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Rhetoric
00:23:10
What can the social media generation learn from the ancient art of persuasion?
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Advertiser
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Mark Forsyth
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Sandra Canthal
thank you for downloading the Y Factor on the BBC World Service. I'm Sandra Canthal and in this episode why the Ancient Art of Rhetoric has a lot to teach us about modern communication. Click, clack, Front and back. It's the tagline of a successful Australian campaign to encourage the use of seat belts and to make the message stick, it uses an effective rhetorical trick.
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Sam Tatum
Rhyme is really important in understanding why language can be powerful. Rhyming lines can seem sort of less creative, but actually hugely effective. If you think of O.J. simpson Trowel, if the gloves don't fit, you must acquit. Rhyme is really impactful in driving believability. If something has rhymed, then it's an assumption that it's been used over and over again, so it must be true.
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Sandra Canthal
Rhyme is just one rhetorical device. Sam Tatum, the behavioral strategy director at advertising agency Ogilvy, knows many more.
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Sam Tatum
Concreteness in language is also another really powerful strategy. Donald Trump's Build a wall is a really powerful way of using language to rally behind, essentially immigration. We they often say if you can't draw it, you shouldn't say it.
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Sandra Canthal
This is the why Factor on the BBC World Service. I'm Sandra Canthal, and this week in the age of the 280 character polemic, why it might be useful to understand more about the ancient art of Rhetoric Project Debater, let's hear your rebuttal speech and why. This is yet another skill where machines may have an advantage over humans. Thank you. Allow me to respond to some of my opponent's most recent claims.
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Sam Tatum
Rhetoric is persuasive language. We use it to rally, to simplify the complex, to inspire an influence. But it's important, I think, to identify what strategies might be influencing us more than we think by understanding the power of language in shaping perceptions, we can start to say, I'm wondering why people are looking to be so concrete. Are we trying to pull the wool over our eyes of something that's far more complex than we actually state?
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Mark Forsyth
Rhetoric is what makes anything you say memorable. Rhetoric is what makes what you say stick in people's minds. Rhetoric is what persuades people of your position. Rhetoric is what provokes emotions. Rhetoric. Have you noticed here I'm starting every single sentence with the same word? That's called anaphora. But in all seriousness, rhetoric wins votes. Votes gets you into government. And in government, you can actually change the real world. That's anadiplosis, by the way. Fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger. Anger leads to the dark side.
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Sandra Canthal
This is Mark Forsyth giving a 2016 TED talk called how to Talk youk Way into the White House. Spoiler alert, he got the ending wrong.
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Mark Forsyth
Rhetoric, technically, is the whole art of persuading people right down to a thing. The Romans had a term for the argumentum ad baculum, which is the argument with a club, literally, and it means hitting somebody with a stick until they agree with you. More generally, it's about how you might shape a whole argument, or it comes down to just altering a sentence to make it sound that little bit better without adding any extra information. For example, you could either say, full fathom five, thy father lies, which is Shakespeare using alliteration, a simple bit of rhetoric, all those Fs, full fathom five. Or you could say, your father's body is 9.84 meters underwater, which is exactly the same information. But you're no longer a poet. You're just a Coast Guard with some bad news.
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Sandra Canthal
Mark Forsyth is also the author of the book the Elements of Eloquence.
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Mark Forsyth
One of the beautiful things about studying the figures of rhetoric is you find that there are timeless things which are still working today that worked thousands of years ago. So, for example, there's one called Progressio, which you'll find in Bible. In a famous passage. There is a time to be born and time to die, a time to weep and a time to rejoice, a time to build and time to destroy. And it goes on and on. It's basically just a long series of opposites. And you have the same thing in Dickens. It was best of times, it was the worst of times. But then you've got exactly the same thing in Katy Perry. You're up, then you're down, and so on and so forth. These are the same tricks being used Again and again over millennia, and they are still effective. This is the martini time of day. You hit an awful lot of good ones in advertising slogans. Lovely tricolon of martini adverts. Anytime, any place, anywhere. Martini Rosso Anytime, any place, anywhere.
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Narrator/Advertiser
Because martini is the right one.
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Mark Forsyth
Sounds so good. And then you think about it and you realize any place and anywhere mean exactly the same thing. That's an example of rhetoric tricking your mind.
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Sandra Canthal
If our ideas and opinions are being shaped by the words of others, isn't it essential that. That we're able to recognize how those words are being tailored to subtly persuade us? In certain corners of academia, this is something of, how can I say this? A rhetorical question.
