3/5 stars
A strange book. Well written, entertaining, but largely pointless – and doesn’t deliver on its core promise of explaining *how to use* rhetoric more effectively.
Instead, its basic argument consists of the astonishing revelation that:
- language can be used to make a case that’s designed to persuade
- people have been doing this for a long time
- people used to study the techniques involved and gave them all fancy Greek names
- people no longer use the fancy Greek names but still use the techniques.
All of which is illustrated with examples, including deconstructions, showing what techniques were used.
So far, so good – but that’s a *what*, not a *how*. As such, so what?
This book starts out as a plea for the restitution of rhetoric as a field of study – but then fails to follow through with a convincing case to do so because it never manages to demonstrate the practical application of an understanding of rhetorical theory. About halfway through there’s even a line that tells us to ignore the detailed analysis and use of rhetorical terminology via the double dismissal:
“in the end, these distinctions… can safely be left to the theorists.” (p.131-2)
If those distinctions can be ignored, what is the benefit of learning *any* of the terminology of rhetoric that is scattered throughout the book? It seems to be just to make you look clever by spouting archaic Greekisms.
(That question was, of course, a rhetorical device.do I know the *name* of the rhetorical device? No. But I knew how to deploy it. I rest my case.)
Because the problem is that while Leith shows how an understanding of rhetoric can be used to analyse words and see how arguments were constructed, at no point does he coherently illustrate how to use this knowledge in a practical way to construct arguments of your own. Nor does he provide a single example of how anyone has done so – beyond references to great speakers of the past reading lots of past great speeches, which is not the same thing at all.
All of which means that, while this is a perfectly entertaining enough book, I’ve come out of it *less* convinced that there’s any point in trying to memorise what hendiadys or hypallage, pleonasmus or polysyndeton are. All I need to know is that I know how to use them. And this book, despite giving plentiful examples of how these techniques have been used by other people, is no practical use on that front at all.
In short, if you want to learn more about how to write or speak in a more convincing rhetorical style, this may be good to point you to some of the greats of the past so you can go and read their stuff (as long as you’re happy focusing primarily on British and American greats, that us), but that’s about it.
And, most importantly, that’s not what the dust jacket promises.