What rhetorical devices are in your toolbox?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My previous post on May 22, 2024 titled Being siloed is a problem for communication referred to an article in the October 2019 issue of Toastmaster magazine by Beth Black on pages 22 to 25 titled The Crafting of Eloquence and subtitled How rhetorical and literary devices turn basic communication into soaring works of art. She mentioned tmesis, hendiadys, and anaphora. There is another brief article by Bill Brown on page 15 of the November 2017 issue of Toastmaster magazine titled Say it with Flair. He mentions seven rhetorical devices: anaphora, alliteration, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, antithesis, and triad (trichotomy).

 

There is another recent article by Jacob Lee at CustomWritings.com on November 2, 2023 titled 10 Highly Popular and Extra Powerful Rhetorical Devices for Speeches in College. Still another article at Thesaurus.com on January 30, 2023 is titled The Top 41 Rhetorical Devices That Will Make Your Words Memorable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And there is an eight-page pdf article titled Rhetorical Devices in Public Speaking with 32 of them, as shown above.

 

The image of Joe Kachler and his toolbox came from the Library of Congress.

 

Zipper merge is an excellent metaphor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I learned a phrase which is an excellent metaphor – zipper merge. It is courteous adult behavior described in a thirty-second YouTube video from the Utah Department of Transportation, which says:

 

“When two congested lanes on a Utah roadway become one, we use the zipper merge. Vehicles should use both lanes right up until the merge point, then take turns converging into the open lane – just like a zipper. Drivers in the closing lane must use their turn signal before moving over safely. Drivers in the open lane must let one vehicle move over in front of them. This helps reduce congestion by as much as 40 percent. And it’s the law.”

 

Another similar video from the Idaho Transportation Department titled How to Zipper Merge says:  

 

“You see a ‘lane-closed sign up ahead and the lanes are merging. So when should you actually merge? Well, the answer might surprise you: You should stay in your lane up to the point of merge. It’s called a zipper merge and it’s not only safe but encouraged. Each car takes turns easing into the open lane. This keeps things smooth and fair for drivers in the continuing lane and the lane that’s ending. So next time you see a lane-closed sign, don’t stress. Just merge when it’s your turn.”

 

There is a section titled The Zipper Merge – Research and Applications in Chapter 2 of the November 2017 U.S. Department of Transportation publication titled Recurring Traffic Bottlenecks: A Primer - Focus on Low-Cost Operational Improvements (Fourth Edition). It also is discussed in a web page at trafficwaves titled Merging-lane traffic jams, a simple cure. And another web page at Academic Dictionaries titled Zipper merge says Kevin Lerch claimed to have coined the term in the late 1960’s. I ran across it in a not-safe-for-work YouTube video titled Lewis Black reads a rant about Rhode Island bridges.

 

The zipper image was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 

Good brief advice from Indeed [Canada] on Eight Key Steps to Successful Speech Writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Indeed [Canada] on March 19, 2023 there is a good article titled The 8 Key Steps to Successful Speech Writing which contains advice on the following:

 

Choose an important topic.

Consider your audience.

Prepare a structure.

Begin with a strong point.

Use concrete details and visual aids.

Include a personal element.

Consider rhetorical devices.

End Memorably.

 

Under Rhetorical Devices there is discussion of:

Alliteration

Anadiplosis

Antimetabole

Antithesis

Metaphor

Simile

Asyndeton

 

The cartoon was adapted from this one at Openclipart.

 

Mitt Romney says Donald Trump is a human gumball machine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In part of an interview on Meet the Press shown onYouTube Mitt Romney said this about Donald Trump:

 

“You know, when I was a kid there was something called a gumball machine. You could put a penny in, and a gumball would come out. It was automatic. There was no filter. Put in the penny, out came the gumball. Donald Trump is kind of a human gumball machine, which is a thought or a notion comes in and it comes out of his mouth. There’s not a lot of filter that goes on. There’s not a lot of what’s the implication. No, he just says whatever. I don’t attach an enormous amount of impact to the particular words that come out and try and evaluate each one of them. I do think you can look at his record as president and particularly in the last month of his presidency and say this is a dangerous approach, it’s an authoritarian approach. That gives me far more concern than him playing to the crowd as he did.”    