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Alan Finlayson
So there's all kinds of arguments partly about what actually rhetoric is. Academics can always argue about what the actual thing they study actually is. That's part about whether we should just be looking at the great grand speeches of the great grand old politicians of past and present, or whether or not rhetoric is something that lots of people do all the time in everyday conversations. And when people argue at work, is that rhetoric as well? All the kinds of ways that people might try to get other people to share their worldview, to agree with them about some propositions to what we should do. That's rhetoric.
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Sandra Canthal
Alan Finlayson is a professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia in the uk. In the classroom where we meet, he's chairing a workshop called A Crisis in Rhetoric.
- [07:02]
Alan Finlayson
The idea behind it is that we think there's a lot of shouting, a lot of argument and dispute in our public debates. So we want to focus on how people are trying to put forward their arguments and persuade each other of the positions they hold.
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Sandra Canthal
The Internet provides a platform for anyone in the world to share ideas and opinions. Arguments are common, but debates all too often descend into acrimony when thoughtful prose is sacrificed for partisan posturing. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato defined rhetoric as the art of ruling the minds of men, and he was concerned it could be used as a way to pander to the people. His student Aristotle, believed it to be an essential political skill and was the first to lay out what he considered to be the three pillars of worthwhile rhetoric.
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Alan Finlayson
The first of those is what we call ethos, which is an argument to do with the character of the speaker. They've got to present themselves as someone that you want to listen to, want to pay attention to, might believe, might trust. Second one is pathos. That's arguments from emotion, trying to move people's feelings in some way to get them to see your point of view. Moving the emotions is a way to get people to see this is a situation that matters and should be dealt with. And then the third is logos. So logos is that category of arguments that we might more generally think of as being proper argument to do with evidence, but also to do with reason, logic, ways of presenting your case. When you're teaching rhetoric, you're not just teaching these tools and techniques, you're also saying to people, look, if you believe something passionately and it's important to you, you can't expect other people to believe it just because you shout about it. You have to think about how to explain it to them. And if you want to think about how to explain it to them, you have to think about them, what's their situation. In that sense, rhetoric, it can be a way of building walls between people. It can also be a way of breaking them down or building bridges, of finding common ground between people and finding
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Sandra Canthal
that common ground is crucial. In a world facing a myriad of complex problems such as climate change, political upheavals and economic inequality, knowing how to build towering prose out of ordinary phrases can make it possible to alter the course of history.
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Mark Forsyth
There's a rhetorical form called anaphora, which is a very simple one. It's where you just repeat the first words of a sentence again and again and we will fight them on the
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Chris Anderson
beaches, we shall fight on the landing
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Sandra Canthal
grounds, we shall fight in the fields
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Mark Forsyth
and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.
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Chris Anderson
We shall never surrender.
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Mark Forsyth
One of the odd things about Anafra, though, is that you stop listening to what he's saying in between the we will fights. So in that he's actually describing the invasion of Britain, this was in the darkest hour, when it looked like Britain was going to be invaded. We'll fight them on the beaches, that is in Dunkirk, we will fight them on the landing grounds in England, we will fight them in the fields of Kent, we'll fight them in the cities, ie, London. He's describing losing a war, but you don't hear that. You hear the we will fight again and again and again. And it was a brilliant way of inspiring a nation.
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Sandra Canthal
Laying it out like that in no way diminishes the power of Churchill's rhetoric, but it does provide insight into his skillful techniques. Big set speeches are rarities. Today, in the age of non stop tweets, news updates and digital distractions, discourse feels like it's becoming more immediate, less considered and often aggressive. What should be Reasoned rhetoric can deteriorate into the quest for the perfect put
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Narrator/Advertiser
down to create a narrative that people are drawn into that requires a lot of language, that requires time. It requires patience.
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Sandra Canthal
Kendall Phillips is a professor of rhetorical studies at Syracuse University in upstate New York.
- [10:48]
Narrator/Advertiser
It's also hard to analyze the argument or reasoning of a tweet because 280 characters is not a way for me to lay out a logical argument with a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. It's much easier to just use a two word phrase or a hashtag that usually ends up adding to that kind of polemical division between my side and their side. So more and more we have to learn to be critical consumers of the messages around us, and we need to understand what it is that makes it persuasive and then ultimately make a decision for ourselves. What, what are we willing to be persuaded by?
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Sandra Canthal
Professor Phillips is also a past president of the Rhetorical Society of America.
- [11:27]
Narrator/Advertiser
One of the things we see, particularly in politics around the world these days, are what would be considered fallacious arguments. One that we hear a lot, especially in democracies, is what the Romans called ad populum, which is an appeal to the people. And this is when you sort of say, well, everybody agrees, everybody knows, everybody's saying all of us agree to this.
