Principle IV: Persuasive rhetoric deals in stories, facts, and tropes

Stories, facts, and tropes are your tools for building effective, emotionally convincing communications. Used properly — stories liberally, facts carefully, and tropes sparingly — they will give your communications zest, interest, and charisma. Failure to use them will result in communications no one else wants to listen to.

I begin with stories. There are five basic stories in Western culture: the quest, the love story, the revenge story, the rags-to-riches story, and stranger in a strange land.

The first and most important is the quest. We all understand and love quests. If you can suggest to your listeners that you are on a quest together, the odds that they will enthusiastically join you rise greatly. There are many situations in the business world that lend themselves easily to a good quest story. Business start-ups, new product launches, sales goals — indeed most of what businesspeople do — can all become quests.

The second most popular and effective story in our culture is the love story. How do you apply this venerable tale to your communications? Whenever it’s about two people, or groups, or companies, or
organizations, or nation-states getting together, it can be a love story. We all recognize this instinctively in the language we use to describe such linkages. We say the United States is “wooing” North Korea, for example, or the company “seduced” a new employee with great benefits, a high salary, and a really sexy car.

In the revenge story, the hero is wronged and usually suffers for most of the plot trying to get a bit of his or her own back. Revenge, by killing, swindling, or ridiculing the enemy, usually comes after our hero has suffered a lot for a long time. We love good revenge stories because they help us believe that the world is in fact a just place despite nearly overwhelming, constant evidence to the contrary.

In a rags-to-riches story, the hero starts out poor; finds help along the way in the form of a magic bean, a flying carpet, or a rich uncle; and ends up rising to the occasion and the new style and driving a Porsche with the best of them. You can use rags-to-riches stories in persuading people to join entrepreneurial ventures. These stories work well because the underlying message is that even ordinary people will win out. It’s the triumph of the nerds, the un-athletic, and the unremarkable

Finally, my own favorite story is the stranger in a strange land. Here, a hero finds herself dropped into an unfamiliar terrain, or country, or place, and the goal is to become expert in the custom, land, or language in order to survive. The story is widely applicable in business situations, political campaigns, and social change campaigns. Barack Obama used his own stranger in a strange land story extensively during his presidential campaign.

These stories are important in all kinds of communications because they are recognizable, they quickly enlist people to your point of view, and they carry a good deal of emotional freight with them. Facts come a distant second to stories in our memory hall of fame, but they can be powerful if used carefully.

Sprinkle the conversation with a fact here or there, and you can clinch a deal, settle an argument, or end a debate. But I once heard a speaker (and he was speaking off the cuff) say, “There are seventeen reasons as to why that approach won’t work.” Those of us in the audience held our collective breath while he ticked off the seventeen reasons. It was amazing; he got through all of them. Of course, none of us paid any attention to what he was actually saying. We were just listening spellbound to the numbers rolling by. And we had written him off as some sort of freak long before he got to the end. One or two telling facts can be powerfully persuasive. More facts are not.

Tropes are the final arrows in your rhetorical quiver. They are the rhetorical devices that people notice most quickly, such as metaphors and similes. A little rhetoric goes a long way. If you use a striking metaphor or if you say, as President Kennedy did, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” the results can be profound. But there’s a delicate line between that and rhetorical excess, which is immediately suspect in the average person’s mind. William Safire once wrote a line for the late Vice President Spiro Agnew to say to describe liberals: “nattering nabobs of negativism.” That was too much of a good thing.

If you extend the metaphor beyond a sentence or two, you will sound ridiculous. Or if you launch into a blizzard of syllepsis, synecdoche, and zeugma, even if your audience could not begin to identify the trope by its name, they will recognize that rhetoric is being practiced on them and react with derision or disdain.

It’s important to understand nonetheless the power of tropes in framing and reframing a discussion. If a politician on the stump replies to an accusation by saying, “Well, that’s the pot calling the kettle black,” even as tired a cliché as that immediately puts the other party on the defensive because suddenly both candidates’ misdeeds are on the table. The use of the metaphor in that situation turns the tables in the discussion. Rhetoric is power.