 

The story also was reported on December 10, 2023 by Sarah Fortinsky at The Hill in an article titled Romney compares Trump’s ‘dictator’ remark to ‘human gumball machine’ and another article by Kelly Garrity at Politico titled Trump the ‘human gumball machine’ will ‘impose his will’ on the nation if elected, Romney says.

 

The gumball machine cartoon came from Openclipart.

 

Five recent articles on using analogies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found an excellent recent article by Dr. Juan Miguel Balbin, Dr. Khatora Opperman and Dr. Tulio Rossi at AnimateYourScience on November 7, 2022 titled How to write effective analogies for communicating research. It includes the metaphor that Blood vessels are highways in your body (illustrated above). There is another excellent article by Leopold Ajami at Medium on June 7, 2023 titled Are you speaking with analogies?

 

There also is a series of three articles from July 2023 by Anthony Sanni. One on July 3, 2023 is titled Master the Analogy  – a powerful persuasive tool. Another on July 24, 2023 is titled Gain mastery of the analogy II, and a third on July 31, 2023 is titled Master the Analogy III – Mistakes to Avoid.

 

The Tolo highway image came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Curious People and Creative Acts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For inspiration I have been borrowing books from my friendly local public library on broad topics like curiosity and creativity. An excellent book from 2021 is Sarah Stein Greenberg’ Creative Acts for Curious People – how to think, create, and lead in unconventional ways.

 

The fourth and fifth paragraphs in her Introduction say:

 

“At the Stanford d.school, we’ve created an environment where normal rules are suspended and we constantly use our imaginations. Our purpose is to help everyone unlock their creative abilities. We cook up special ways for people to interact with each other. We make a lot of time for feelings, and we act like that’s no different than doing any other kind of work. We speak a language of encouragement. We’re hard on work but soft on people, and we don’t confuse kindness with weakness. We try things out before we know exactly what will happen, and then we spend time thinking and talking about what, exactly, just happened. Our furniture rolls around.

 

Our way of being and working contains a standing invitation to everyone to join us. Almost without exception, we can convince you to come up with a secret handshake at a moment’s notice. We know how to engage a room of adults in a fierce game of Rock Paper Scissors played at top volume. We can give you a bin filled with art supplies, and teach you to make something world-changing with them. We can show you how to stop self-censoring your most interesting ideas.”  

 

There are 81 assignments in that book, divided into the following 16 categories:

 

See things in a new way

Work well with others

Make sense of your insights

Come up with ideas

Build something

Tell a compelling story

Put your work out there

Take control of your own learning

Locate your own voice

Get out and discover

Pick up the pace

Slow down and focus

Have fun

Work toward equity

Peer into the future

Tackle a whole project

 

For example, consider these four assignments.

 

Assignment 2 is titled How to Talk to Strangers:

 

 “….Your third mission is harder.

Pretend you’re lost and ask a stranger for directions to a specific destination nearby.

If you get the person to give you directions, then ask them to draw you a map.

If they agree to draw you a map, then ask them for their phone number so you can call them if you need more help and get lost along the way.

If they agree to give you their phone number, then call them to see if they answer.

If they answer, thank them for their help and let them know you found your destination.”

 

Assignment 17 is titled Expert Eyes:

 

“Walk around the block for twenty minutes or so. This could be anywhere: your neighborhood, a farm, a bowling alley, and so on. Draw what you see in a notebook.

 

Repeat this exact same walk three or four more times and ask someone with a different expertise to join you each time. Being an ‘expert’ can mean many different things: you just want to be with folks whose discipline has trained their eyes in a specific way. Try a civil engineer, an artist, a landscaper, a historian, a transit worker, a community volunteer, or a small business advocate.

 

Ask your expert to talk aloud and tell you what they notice. Each time, sketch what the expert sees. Afterward, compare your original drawing, the one you drew when walking by yourself, to your subsequent drawings.What new and varied details or insights are there? How has your perception of the area shifted?”