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Chris Anderson
When you talk to every single expert
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Narrator/Advertiser
and you just talk to ordinary people and you talk to businesses, everybody understands that the problem is not getting better, it's getting worse, when maybe we actually don't all agree to this, but you're just creating the illusion that there's some public opinion where there's actually not any opinion that's been articulated by the public. The other that we hear a lot in contemporary politics is the ad hominem, which is an attack on the person. And so especially, I guess, in our country, it seems over the last few years that politicians have been much more likely to go negative attacking aspects of the character of another candidate and not actually dealing with the issues.
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Kiera Meister
That's a matter of principle.
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Narrator/Advertiser
And I'll tell you the biggest liar. You probably are worse than Jeb Bush. This guy will say anything. Nasty guy. Now I know why he doesn't have one endorsement from any. But when things get covered over through ad populum or it goes negative as an ad hominem, we may find ourselves persuaded, but we still don't really know the basis of the stance of the candidate we're now supporting.
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Kiera Meister
Let's say you're reading an article online about whatever's going on in the world and the rhetoric in there is swaying you one way or the other. The more you know about rhetoric, the more you can see when you are maybe being persuaded in a way that you don't want to be persuaded.
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Sandra Canthal
Kiera Meister is one of Kendall Phillips students. For her, there are clear reasons to concentrate her studies on rhetoric and its influence on her generation. She's 22. But that doesn't make it easier to describe the course to friends.
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Kiera Meister
A lot of times they don't even know what rhetoric is. They're like, so what are rhetorical studies? And to this day, I still struggle with explaining it, but I think it's frustrating when people are reading things and they're kind of just swayed. But you're like, no, really read between the lines, see what they are saying. And I think when you don't really understand the true meaning of rhetoric, you don't realize how you're being persuaded. Rhetoric has kind of become easier to master in a way, with social media because you see it all the time, and so you're kind of just always being bombarded. But by breaking it down, it becomes easier to realize that rhetoric, although it can be toxic, it can also be used for good as opposed for bad. Because I think often we read that the poor rhetoric of this or the bad rhetoric of that. But rhetoric is neither good nor bad. It's just kind of how you use it in your own life to communicate with others.
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Sandra Canthal
While it may seem like the rhetoric of rage is more contagious than ever before, complaining about the quality of our communications is not a new phenomenon. According to Dr. Henrietta Vanderblum, a classicist at the University of Birmingham, this criticism has traveled through the ages. It goes all the way back to antiquity, before even the Romans, when the Greeks were talking about what is rhetoric and what is good rhetoric, there was a big discussion between philosophers and those that the philosophers called the sophists. The sophists, they argued, were just having style, just doing rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric, not having actual good moral content. Whereas the philosophers were arguing that they stood for good, arguments were rooted in logical thinking, but also in moral worth. So it's a very old discussion about what is good rhetoric and whether people perform that. In the days of the Roman Republic, speeches to promote opinions or ideas were made to crowds in the public square. Today we have TED Talks. Good morning. I have an interest in education.
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Mark Forsyth
Actually, what I find is, everybody, this
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Sandra Canthal
talk on schools and creativity by the education expert Sir Ken Robinson has been viewed more than 50 million times. The roster of TED speakers includes philosophers, scientists, business people, and anyone else with an idea they think is worth spreading to the masses. But their talks all have one rhetorical trait in common.
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Chris Anderson
They're not all perfect, but they are
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Sandra Canthal
all short, 18 minutes or less. Chris Anderson is the curator of TED Talks.
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Chris Anderson
Even though 18 minutes may sound ridiculously short to someone who's spent their lifetime working on a topic, the process of trying to compress what you most want to say to a general audience forces people to cut out the rambling and the imprecision. But there's no doubt that the process of compression is unbelievably hard. And when you get it right, it's hugely powerful. The Gettysburg speech was two minutes.
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Sandra Canthal
The philosopher John Locke, who was also a lecturer in rhetoric in the 17th century, once wrote of his more lengthy essays, to confess the truth, I am now too lazy or too busy to make it shorter. And even with all the modern tools we have at our disposal, it's as difficult as ever to lay out a big idea in a small space of time.
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Chris Anderson
There is no formula to doing this. You can think of a talk as a speaker trying to persuade a group of people to come on a journey with her. And that might mean showing that you see an issue the same way that they do, or coming over as a human that they would like to hang out with. That means knowing who your audience is, knowing the kinds of things that they are interested in. When you think about what you're actually trying to do is you are building an idea in their minds. The great talks that involve elements of explanation and persuasion build up concepts and explain it using metaphor, or using easy to understand languages, or sometimes using storytelling, where a concept kind of emerges from a story and things you absolutely mustn't do is trigger immune response reactions. Two things.
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Sandra Canthal
Is Chris Anderson concerned that the speed and brevity social media encourage create a danger that we are losing the patience eloquently concise rhetoric requires?
