If you’re a writer of any kind, you’ve probably read a style manual at some point, or at least picked one thinking about reading it. Style manuals are interesting but not for the reason they want to be interesting – most manuals function as their authors’ personal objective stances on how to scribe a sentence, their mission being to update your syntax. Many try to follow in the footsteps of Strunk and White, but many others steer more into the realm of not really touching style and instead offer platitudes that are only useful for those just picking up their pens. Stephen King says these kinds of books are “filled with bullshit” (ironic considering On Writing is filled with what it identifies as “bullshit”). What’s more, rarely do they focus on one of writing’s crucial factors – rhetoric.
Fahnestock’s Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion is not a style manual, but it sure does fit the bill better than many actual manuals. This hefty book of over 400 pages provides a “comprehensive guide to the language of argument,” a “renewed appreciation of the persuasive power of the English language.” Style, as many in WRD probably know, is one of the rhetorical canons identified by Cicero back in Rome, and in a way is the one of the more prescriptive of the canons. Going back to works like the Rhetorica ad Herennium, attributed to Cicero, style has a large repository of terms, strategies, and concepts with a long history.
What Fahnestock has done is gather this long history and translate it into a catalogue of stylistic subjects as it relates to rhetoric, the subjects being Word Choice, Sentences, the Interactive Dimension, and Passage Construction. From here, she illustrates through example the extensive list of stylistic terms. She takes concepts like the iconic form, sentences whose “syntax or compositio reinforces or even epitomizes its meaning,” and demonstrates the concept in action through a news article, a presidential speech, or a literary text. The book is a rather wonderful dictionary for learning about rhetorical style, defining the tools for you to practice and maybe even use.
In fact, those examples must be favorites of Fahnestock, because she constantly cycles through them each section. Whether it’s Lincoln, Nixon, or one strange instance of America’s Mayor, Fahnstock has specific sets that she likes to marvel at. It’s understandable. Literature has traditionally seen more experimentation with style due to its intimacy with writing-as-art, and politics has many long running affairs with rhetorical tropes and figures.
But two problems arise from this formula. The first is more mundane and obvious – each chapter is going through a routine. She introduces a concepts, deep dives into an ocean of Greek-Latin terminology, cycles through politics and news articles (a recurring example is Malcolm X’s “The Ballot and The Bullet,” an example of agnominatio), then summarizes the chapter. I meant it when I said it was like a dictionary – a suggested reading routine is to casually go through it and mark concepts you find interesting. Otherwise, you may find yourself burning out after several chapters of endless Latinate stylistic terms.
Latinate terms is part of the second problem that arises in the book – this is a very western book, and a very American one at that. This isn’t so much a problem as it is an unremarked limitation. If you’re hoping to see stylistics as they relate to African American rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, or other traditions from around the world, you will not find it here. A joke I told myself while reading was “Take a shot every time the Rhetorica ad Herennium came up.” That’s not so much a bug as it is a feature. It’s simply impossible to have such a comprehensive guide to western rhetorical style without consistently referencing the Greeks and Romans. For those wanting to be immersed in that tradition, I cannot suggest a better book on the topic. For those wanting to explore traditions outside that territory, this book will do nothing for you.
Regardless, Rhetorical Style is a wonderful text that I would suggest to anyone wanting to have a more extensive vocabulary as it relates to their writing styles. The book’s half-life, or its ability to be picked up and referenced after a finished reading, is a long and potent one – if only to remember what exactly an anaphora is.