 

On February 28, 2014 I blogged about walking around and finding Speech topics from near your neighborhood. And I described having your perceptions shift in a post on May 25, 2018 titled Cognitive biases and the frequency illusion.

 

Assignment 52 is titled Tell Your Granddad:

 

 “Your goal is to take an abstract concept and attempt to express the idea in as many ways as possible using metaphors, analogies, and similes. To do so, first imagine an audience of someone you know well and understand but who is very different from you. For the purposes of this game, call him Granddad.

 

Granddad probably grew up in a pre-digital technology era. He may still prefer a toaster to a panini press. He reads the newspaper in print and always buys his movie tickets in person, at the theater. He’s a smart guy, but he’s just not into all this modern stuff.

 

Your goal is to make sure your communication has reference points Granddad will connect to and immediately understand.”

 

Assignment 81 is titled I Used to Think & Now I Think. For it you make a two-column list with your previous ideas about a topic or another assignment, and your present thoughts (after completing it).

 

The image of a man using microscope in a lab was adapted from one at the Library of Congress.

 

Sports are an awful metaphor for business

John Sadowsky had a blog post on February 10 titled Can sports teach us anything worthwhile about business? and another on February 23 titled Is sport such a poor metaphor for management?  I don’t share John’s claim that sports can teach us anything, or his enthusiasm for the National Football League (NFL).

On February 3, 2017 the web site for the Harvard Business Review had an article by William C.  Taylor titled Why Sports Are a Terrible Metaphor for Business. He said:

“The logic of competition and success is completely different.”

“The dynamics of talent and teamwork are completely different.”

“The creation of economic value is completely different.”

I agree. Bill wrote that a few days before the Super Bowl. Most businesses don’t compete in an artificial oligarchy like the NFL where less than twenty events over part of a year decide a championship. And most don’t have their talent come from indentured servants like college students playing under the NCAA.

Also, as George Carlin hilariously discussed long ago there are huge differences between even Baseball vs Football.

Explaining something by comparison with the familiar

South of Boise and east of Cole Road, on the sagebrush that will become the Syringa Valley subdivision, I saw an enormous piece of construction equipment that I’d never seen before. It was a Trencor 1660 HDE chain trencher. Just imagine a Ditch Witch on steroids. Did that help? Probably not, unless you’ve already seen one cutting trenches for installing sprinkler pipe or TV cable.

But most people are familiar with chain saws, like the one shown above. Imagine a longer, wider chain saw mounted on a vehicle with wheels or tracks underneath, like the Ditch Witch R300 shown below. That’s a chain trencher.

Wikimedia Commons has a category with 32 images of them. The accompanying text says:

“A chain trencher cuts with a digging chain that is driven around a rounded metal frame (formerly sometimes a rotating wheel at the end of a boom). This type of trencher can cut ground that is too hard to cut with a bucket-type excavator. The angle of the boom can be adjusted to control the depth of the cut. To cut a trench, the boom is held at a fixed angle while the machine creeps slowly. Chain trenchers are used for narrow to wide trenches, especially in rural areas. The excavated material can be removed by conveyor belt to either side of the trench.”

Here’s what that Trencor 1660 HDE looks like. I found a 2000 brochure from Trencor here. The engine is a 750 hp turbocharged Caterpillar V-12 with two 520 gallon fuel tanks. Crawler tracks underneath (from a Caterpillar D8 bulldozer) are 19-1/2 feet long, and the rear overhang is another 12-1/2 feet. It’s 13 feet wide, 12 feet high, and weighs over 107 tons.   

And here is a brief YouTube video of one at work:

Images of a chain saw and a Ditch Witch R300 both came from Wikimedia Commons.

Why asking people to turn up the heat is a bad motivational analogy

With boiling water comes steam, and bad motivational analogies. After two of them it perhaps is time to contact the Analogy Police, for a warning that next time they will take away your poetic license.

