Like stern clergymen, books on good writing and speaking preach clarity. But they are silent on style. You need style to give moral dimension and emotional urgency to what you say. Here, you can learn a lot by considering teachings from ancient Greeks and Romans who wrote about imaginative ways to arrange words – rhetorical figures of speech. We’ll consider one: the synecdoche. That is when a part stands for the whole:
- Give us this day our daily bread.
- All hands were summoned to the quarter-deck.
- Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive the powerful rhyme.
Here is some staid text from the NY Times:
Now a Texas investor with ties to the Trump family is testing the possibility of making deals with Russian companies, even as the fighting in Ukraine rages on. The investor, Gentry Beach, said that he quietly signed an agreement with one of Russia’s biggest energy companies last fall to develop natural gas in Alaska.
How about restating the same with a synecdoche and other rhetorical figures?
Even as guns fire in Ukraine, Trump-tied investor Gentry Beach will use his old dollars and new-found rubles to go from the Texas panhandle to Alaskan gas.
Here, I created an image of Beach traveling from Texas to Alaska. Within that, I used “rubles” as a synecdoche for the staid “signed an agreement with one of Russia’s biggest energy companies.” Similarly, “guns fire in Ukraine” is a synecdoche for the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
There is also alliteration: “Trump-tied investor.” Finally, I tried to incorporate words that had the short -a sound. There is even a mini-antithesis contrasting “old dollars” and “new-found rubles.”
In all, the new sentence has a derisive tone: it suggests a spoiled, politically connected, mercenary investor who cynically works with Russia to enrich himself.
One could object that figurative language like this has no place in today’s business world. But we are awash in information, much of which will be perused and soon forgotten. You will often need to brand your words in the minds of your audience Classical rhetoric is a tool.
I work with professionals and executives from other countries. Consider different ways of describing the immigrant’s journey to the US. We could say, “People brave hardships to come to this country to make a life.”
Or we could say, “People traverse oceans and jungles to come to this new land and plant their flag on this new continent.” Which sentence moves you more?
I can give you the language to move people – in the job interview, in the business meeting, in the investor pitch. Work with me.
