The Figures of Speech, Ethos, and Aristotle: Notes Toward a Rhetoric of Business Communication

Abstract

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...

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Ethos and senior leader communication: Examining responses to a policy change memo

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