On December 30, 2009 I blogged about how the inspirational book 212 Degrees: The Extra Degree was where inspirational vapor clashes with reality. That book confused temperature and the amount of heat required to boil water. At 2:54 in their accompanying video there also is a call to action which says that:

“You are responsible for your results. And it’s time to turn up the heat.”

That statement may seem obvious if your experience with heat transfer is limited to watching pots or teakettles boiling on your kitchen stove. But, it is not how the boiling heat transfer process always works. Chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, and metallurgists all know better.

When you look at the section on boiling heat transfer in the Wikipedia entry under heat transfer you will see that there are two very different types of boiling. The more familiar one is called nucleate boiling, but there also is another one called film boiling.

If you keep turning up the heat in an industrial boiler you eventually change over to film boiling. During film boiling there is a blanket of vapor covering the surface which insulates it from the liquid and greatly reduces heat transfer. You can see film boiling on your stove at home if you put a drop of water on a hot pancake griddle. When it is hot enough for the drop to dance around without evaporating quickly, then you are watching film boiling. Film boiling also is discussed in the Wikipedia entry under the Leidenfrost Effect. A more technical discussion appears in one section of the Wolverine Tube Handbook. So, once again inspirational vapor clashes with reality.

My father taught chemical engineering for twenty years. When I was a teenager he told me a story about how film boiling could seem completely counterintuitive. Back in the 1930s he was hired by a glue company who wanted to cut costs and increase production. He looked at their process, and told them to turn DOWN the heat. They were skeptical until he told them why that would help. After they did their glue production soared. Their warehouse began to fill up until their salesmen managed to get more customers.

















Asking people to turn up the heat sounds pretty silly when peak daytime temperatures currently are hitting above 100 degrees. Maybe it is time for a big glass of iced tea instead.

Missing the (Power)Point

In his Manner of Speaking blog on February 25th, John Zimmer discussed Power Point Math: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. His post illustrates how to miss the point - how NOT to discuss large numbers in a presentation.

John begins by mentioning two statistics about PowerPoint presentations from the eighth slide in a BBC magazine article. These originally were that:

“Businesses globally make an estimated 30 million PowerPoint presentations each day.”

and

“The average PowerPoint session runs for 250 minutes, from startup to shutdown.”

Then he proceeds to ignore both statistics. (Why would you do that to your audience?) Instead he assumes that there are 1 million presentations given per day, and that the average presentation runs for 1 hour. He adds an additional assumption that:

“…the average PowerPoint presentation involves 15 people (audience, presenter and technicians all included).”

John multiplies, and finds that there are 15 million hours of people’s time each day spent watching PowerPoint presentations. Then he divides that number by 8760 to convert from hours to years, and arrives at a figure of 1712 years. He notes that the Roman Empire didn’t last that long.

My high school chemistry teacher used to emphasize dimensional analysis - that you always need to watch the units attached to numbers that you calculate. If we take the 15 million man-hours per day and divide by 24 (hours in a day), the result is 625,000 men. That’s more like holiday audience for the Pope than the life span of the Roman Empire!

Let’s go back to the two quoted statistics. 250 minutes (or 4.166 hours) actually is the average time spent by a man for preparing a PowerPoint presentation, so when we multiply by 30 million per day we arrive at a larger figure of 125,000,000 man hours per day. What does that really mean?

Let’s put it into a global perspective. According to the US Census bureau, the 2010 world population is about 6,831,000,000 people. Assuming that we put everybody to work for 8 hours per day, there potentially could be 54,648,000,000 man-hours available per day. So, we would only be consuming 0.23% of that global effort in preparing presentations.

Another perspective could compare how preparing PowerPoint stacks up relative to building something truly exceptional. The Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza took about 1,150,100,000 man hours (or 131,200 man-years) to build, so just preparing presentations each day takes about a ninth of a Pyramid.









Still another perspective could come from converting man-hours into dollars. Back in 2003 Dave Paradi estimated that 15 million man hours per day really was just the wasted effort due to PowerPoint, or $252 million dollars per day. In a comment on John’s post I referred to Dave’s estimate. Max Atkinson also commented that he had calculated the annual waste in the UK. Shouldn’t we be more interested in the waste rather than the total?

