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Part of Rhetorical devices in famous historic speeches
Rhetorical devices about life: which ones earn their place
Rhetorical devices about life sorted into those built to travel and those built to be trusted, with named speeches and five questions for judging any line.
A certain kind of speech tells people how to live. Graduation addresses, memorial tributes, retirement dinners, prize lectures and farewell remarks all end up in that register, and they reach for the same small set of techniques because the register itself is difficult.
What to take away
- Advice speaking runs on compressed general statements, and compression is exactly what makes a line detach from its argument and float away.
- The good examples earn the general statement first and only then make it.
- The devices split into two groupsthose built to travel, and those built to be trusted. The second group is the one worth copying.
Why the register is hard
The speaker has to say something true about living, to people whose lives the speaker does not know, in a setting that expects uplift. Three constraints pull against each other: honesty wants qualification, the occasion wants affirmation, and memory wants brevity.
Most bad advice speaking is the result of resolving that tension in favor of memory. A short affirming sentence is easy to remember, easy to applaud, and usually not true enough to act on.
Devices built to travel
Five devices are built to be remembered and repeated. Each compresses a claim into a shape that survives being lifted out of the speech.
- The compressed general statement.A short declarative claim about life, built to be repeated. The form is ancient, and quotation anthologies such as Bartlett's Familiar Quotations rank lines by fame the way best rhetorical devices lists sort tools by prestige.
- Balanced opposition, or antithesis.Two clauses set against each other so the second turns the first. Cheap to build and highly memorable, which is why so much weak advice arrives in this shape.
- The reversed pair, or chiasmus.The same words returned in the opposite order. Almost always feels profound and frequently means nothing; the structure is set out under chiasmus.
- Repetition, under the names anaphora and epistrophe.Anaphora repeats the opening words of successive clauses, epistrophe the closing words.
- Tricolon and asyndeton.A three-beat line, and the dropping of conjunctions between its parts so that it hurries. The tricolon is the device audiences applaud before they have understood it.
Devices built to be trusted
Three devices work the other way. They keep the speaker's evidence in view, which is why they travel badly and read well.
- The concrete instance.One specific thing, described plainly, from which the general point is left to the listener. Steve Jobs told the story of the calligraphy class he sat in on after dropping out of Reed College. The hardest technique here and the only one that survives skeptical rereading.
- The admitted failure.A speaker describing something they got wrong buys the right to advise. J.K. Rowling's 2008 Harvard address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure," is built on that move, and it works because it changes the speaker's position from above the audience to beside it.
- The narrowed claim.Advice about one specific circumstance rather than about life. Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon in 2007 is advice about one man's childhood dreams, not about living in general: less quotable, far more useful.
Where the register has been used
The same devices recur across occasions, and each occasion has produced addresses that are still read.
| Occasion | Addresses |
|---|---|
| Commencement | Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005; David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" at Kenyon College the same year |
| Memorial and tribute | Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address; Pericles' Funeral Oration as Thucydides records it |
| Prize and award | Douglas MacArthur's 1962 address at West Point, accepting the Sylvanus Thayer Award; William Faulkner's Nobel banquet speech in Stockholm in 1950 |
| Farewell | George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 |
George Washington's Farewell Address of 1796 announced his retirement and offered his political advice to the country. The sourcing steps for such texts are in fact-checking presidential farewell addresses.
The detachment problem
A memorable general statement is designed to travel, and traveling is exactly
Techniques vs. Survival After Detachment
Memorability
- Compressed general statement
- High
- Balanced opposition
- High
- Reversed pair
- Very high
- Concrete instance
- Moderate
- Admitted failure
- Moderate
- Narrowed claim
- Low
Survives detachment
- Compressed general statement
- Yes, empty
- Balanced opposition
- Yes
- Reversed pair
- Yes
- Concrete instance
- Poorly
- Admitted failure
- Poorly
- Narrowed claim
- Not at all
Useful to act on
- Compressed general statement
- Rarely
- Balanced opposition
- Sometimes
- Reversed pair
- Almost never
- Concrete instance
- Often
- Admitted failure
- Often
- Narrowed claim
- Usually
Steve Jobs closed his 2005 Stanford commencement address with "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." That line circulates now without the three stories that earned it.
That is not a hypothetical risk. It is the standard fate of these lines. Mary Schmich's "Wear Sunscreen," a 1997 Chicago Tribune column written as mock advice to graduates, still circulates as a commencement speech by Kurt Vonnegut that he never gave.
Jobs took the phrase from the Whole Earth Catalog, and it is now credited to him alone.
Quotations from advice speaking routinely arrive with no occasion behind them, a pattern examined in commencement speeches where the genre is densest.
Memorability
- Compressed general statement
- High
- Balanced opposition
- High
- Reversed pair
- Very high
- Concrete instance
- Moderate
- Admitted failure
- Moderate
- Narrowed claim
- Low
Survives detachment
- Compressed general statement
- Yes, and empty afterwards
- Balanced opposition
- Yes
- Reversed pair
- Yes
- Concrete instance
- Poorly, which protects it
- Admitted failure
- Poorly
- Narrowed claim
- Not at all
Useful to act on
- Compressed general statement
- Rarely
- Balanced opposition
- Sometimes
- Reversed pair
- Almost never
- Concrete instance
- Often
- Admitted failure
- Often
- Narrowed claim
- Usually
The answer sits in the last two columns: the techniques that travel are the ones that stop being worth anything once they arrive.
Five questions for judging one line
Put any memorable line through five questions, in this order. The last one decides.
- Find the general statements and ask what each one would commit the speaker to if taken seriously.
- Ask what evidence or instance the speaker gives for each general statement.
Five Steps for Judging a Speech
- Find general statements and their commitments
- Check if earned by something specific
- Look for a narrowed claim anywhere
- Note where the speaker admits a limit
- Ask if the line is the argument
Step five separates the two kinds. A good address has a memorable line that summarizes work already done. A weak one has a memorable line instead of the work. The mechanics behind both are cataloged in rhetorical devices, and the structural comparison that shows which is which is set out in speech analysis.
Writing in this register
Say the specific thing first. Make the general statement only if the specific thing has earned it, and be willing to let the general statement be less quotable than it could be. Admit at least one limit.
Advice with a stated boundary is trusted more than advice without one, and it survives being repeated by someone who knows the subject.
Common questions
Is a memorable line always a bad sign?
No. It is a bad sign when it arrives without the reasoning. A line that compresses an argument the audience has just heard is doing its job.
Why do reversed pairs feel so convincing?
Because the symmetry reads as inevitability. The structure supplies a feeling of proof that the content has not supplied, and it is worth being suspicious of your own agreement.
Should advice speaking avoid generalities entirely?
Not entirely. The problem is generalities that stand alone. One general statement resting on three specific ones is a normal and effective structure.
How do I test my own draft?
Remove every general statement and read what is left. If nothing remains, the speech was assertions. If the specifics still say something, the generalities were summaries and they can go back.
