Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion by Jeanne Fahnestock (review)

Jeanne Fahnestock’s Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in Persuasion should be on your shelf. Tackling what is assumed to be at the heart of rhetoric, Fahnestock gives rhetoricians—and those who do not understand what rhetoricians can see in texts—a welcome resource for expanding their vision and depth of knowledge about a topic that we all seem to agree is important but do not seem to consider as seriously as we should. The breadth of the title will invite criticism of what is not included in the ambitious work, but its virtues go well beyond other attempts at wrestling with such an inevitably elusive subject as style. A topic that linguistic analysis has largely dominated, the consideration of style from a perspective of traditional rhetoric is certainly welcome, perhaps even needed, in our field.

Fahnestock has carefully constructed Rhetorical Style to not be certain things, as she herself quickly points out. It is not an Emily Post guide for improving one’s writing and speaking style, although that might be a happy byproduct from the exploration of the various facets and functions of style, nor is it precisely a handbook for close textual analysis from a rhetorical perspective, although that might be where the book ultimately can do the most good. And it is not simply a freshly packaged compendium of stylistic devices, an updated glossary of quaint terms for reference. Finally, it is not a Sontag-like conceptual musing on the ontological nature of rhetorical style itself. Reanimating traditional rhetorical stylistics through dialogues with linguistics, contemporary rhetorical theories, and reconsidered groupings of language strategies that highlight why they might be used, Rhetorical Style clearly and quite comprehensively explains the potential choices that rhetors can make and what those choices can do, given their purposes. The audience of the book, therefore, is broad, and it shifts: given your knowledge of linguistics, the rhetorical tradition, or methods of rhetorical criticism, you may feel yourself outside of its ambit at times and temporarily hungry for deeper discussions of semantic roles, the history of punctuation, or the construction of an implied world through syntactic emphasis. But it is a hunger that goads readers to explore on their own, following the many references to scholarly works on similar topics or considering how something like “sentence architecture” is operating in texts around them in ways that may be more complex than Fahnestock has space to explain.

The celebration of rhetorical choices—and the difference that every choice makes—suffuses the more than 450 pages of the work. Readers finish the book appreciating the multitudes of stylistic opportunities possible and seeing those that previously passed unnoticed. And Fahnestock makes it clear that she is conscious of her own choices. Beyond deciding to tether style to purpose, argument, and the classical tradition, Fahnestock has portioned her work into four general categories: word choice, sentence forms, the interactive dimension in texts, and passage construction, with three to six chapters in each section. For example, perhaps one of the most provocative and successful analyses in the book, the section on sentences, includes chapters on predication, modification, sentence architecture, figures of argument, series, and prosody and punctuation. There is a lot of information in Rhetorical Style. If you have never formally studied style or are trapped in the rut of observing the same stylistic maneuvers or effects, then Rhetorical Style should be your resource. The explanations are clear and the concepts are illustrated and analyzed in extended, traditionally rhetorical, passages. You will become familiar with a wide range of stylistic devices, and they are wedded to a thorough-going, if particular, rhetorical perspective. That perspective, rhetor-centered, like the classical tradition itself, does not permit much of an audience or implied audience-centered analysis of style, a limitation that is sometimes sensed in the rhetorical criticism that peppers the discussions. Nevertheless, equipped with the tools Rhetorical Style provides, the reader...