#writing One of the challenges with writing is the fact that you know everything about your book or article, but your [[audience]] does not. Generally, they read or listen to your work in a linear fashion. The things they know at the end of a speech or text are different from what they know at the beginning. This creates rhetorical [[rhetorical constraint|constraints]] and [[rhetorical opportunity|opportunities]]. This idea relates to [[rhetorical structure]] and the rhetorical canon of [[arrangement]]. ### Two examples from classical rhetoric ##### Ethos, pathos and logos in a speech A simple example of this idea related to **when it normally makes the most sense to use [[ethos]], [[pathos]] and [[logos]] in a speech.** Generally, you need to establish your credibility, or __ethos__, early on. After all, if your [[audience]] doesn't trust you, why should they listen to your main arguments, or [[confirmatio]]? This is one reason why [[ethos makes sense at the beginning of a speech]]. Likewise, [[pathos]] won't work very well if your audience just plain is not yet convinced of your main arguments. You can't rile up your audience to take action on your argument if they simply don't even believe your argument. Also, you don't want to rile up your audience too much with the "hot emotions" of pathos so that your audience will miss the nuances of your speech. Just as _ethos_ makes sense at the beginning, [[pathos makes sense at the end of a speech]]. ##### Syllogism and enthymeme Another, more complex way of thinking about this in terms of [[syllogism|syllogisms]] and [[enthymeme|enthymemes]]. A complex syllogism, containing [[premise|premises]] and sub-premises, needs to be rhetorically [[arrangement|arranged]] in a particular way. You can't show that Socrates is mortal because he's a man if your audience doesn't understand that he's a man. This can get difficult the more complex your argument. ### Example from technical writing Another simple example of this idea, now looking at technical writing, **would be the use of technical terms in a report or another technical [[genre]].** That is, if your audience would not already be familiar with a given key term or idea, you obviously can't effectively use or deploy a key term until you've actually defined it. This can become difficult. For example, consider a scenario where you want to explain a key term—let's call it **Term A**. You start to define it, but as you do, you run into problems. - In order to explain **Term A**, you need **Term B**. - Okay, in order to explain **Term B** you need **Term C**. - Alright, fine. Except that in order to explain **Term C** you need — you guessed it — **Term A**. This is why [[rhetorical arrangement can feel like a game of rock, paper scissors]]. ### Example from Marx's *Capital* [[David Harvey]]'s discussion of [[Karl Marx's literary style|Marx's style]] in [[Capital (1867; 1887)]] addresses this idea. Marx doesn't build his argument "brick by brick," but does something that Harvey compares to peeling back an onion: > “==We are far more familiar with an approach that builds the argument brick by brick==. With Marx, the argument is more onion-like. Maybe this metaphor is an unfortunate one, because, as someone once pointed out to me, when you dissect an onion, it reduces you to tears. Marx starts from the outside of the onion, moving through layers of external reality to reach its center, the conceptual core. Then he grows the argument outward again, coming back to the surface through the various layers of theory. ==The true power of the argument only becomes clear when, having returned to the realm of experience, we find ourselves equipped with an entirely new framework of knowledge for understanding and interpreting that experience==. By then, Marx has also revealed a great deal about what makes capitalism `[end p. 8]` grow in the way it does. In this way, concepts that at first seem abstract and _a priori_ become ever richer and more meaningful; Marx expands the range of his concepts as he goes on” (pp. 8-9). ### Example from Saunders's [[A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021)]] [[George Saunders]] discusses this with respect to short story writing. He has an excellent [[teaching exercise]] where he takes [[Anton Chekhov]]'s [["In the Cart"]] [[short story]] and breaks it down a page at a time. Here's (part of) what Saunders says after the first three paragraphs of the story: > Taking your time, answer these questions: > > 1. Look away from the page and summarize for me what you know so far. Try to do it in one or two sentences. > 2. What are you curious about? > 3. Where do you think the story is headed? > > Whatever you answered, that's what Chekhov now has to work with. He has, already, with this first page, caused certain expectations and questions to arise. You'll feel the rest of the story to be meaningful and coherent to the extent that it responds to these (or "takes them into account" or "exploits them"). (p. 14) What Chekhov has established, basically, is that a character named Marya is lonely. Saunders then has an excellent discussion of how the introduction of certain elements in a story (such as, for example, a lonely woman in a small Russian community) determine the range of possibilities for what can or should happen next: > As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases. > > If a story begins, "Once there was a boy who was afraid of water," we expect that a pond, river, ocean, waterfall, bathtub, or tsunami will soon appear. If a character says, "I have never once in my life been afraid," we might not mind it so much if a lion walks in. If a character lives in perpetual fear of being embarrassed, we have some idea of what might need to happen to him. Likewise with someone who loves only money, or confesses that he has never really believed in friendship, or who claims to be so tired of her life that she can't imagine another. > > When there was nothing in the story (before you started reading it) there was nothing that wanted to happen. > > Now that Marya is here, unhappy, the story has become restless. > > The story has said of her, "She is unhappy and can't imagine any other life for herself." > > And we feel the story preparing itself to say something like "Well, we'll see about that." (16) Texts—including both narrative fiction and fiction—set up expectations as we read them. They can then play with those expectations in a variety of ways. (For example, as we might expect, Chekhov introduces some love interest for lonely Marya, but since Chekhov is a pretty good writing, what happens next avoids narrative [[cliché]] or the simple fulfilment of our expectations.) In the case of fiction, more broadly, the reader's linear encounter with the text, the range of expectations the text produces at any given moment, the ways in which the text does or does not satisfy those expectations, is a key part of what [[narratology]] attempts to study. ## Other articulations of this idea [[Eric Hayot]] articulates this idea in terms of [[synchrony]] and [[diachrony]] when he says that "you should understand your writing synchronically." Here, Hayot provides a good articulation of the central tension: > "While you may not need to organize your article or book as though it were a murder mystery, the sheer pleasure onetime readers take in fiction’s revelations suggests a parallel for authors of academic work: ==you need to write for, and think continually of, a reader whose basic temporal experience of the work will be radically different from your own==, and for whose pleasure you are essentially responsible. This is why the work should not be a simple expression of “your” “ideas.” The relation you have to that expression in prose is unique: no one else wrote your work, and no one else will ever read it the way you do. Any piece of scholarly writing is, therefore, an expression of thought designed to communicate to readers who have not yet thought it" (52).