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Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. According to Aristotle, it’s finding the best available means of persuasion for any given case. According to Chaim Perelman, the “aim of argumentation is not to deduce consequences from given premises; it is rather to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent” (The Realm of Rhetoric, 9). I note this so everyone knows that when I discuss rhetoric, I don’t mean it in the sloppy popular sense of “empty verbiage.”

Librarians have much to learn from the art of rhetoric. Essentially, rhetoric is about communication, and with any communication there are at least three elements: the speaker, the message, and the audience. Most people, including librarians, are aware of themselves as speakers and often aware of their message, but too many times do not consider the audience, and the effect on the audience is crucially important. From a rhetorical point of view, for example, it doesn’t matter how right or logical you are, if you alienate your audience and fail to persuade them of your points, then you have a failed argument. Fret and bemoan your fate all you like, but the problem is you.

Today I want to consider three rhetorical situations many librarians often find themselves in and show the importance of audience: staff meetings, presentations, and library instruction.

If you are in a staff meeting discussing some controversial topic and want to persuade your opponents, the last thing you want to do is alienate them. Unfortunately, that’s easy to do. You can call their ideas stupid, or better yet say something like, “only an idiot would believe that.” You can aggressively state your views as if they were the only ones that mattered. You can interrupt your opponents with frequent hostile criticism. You can state from the beginning that you have no intention of changing your mind. All these behaviors alienate others. Some, like aggression and interruption, alienate because they threaten. Others, such as saying there’s no way you’ll change your mind, inform your listeners that this is not in fact a discussion or debate, because where there is no willingness to consider the opponent’s point of view, there is no dialog, and thus no point of continuing a discussion. By acting like this, you’ve notified them that you don’t give a damn about them or their ideas. Don’t act surprised when they reciprocate.

Try to remember presentations you have seen, either at conferences, on campus, in your library, wherever. Were the speakers aware of their audience and their fellow speakers? Was it an hour long talk that took an hour and a half? Did the speaker seem aware of appropriate time limits or the effect on the audience? Remembering a few simple rules can make your own presentations better, but the most basic rule of all is, think about other people. Do as you would be done by. If you’re on a panel and someone else hogs all the speaking time leaving you with five minutes to get in fifteen minutes’ worth of information and thus forcing you to cut and adapt extemporaneously, how would you feel? I can tell you, you’d most likely be angry, and understandably so.

When you perform library instruction (and I use the word perform deliberately, for it is a performance), do you stand like a lump in front of the class for an hour or more monotonously giving special attention to every nuance of your OPAC or selected database but no attention to your audience? Do you even care if the students are listening to you? If students are checking their email or Facebook or are nodding off, do you blame these kids today and their short attention spans, or yourself for being so boring? You should blame yourself. You’re boring. It doesn’t matter if every single bit of information you convey could potentially be useful to your students. If you don’t communicate with the audience, then the message fails, and the problem is most likely you.

I could offer some practical tips. Listen to your colleagues and acknowledge that you understand their points, even if you don’t agree with them. Don’t alienate people with your arrogance. Pay attention to time limits. Don’t read from your PowerPoint slides with your back to the audience. Don’t speak monotonously or too quickly. During library instruction, consider having a student run that presentation computer while you walk around engaging students and speaking. (They’ll be less like to tune you out or Facebook that way.)

Practical tips are easy to find online, though, and there are plenty of them. However, the primary rule is always to consider your audience. Pay attention to what they’re doing. When you speak, do your colleagues roll their eyes or purse their lips while glaring at you? Then maybe you should tone down your aggression and be more sensitive to their views. During a presentation, do audience members check their watches frequently? Think about time, and how bored you’d be if someone prattled on too long. Do you notice jerky heads as people nod off to sleep but pop back awake as their chins hit their chest? Then speed it up, change the tone of your voice, change topic, do something to engage them. Do students come out of your instruction sessions thinking librarians are bores who want to teach everyone to be librarians? Can they still not research very well because they tuned you out as soon as it was obvious you had no intention of engaging them? Then change your approach, engage students more, don’t try to teach them everything.

Teaching and speaking are performances, and performances are designed for audiences. The best performances should teach and delight. This certainly doesn’t mean we all have to act like clowns or stand-up comics, though I’m never afraid to say something silly or make a joke if I think it will keep the audience paying attention. A bit of wit can carry an audience through a lot of dull business. But we have to keep in mind that public speaking is a performance, and the person up their speaking isn’t us. It’s a persona called Librarian, and part of that persona is an awareness of others.

Considering other people is always difficult. Having an awareness of how our speaking affects those around us, the audience at a big talk or the students at a small BI session, takes practice. Moreover, it takes deliberate consciousness of what we are saying and how we say it, which a lot of people can’t seem to master. Some people are nervous enough just standing up in front of audiences and speaking. I know how it can be. I’ve been teaching and speaking to groups for 15 years, and I’m pretty good at both, but every time I feel sick in the minutes before beginning. Some people mistakenly believe that it’s what they say that’s important, not how the audience hears what they say. Those people don’t usually feel the same way when they’re part of an audience, though.

The most important thing is to communicate our point, to persuade our colleagues, to win the adherence of the audience to our ideas, to get our students to understand a bit about library research and about what librarians can do for them. By alienating or boring your audience, your message is lost, and you have only yourself to blame.

Rhetoricians sometimes talk about the psychologist Carl Rogers, specifically his notion that threat hinders communication and persuasion. The basic idea should be obvious to everyone. If I feel threatened by you, I might listen to you, but I won’t be persuaded. I might be ordered, forced, coerced, or manipulated, and I may have to capitulate to your demands, but I won’t be persuaded and won’t willingly do what you want me to do. In an organization, this means I might very well resist you in cunning ways, especially if I feel I have little power in a direct confrontation.

