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Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Editors: Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, & Jennifer Bay
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How to theorize style’s role within acts of persuasion is a question that rhetoricians have puzzled over since antiquity and found difficult to answer. As Edward P.J. Corbett observed, style is a “vague concept” that we think we grasp but then find impossible to encapsulate within neatly sorted descriptions. To characterize style, we often borrow familiar descriptors such as “‘lucid,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘labored,’ ‘Latinate,’ ‘turgid’ or flowing” (209). Or, as phrased within impeachment discourses, “plain” and “honest.” Our conceptions of style, Corbett concludes, include “a curious blend of the idiosyncratic and the conventional” (210). When idiosyncrasy and convention blend, then a question is raised about the purpose of stylistic standards and whether their application helps to identify what a style is and does. Styles may be identifiable when discursive protocols are followed, but the effects (or consequences) of re-presenting forms of representation are not. Styles are present. They are material embodiments of ways of seeing that can carry forceful persuasive effects by provoking our senses. But what a given style conveys is conspicuously (and perhaps tortuously) ambiguous. Meanwhile, because that curious blend between the idiosyncratic and the conventional cannot be standardized to guarantee interpretive results, it contributes to the contemporary tendency to downplay style’s role in political judgment.
But as we move from apprehension to dismissal, we are apt to lose sight of a critical moment of interpretive conversion. Style’s role in judgment is minimized when meaning and significance get ascribed to entities that appear to have substance. This apparent order of cause and effect offers another occasion for considering how interpretation engages acts of translation. Our encounters with the domain of “the substantial” would seem to require no translation at all, as substance would seem to be self-evidently present, unambiguously noticeable, forging a clear and direct relationship between the signifier of substance and its substantial quality. The judgments we make about what has substance seem to be organized by the terminology we’ve devised to designate that quality, while the possibilities for identifying what has substance seem to rely upon the procedural—a neutrally deployed process that constitutes the experience of feeling (knowing) what has weight.
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