A more complete estimate really should consider the time spent (or wasted) per day both in preparing and in watching presentations.

The Great Pyramid image on Wikimedia Commons is from Nina Aldin Thune.

212 Degrees – Where inspirational vapor clashes with reality

 

212 Degrees: The Extra Degree is an inspirational book by Samuel L. Parker and Mac Anderson. Of course there is a web site too (and an inspirational two-minute video).

The video has several comparisons showing that in sports there are very small differences between winning big and losing. Those comparisons are real, and perhaps relevant to the rest of us. If they had stopped there, then they would have been fine.

Unfortunately the book instead begins with the following:

“At 211 degrees water is hot. At 212 degrees it boils. And with boiling water comes steam. And steam can power a locomotive.”

“….Raising the temperature of water by one extra degree means the difference between something that is simply very hot and something that generates enough force to power a machine – a beautiful, uncomplicated metaphor that ideally should feed our every endeavor – consistently pushing us to make the extra effort in every task we undertake. 212 degrees serves as a forceful drill sergeant with its motivating and focused message while adhering to a scientific law – a natural law. It reminds us that seemingly small things can make tremendous differences. So simple is the analogy that you can stop reading right now, walk away with the opening thought firmly planted in your mind, and benefit from it the rest of your life.”

To many people that sounds very inspiring. Just a little more effort can bring huge results! The web site also has the catch-phrase: “One extra degree = exponential results.”

Don’t try telling the stuff about steam to engineers or scientists. At best they just will giggle. At worst they will scald you with their derision. For them it is a horribly bad analogy, an incomplete one that does not really add up. Instead it clashes with what they know about thermodynamics, and how water actually behaves.

That metaphor and “scientific law” confuses temperature and heat. How much added heat it does it really take to both bring a gram of water from 211 degrees to 212 degrees, and then to make it all boil away – to turn it from liquid to vapor?

Heating the liquid from 211 to 212 degrees takes only 2.342 Joules (the specific heat times the temperature difference). One degree F is 0.555 degree C, and the specific heat is 4.2159 Joules per gram degree C.

But, boiling it away takes adding another 2257 Joules (the heat of vaporization). You need to add another 964 times as much heat before you can turn it all into steam. Although it’s only one degree more, it takes adding much more heat to finish the job. And heat is equivalent to work. There really is no huge difference achieved with just a little more effort.

If instead you begin with the water at room temperature, 68 F, and heat it to 212 F, it only takes 335 Joules. Then you just need to add about another 6.74 times more heat to turn it all into steam. Tom Lambert pointed this out last year in a scalding blog post.

So the uncomplicated metaphor in the 212 degree book left out a huge part of the effort required to reach the goal. It is simply…wrong. The video says that: “…sometimes we need to sweat the small stuff.” Wrong! We always need to sweat the small stuff.

Boil some water, sit back, and have cup of nice hot tea. Consider the huge gap between an incomplete analogy and physical reality.

Mr. Parker since has written another motivational book called Smile & Move. If you do motivational speaking, then I strongly suggest you consider that one. You are now aware. Don’t steam people up by repeating a bad analogy!

Speaking of bad, there also is a much briefer (and only slightly obscene) parody video called 32 Degrees – the Extra Degree. Happy New Year!

Like trying to fill a dog dish with a firehose

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A good analogy can help your audience to understand something strange or complicated, or both. The metaphor in the title of this post refers to an explanation by the astronomer Antony Stark of why most galaxies, including ours, have sudden periods where stars form (starbursts).

When a highly dense ring of gas is drawn toward the black hole at the center of a galaxy, its mass will exceed the ability of the black hole to consume it. Then the gas will be ejected suddenly in a starburst. Tony explains it in a newspaper story here. He is shown walking to work at his telescope located down at the South Pole in the NOVA TV program Monster of the Milky Way. Look at the beginning of Chapter 7: Fate of the Milky Way.

I recalled that analogy a week ago in describing the new Star Trek movie, which seemed to be trying to cram in way too much stuff into the story, including some black holes. By the way, Tony is my brother-in-law.