I say the basic idea should be obvious, but often isn’t, because persuasion isn’t necessarily what some people set out to achieve. Chaim Perelman writes in The Realm of Rhetoric that the aim of argumentation is “to elicit or increase the adherence of the members of an audience to theses that are presented for their consent.”

Communication may be hindered even by relatively mild threats. I don’t need a gun put to my head to feel threatened. I can feel threatened professionally or personally, and this can mean standard arguments might not work. As Maxine Hairston writes:

“Ironically, those situations in which the classical methods of using proof, evidence, and logical deductions are most apt to fail are just the ones we care about most. Such arguments often concern issues that affect us deeply-racial and sexual matters, moral questions, personal and professional standards and behavior. Where there is dispute about this kind of issue, communication often breaks down because both parties are so emotionally involved, so deeply committed to certain values, that they can scarcely listen to each other, much less have a rational exchange of views. ” (Carl Rogers’s Alternative to Traditional Rhetoric, College Composition and Communication 27:4. Link is to JSTOR)

I bring this up because I think it has some relevance to discussions of change, technology, politics and other contentious issues within librarianship. How much do proponents of certain changes or political positions try to persuade reluctant librarians? And how might reluctant librarians feel threatened? And if they feel threatened, how might that perception of threat be reduced? Saying “you just don’t get it” isn’t persuasion.

Rogers contribution adds more understanding of the person to traditional rhetoric. Rhetoric isn’t just about argument, it’s about persuasion. Arguments sometimes don’t work. An argument may be sound, but if people aren’t persuaded, it still fails. To persuade, those arguing need to treat their opponents with respect and understanding, to try to see the world as the other sees it. Hairston outlines 5 rhetorical actions based on Rogerian theory:

1. Give a brief, objective statement of the issue under discussion.

2. Summarize in impartial language what you perceive the case for the opposition to be; the summary should demonstrate that you understand their interests and concerns and should avoid any hint of hostility.

3. Make an objective statement of your own side of the issue, listing your concerns and interests, but avoiding loaded language or any hint of moral superiority.

4. Outline what common ground or mutual concerns you and the other person or group seem to share; if you see irreconcilable interests, specify what they are.

5. Outline the solution you propose, pointing out what both sides may gain from it.

If we all followed these guidelines, there might be fewer librarians who feel threatened by change. Frustration and hostility never persuade anyone.

Is there a case to be made for careless writing? In academia, we usually don’t think so. As a librarian, I try to help students get the sources they need to carefully research an argument, and as a writing teacher I try to help students learn to write careful and nuanced essays. As a writer, I’m not sure sure. I try to be careful and nuanced, but I also tend to focus on small topics, or small parts of large topics. Maybe I’d get more comments if I were more provocative and less careful, if I created some turbulence.

During lunch today, I read the introduction to an issue of Turbulence (which I’d never heard of; I found the link through Bookforum). The issue is a collection of articles on the topic of “Are We Winning?” The “We” is progressive social movements around the world. The introduction notes the differences in focus and mood between the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and now, and wonders if the left is still winning, or what it would mean to “win.” I didn’t read any of the articles, and probably won’t, mainly because I was struck by this paragraph:

“We’re not offering a packaged and polished set of answers to these or any other questions. The 14 articles in Turbulence come from different contexts, different parts of the world; they have different tones, different paces and they certainly don’t all agree with each other; and some are harder than others to read outside their context. But we think this unevenness, what some might call roughness, is useful. It’s sometimes hard to engage with a collection of texts which is too polished. You’ve no sooner exclaimed, ‘that’s wrong, I don’t agree with that at all!’ or ‘but what about X?’, than the author’s anticipated your objection in a footnote, or else the editors have directed you to another article which plugs the gap. On the other hand, rough edges provide handholds, something to grab onto. They provide a way into arguments. Maybe you’ll pull at a loose end and everything will unravel. But perhaps you’ll be able to weave something else with those threads. What we want to do is put out articles that help us to think new thoughts. To think and act differently.”

It could be that roughness is useful, but it still seemed to me a way to excuse bad writing and careless arguments. Eliminating unevenness, considering and responding to counter-arguments, backing up your argument with footnotes and proof — these are some of the hallmarks not only of academic writing but good argumentative prose in general. What the editors, who call themselves the “Turbulence Collective,” seem to be saying is that thoughtful, careful, substantiated writing is bad, that considering and responding to counterarguments is a problem because it supposedly doesn’t allow people to think and act. Can this really be the case? Are we really to approve and justify political writing that avoids all usual standards of argument and thought, regardless of the side that puts it forward? And what of research? Is research thus bad, because it might make you less willing to put forward arguments that you know are faulty because you’re read their refutation?

The home page says that “Turbulence is a journal-cum-newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them.” Is this, I wonder, how the thinking through is to be done? Is it better to put out unsubstantiated or ill considered, though passionate, opinions, because careful thought and argument don’t leave enough spaces for disagreement and discussion? Or is instead the case, as much academic writing assumes, that careful argument doesn’t eliminate the handholds, it just eliminates the useless or sloppy handholds? People disagree passionately with careful arguments as well, but they have to be more thoughtful in their disagreement.

On the other hand, isn’t that what usually occurs on blogs, especially the popular and provocative ones? I read one library blog that regularly gets dozens of comments on many posts, and passionate arguments break out in the comments section. But it’s a blog that seems designed to provoke, to leave what the editors of Turbulence call a handhold, to irritate some readers so much they can’t help but respond. I think this is a useful function of blogs, and I suppose of Turbulence as well, to bring a lot of voices together on a topic. But as a general editorial rule, it seems a way to justify lowering the tone of argumentative writing, especially in politics, and the tone is low enough already.