After observing that business writers rely far more heavily than expected on the classical figures of speech, the authors turn to Aristotle's Rhetoric to show that the figures offer a powerful tool for the persuasive function of modern business communication. In this way business communication takes its rightful place beside judicial, deliberative, and epideictic rhetoric, leading the authors to sketch an outline of this fourth, modern kind of rhetoric from an Aristotelian perspective.As INTEREST IN THE DISCIPLINE of business communication has grown in recent years, the number of textbooks and handbooks in the field has quickly multiplied. A glance along the appropriate library shelf wi11 Hush out a whole covey of books which promise to tell the reader how to write better business letters and reports, how to write for managers and for hourly workers, how to write for internal consumption and for the general public,.What is more striking than the sheer number of such books, however, is their almost unanimous agreement on one point: the appropriate style for business communication. In advocating shorter sentences, economical phrasing, and logical constmctions, the authors return again and again to clarity as a guiding principle for business prose. This is as it should he, for all the obvious reasons. But as these writers stmggle to describe clear writing, a certain ambivalcnce creeps into the discussion. On the one hand, most of the authors recognize that clarity does not happen hy itself, that we must work at our writing in order to express ourselves clearly-' On the other hand, the guides to business communication restrict themselves to a much more limited range of stylistic strategies than most other writing manuals, since business communicators seem to believe that any signs of artifice in the finished product inevitably interfere with comprehension. For example, Menning, Wilkinsoo, Clarke, and Wilkinson contend that evdence of aconscious attention to style can only come between wliter and reader, that style is hest when it is most inconshicuous.3 They even go so far as to condemn the deliberate cultivation of style as a &dquo;mark of immaturity:'4 No stylistic devices have suflered more from this bias than the figures of speech, which threaten almost by definition to draw attention to themselves. Brought into disrepute by such accusations ofartinciahty and burdened down with forbiddingly polysyllabic Greek names, the figures have never found a place 36 in business writing texts.5 Many of the people who write ahout business prose seem to feel that the figures are at hest distracting and at worst confusing, that clear writing cannot strive for obvious stylistic polish as well. But what of the people who actually t~ritc business prose?As the advance guard of sales promotion, adver1ising reaches more people than internal memos, reports, letters, and other less public company documents. A close look at the slogans and the prose of advertising copy reveals an unexpected interest in the figures of speech. From epistr...
This essay analyzes business communication in order to generate an approach to ethics based in the rhetorical process of corporate life. Through a study of the role of language in creating and disseminating values, the essay first extends the Aristotelian paradigm for ethical communication to the rhetoric of business. Two case studies then show how this model works in practice, while a third case poses questions of ethics and communication for the reader's consideration.An examination of recent scholarship in business communication reveals that comparatively little work has been done on ethics in corporate writing and speaking.' To be sure, numerous studies address corporate ethics, but relatively few works concentrate on the ethics of corporate communication (Rentz and Debs 37; Golen, etal.). Indeed, the former editor of Philosophy and Rhetoric has complained about this problem more generally in studies of ethics and rhetoric, where rhetoric is made &dquo;completely subservient to an ethical standard wholly external to it; rhetoric is to be no more than the means used to achieve an end nonrhetorically certified as good&dquo; (Henry Johnstone 305; see also Minnick 278-81; Schrier 476-77; Wallace, &dquo;Ethical Basis&dquo; 9). The limitations in these existing studies raise an important question : Can an analysis of business communication generate an approach to ethics based in the rhetorical process of corporate life itself? At first glance, this question may seem fundamentally misguided. After all, some of the more routine forms of business writing, such as the resume and the annual report, may seem to have little to do with ethics. However, in a well-known essay entitled &dquo;Language is Sermonic,&dquo; Richard Weaver argues that in the world of actual speech, value-free language has only a putative existence:1. The authors would like to thank Dr. Jeanne W.
Carol Kallendorf Kallendorf Communication ServicesAfter citing the frustration business people experience infinding ideas for their speeches, the authors address this problem of internal invention through the ancient system of topics. They suggest that the expressly pragmatic orientation of classical rhetoric suits it to the corporate setting; however, the ancient topical system as it appears in the classical sources is unwieldy for modern writers. The authors hone and reorganize this system to make it a tool which corporate speakers can use profitably. They then amplify their adaptation of the ancient system with questions, sample arguments drawn from the questions, and a case study showing how one speaker used their topical system to write a successful speech CICERO BEGINS ONE OF HIS LESS FAMOUS WORKS, the Topica, by describing a pleasant afternoon spent in the library of his Tusculan villa with his friend Trebatius, a young lawyer. The two men sat unrolling the various parchment volumes, each one reading according to his own interests, when one of the volumes piqued Trebatius' curiosity, and he asked Cicero for a description of its contents. As Cicero explained, the volume, entitled the Topics of Aristotle, set forth a system speakers could use to invent or discover arguments on a given subject. Fascinated by the idea and seeing its immediate usefulness to his legal practice, Trebatius begged Cicero to condense Aristotle's ideas and adapt them to his particular needs. The result was Cicero's Topica. 1 What Trebatius learned from this work, however, is rarely given systematic treatment today in teaching speech and even more rarely in teaching business communication.2 But is it possible that the business writer or executive who becomes frustrated staring endlessly at a blank page might find it just as useful and intriguing as Trebatius did?The material under discussion by Cicero and his young friend, of course, formed part of the unified, systematic approach to public speaking and writing that we now call &dquo;classical rhetoric.&dquo; The origins of this system are tied to the origins of literacy and of Western civilization itself, and the entire educational practice of antiquity was dominated by this kind of instruction. Though its influence was greater in some periods than in others, it is well known that classical rhetoric continued to play a vital part in communication theory and practice through the nineteenth century.3 It is a peculiarity of our age that a
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