The Making of Arguments

by J. H. Gardiner

The use of similes and metaphors and other figurative language raises a difficult question. On the whole, perhaps the best advice about using them is, Don't unless you have to. In other words, where a figure of speech is a necessity of expression, where you cannot make your thought clear and impart to it the warmth of feeling with which it is clothed in your own mind except by a touch of imaginative color, then use a figure of speech, if one flashes itself on your mind. If you add it deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note; if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of insincerity is fatal to the persuasiveness of an argument.

The value of the figure of speech is chiefly in giving expression to feelings which cannot be set forth in abstract words, the whole of whose meaning can be defined: in the connotation of words—that indefinable part of their meaning which consists in their associations, implications, and general emotional coloring—lies their power to clothe thought with the rich color of feeling which is the life. At the same time, they serve as a fillip to the attention. There are not very many people who can long keep the mind fixed on a purely abstract line of thought, and none can do it without some effort. Professor William James is a notable example of a writer whose thought flowed spontaneously into necessary figures of speech:

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretending to decide things out of his private dream[⁶³][!--Note--]

One cannot go to sleep over a style like that, for besides the obvious sincerity and rush of warm feeling, the vividness of the figures is like that of poetry. On the either hand, one must remember that it is given to few men to attain the unstudied eloquence of Professor James.

Fables and anecdotes serve much the same purpose, but more especially throw into memorable form the principle which they are intended to set forth. There are a good many truths which are either so complex or so subtle that they defy phrasing in compact form, yet their truth we all know by intuition. If for such a truth you can find a compact illustration, you can leave it much more firmly fixed in your readers' minds than by any amount of systematic exposition. Lincoln in his Springfield speech, for example, threw into striking form the feeling which was so common in the North, that each step forward in the advance of slavery so fitted into all earlier ones that something like a concerted plan must be assumed:

We cannot absolutely know that all these exact adaptations are, the result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten cut at different times and places and by different workmen,—Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance,—and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding,—or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in,—in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.

On the other hand, there is the danger of being florid or of playing the clown if you tell too many stories. Whether your style will seem florid or not depends a good deal on the part of the country you are writing for. There is no doubt that the taste of the South and of a good deal of the West is for a style more varied and highly colored than suits the soberer taste of the East. But whatever part of the country you are writing for, just so soon as your style seems to those special readers overloaded with ornament it will seem insincere. In the same way, if you stop too often to tell a story or to make your readers laugh, you will produce the impression of trifling with your subject. In both these respects be careful not to draw the attention of your readers away from the subject to your style.

The ultimate and least analyzable appeal of style is through that thrill of the voice which in written style appears as rhythm and harmony. Certain men are gifted with the capacity of so modulating their voices and throwing virtue into their tones that whoever hears them feels an indefinable thrill. So in writing: where sounds follow sounds in harmonious sequence, and the beat of the accent approaches regularity without falling into it, language takes on the expressiveness of music. It is well known that music expresses a range of feeling that lies beyond the powers of words: who can explain, for example, the thrill roused in him by a good brass band, or the indefinable melancholy and gloom created by the minor harmonies of one of the great funeral marches, or, in another direction, the impulse that sets him to whistling or singing on a bright morning in summer? There are many such kinds of feeling, real and potent parts of our consciousness; and if we can bring them to expression at all, we must do so through the rhythm and other sensuous qualities of the style which are pure sensation.

How is that to be done? The answer is difficult, and like that concerning the use of figurative language: do not try for it too deliberately. If without your thinking of it you find yourself becoming more earnest in speech, and more impressed with the seriousness of the issue you are arguing, your voice will show it naturally. So when you are writing: your earnestness will show, if you have had the training and have the natural gift for expression in words, in a lengthening and more strongly marked rhythm, in an intangibly richer coloring of sound. In speech the rhythm is apt to be shown in what is called parallel structure, the repetition of the same form of sentence, and in rhetorical questions. In writing, these forms more easily tend to seem either excited or artificial. Sustained periodic structure, too, can be carried by the speaking voice, when it would lag if written. Every one recognizes this incommunicable thrill of eloquence in great speakers and writers, but it is so much a gift of nature that it is not wise consciously to cultivate it.

59. Fairness and Sincerity. In the long run, however, nothing makes an argument appeal more to readers than an air of fairness and sincerity. If it is evident in an argument of fact that you are seeking to establish the truth, or in an argument of policy that your single aim is the greatest good of all concerned, your audience will listen to you with favorable ears. If on the other hand you seem to be chiefly concerned with the vanity of a personal victory, or to be thinking of selfish advantages, they will listen to you coolly and with jealous scrutiny of your points.