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Chris Anderson
Absolutely. I think there's huge danger in what's happening right now in social media. The biggest single danger, I would say, is not even just the brevity of it. The real danger is that in these written forms where you don't see the person, you're just sitting there at your keyboard writing. We go into a whole different mode. The Internet is dividing people into counts that get gradually more angry at each other. We basically stir up each other's outrage. And there's this tragic truth about human psychology that we gravitate to people who we agree with and who can say something in a sort of viscerating way. We share their outrage and frankly, we're appealing to each other's lizard brains is what's going on here. Rhetoric at its heart is using the power of reason to make a case, persuade someone anchored in facts about the world, and then layering logic and reason on top of that to persuade. We don't do that much in modern media. And I think that the lesson that we all kind of need to learn and learn quite urgently is that human psychology is fragile. We have these different layers in us. And the lizard lair that responds to an us them paradigm is ugly and is dangerous. And we need to work hard to find ways of nurturing the more reflective, more thoughtful, more empathetic side of us.
- [19:09]
Sandra Canthal
So if the worst displays of rhetoric bring out the lizard part of our brain, as Chris Anderson describes, could this be yet another area where machines might have something to teach us? I think that one of the claims made by Ms. Evadia was that people should choose how to spend their money. I would like to offer a different view. People should spend their hard earned money as they please. Project Debater is an artificial intelligence system created by IBM. In June, it made its public debut in San Francisco, debating with a human opponent on the topic of subsidizing space exploration. I believe my opponent made was that there are more important things than space exploration to spend money on. And who won?
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Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
It's a good question. It's a natural question, I should say.
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Sandra Canthal
Dr. Noam Sloaneem is a principal investigator at the Project Debater lab in Haifa, Israel.
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Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
So we have some measures. For example, we asked the audience to vote before the debate and after the debate again. And then we ask which side was able to persuade more people to move to her side. And under these measures, as I recall, in the first debate it was more or less a tie. And in the second debate, actually the Project Debater system won by a nice margin.
- [20:30]
Sandra Canthal
Project Debater looks like a tall, thin, black obelisk, nearly the height of a person, with the voice of an almost human female.
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Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
It's not a standard voice. Here we are listening to a system which is speaking from for four minutes. Sometimes it must be expressive so it will not get too boring.
- [20:54]
Sandra Canthal
As an artificial intelligence, Project Debater has access to more information than a human can absorb hundreds of millions of documents. That will always be its advantage. But as Alan Finlayson explained, skillful rhetoric is built on three pillars. Ethos, pathos and logos. Is it possible for a machine to learn the rhetorical techniques that until now have been exclusively human.
- [21:21]
Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
In principle, yes, the system that we have at this point is focused on logos, but you can say it has signs of an ethos. It has its own humoristic style.
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Sandra Canthal
Like it would say, I don't want to point fingers because I don't have any. Dr. Renit Aharonov is the manager of the Project Debater team in Israel. It has to really understand something about what is going on in order to make the right comment at the right time. It doesn't always do it correctly because it's not always very tactful. Though its jokes may veer into the tactless, it can never be offended, so it can't be baited to deliver an insulting broadside. He doesn't have a problem understanding or seeing that there are arguments pro and con a topic because it doesn't vehemently believe in one side of the topic.
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Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
This has an interesting potential. One of the directions that we hope to take this technology in the future is that it will help people to better understand complex, controversial and emotionally charged topics. When you debate a friend, not to mention when you debate someone who is not your friend, emotions are part of the discussion and this impact how we debate and how we listen. When you engage with an AI system, our feeling is that since emotions are not part of the equation, maybe you have a better chance to listen to arguments. And it's interesting to see how far an AI system can get in this territory that used to be solely human. Maybe this technology has the potential to shed light on our blind spots.
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Sandra Canthal
You've been listening to the Y Factor on the BBC World Service. I'm Sandra Canthal. If you like what you're listening to, you might enjoy going back into our library to hear past programs on subjects like fear versus Fact or why we write letters. You can find them at BBC.com y Factor. If our ideas and opinions are influenced by the words of others, it's essential that we're able to recognize the way words affect us, what we say and how we say it matters.
- [23:40]
Narrator/Advertiser
Rhetoric begins way before you open your mouth or put pen to paper. It's very much about a way of seeing the world and trying to understand other people articulating themselves so that when you hear someone's argument and you disagree, you're more comfortable identifying why you disagree in the moment as opposed to as most of us do two hours later when we say, hey, wait a minute, now I know what I should have said.
- [24:11]
Sandra Canthal
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Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
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Dr. Noam Sloaneem / Dr. Renit Aharonov
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