oscars in The Washington Post, which a bit ironically bemoans the obsession with the slap: “The culture has little patience for the damaged thug in a T-shirt and jeans who’s lucky if his power extends the length of a neighborhood block, but it has the stamina to dissect the psychic pain of a mogul in a made-to-measure Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo.”

I would often use quotes from newspapers in AP Lang classes as a way to explore diction, syntax, figures of speech, and tone -- the four key categories of rhetorical choices. The only (maybe) challenging diction here might be "mogul," though there would likely be some students unable to quite place what "Dolce & Gabbanna" might mean. Of course, may readers can at least approximate meaning from context and that "made-to-measure" adjective would help.

If we were discussing this sentence in class today, I would ask about that simple change in direction achieved by "but" that leads from one claim to a second claim and immediately sets up a conflict. Students would benefit from seeing the rest of the story (or maybe just reading the link online) to see whether the writer did a solid job of supporting those two claims.

Also in The Post, David Von Drehle noted that for all President Biden’s considerable virtues, “when big issues are on the line, he remains the oratorical equivalent of a kid learning to ride a bike in a room full of Ming vases.”

Here we have a simile of sorts, asking readers to picture delicate pottery threatened by an unsteady young bike rider. The writer's comment referred to the president's speech that seemed to call for Putin to be removed from power. As I mentioned in an earlier post: he accidentally spoke the truth and we can't have that. 

One thing to discuss with students is that we all need to make thoughtful choices, in rhetoric and in many other areas of life, rather than stumble around, not being precise and perhaps clouding up our claims.

The theater critic Peter Marks, appraising the costume design in the Broadway revival of “Plaza Suite,” noted “a mother-of-the-bride dress so redolent of springtime it might have to be mulched.”

It's not easy to write descriptions that rival those of photographs, but writers can actually create far more than visual impressions. Here we have a comparison of a dress to spring, and students would benefit from defining "redolent," a term most high school students have never heard or read. It primarily means "fragrant," but here it also means "evocative." The dress probably has no particular odor, but I can imagine a floral arrangement and vivid greens and yellows and pinks. 

Finally, one more interesting sentence, this from George Will, who wrote this on Ginni Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Thomas), after news broke of her stolen-election text messages to Mark Meadows: “The shelves in her mental pantry groan beneath the weight of Trumpian hysterics about the 2020 presidential election having been stolen and the republic’s certain ruination under Joe Biden.”

That metaphor of the mind consisting of storage space that may not be strong enough to support some ideas is not brand new but students benefit from the image created. 

Journalists are usually advised to not push vocabulary and readability indexes much beyond 8th grade level, insuring the widest range of readers for their work. I would argue that one educational contribution student media can make to the community is to push reading levels a bit higher.

The key is to avoid being "boring" and to always include some sort of context clues for unusual diction choices. Don't jam complex vocabulary into every sentence or every story, but sometimes the more advanced diction choice is the more precise one. Sometimes readers need more than basic facts and can better understand a simile or metaphor.

What if one goal were for student media to function as a living textbook?