Persuasive Writing: A Dead Art?

Last week at a party I had the opportunity to speak with a professor from the University of Penn who noted the difficulties in teaching persuasive writing in an era when shouting––literally and figuratively––passes for debate and logical reasoning is characterized as inertia.

What is persuasive writing exactly? You may know it best as the "essay test" where you are expected to establish a thesis or take a stand pro or con an issue and defend your position with facts. In the larger world the classic newspaper editorial or op-ed piece, at its best, is persuasive writing. The Declaration of Independence is  persuasive writing. It sets out the thesis that the time has come for "...for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."  then goes on to "declare the causes which impel them to the separation." The Federalist Papers were a series of persuasive essays written for the purpose of persuading states to ratify the Constitution.

 The Oxford English Dictionary definition of "persuade" is to "cause (someone) to do something through reasoning and argument" to "cause (someone) to believe something, esp. after a sustained argument." The implication is that persuasion is a slow, and somewhat low-key, process. After all, if you hold a strong opinion and you sense someone is trying to steer you in the other direction, you will simply shut them out. The true art of persuasion is much like fishing. The fish, enticed by the lure, swallows the hook. Then the fisherman slowly and smoothly reels the fish in to keep it from fighting and dislodging the hook or breaking the line before he can land it. And like a good fisherman who will give a large fish some slack now and then, the best persuasive essays rely not only on supporting facts, but will also note the facts that seem to support an opposite position and then shoot holes in them.

Unfortunately we see little of that nuanced art today. Though opinions fly, ad nauseam, from the mouths and keyboards of everyone from politicians to journalists to talk show hosts to the everyman blogger , few engage in the art of persuasion. Instead they bludgeon us with their beliefs and replace reasoned argument with visceral appeals, innuendo, and non-sequiturs, e.g. "the same people who want to save the whales care nothing about the life of an unborn child" or "the same people who call themselves pro-life don't care about inner city kids being gunned down in the streets." Such broad and uncorroborated statements would never have stood up in even my high school papers, yet these days I read those silly "arguments" regularly in the most prestigious newspapers and magazines, often written by journalists or "experts" with Ivy League educations. Is it a wonder students view persuasive writing as a relic perfected for the SATs and quickly cast aside like high school algebra?

The Internet puts facts literally at our fingertips, making persuasive argument that much easier over the days when our Founding Fathers needed to hold important information in their heads. It should also make writers more accountable for the "facts" they use to back up an argument, because we can easily call them out on their misstatements. Unfortunately, few Internet readers bother to find the original source, preferring to choose articles that reinforce their own views and spreading the misinformation exponentially.  Take for example the current healthcare debate with journalists as well as senators and representatives (who should, I believe, be held to a higher standard) regularly bandying broad phrases like "government takeover" and "healthcare rationing." No matter where you stand on the issue, I defy anyone to show me anything coming near that in the bill recently passed by the House or the one currently before the Senate.

Now, imagine a teacher assigning an essay on the topic and requiring students to back up a position with facts. Why would they see it as anything more than a useless exercise, like practicing handwriting in this day of word processing?

Walter Cronkite: In Memoriam

Speak about the icons of the Boomer generation and you'll call up images of dead rockers like Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin or long-jowled, big-paunched live rockers who can't give up the concert stage. But for those of us who took our activism further than handing out flowers to cops, Walter Cronkite, the man who told us the way it was each week night on CBS, was a true icon.

Our generation can't claim him as a member. That would be our parents' generation, and that's what made it all the more significant when the man who made objectivity his motto, came over to our side on the Vietnam War, taking our protests out of the realm of hysterical naivte amongst a generation that had not fought Nazism and couldn't appreciate the Domino Theory, into the realm of serious politics.

I noted in an earlier post that my generation enjoyed what may one day come to be known as the "golden age" of news reporting. If that's the case, then Mr. Cronkite was the "gold standard." Back then we didn't want our news anchors cute and perky. We wanted them solid and dependable. In the early days the nerdy glasses and receding hairline wouldn't win him any beauty contests (though as a tan, broad-shouldered septuagenarian, he looked darned good), but the baritone voice and the unerring delivery made us feel, well, anchored, in a world that seemed constantly to shift under our feet.

Not that news wasn't already moving toward entertainment. As I recall, Mr. Cronkite was pushed aside ever so briefly when the ratings lemmings thought all news had to be delivered by a duo like the extremely popular Huntley-Brinkley Report, but he came back even stronger and retired at the top of his game. I just can't picture Walter Cronkite ending his newscast with a cutesy story and an ironic smile or letting the ratings guide him on whether to be soft or tough in an interview or presiding over a shouting match.

Mr. Cronkite was the father we all wanted, who would guide us through the two Kennedy and the Martin Luther King assassinations, through the Vietnam War and the only ever resignation of an American president with a calm and steady hand. Even as we decried the "generation gap" and vowed not to trust anyone over 30, we trusted him. Our president might lie. Our law makers might lie, but Walter Cronkite told the truth. We could depend on it. They were different times when the news media wasn't the politician's best buddy but his worst enemy.

That's the way it was.

Polls and Other Partial or Untold Stories

You probably heard it quoted almost as many times as Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor's remarks about Latina women. A recent new Fox News Poll showed more respondents describing themselves as "Pro-Life" than "Pro-Choice." Thanks to fellow blogger Cashewelliott at Open the Vein I found this site that puts the poll in context by comparing it with other polls. As you can see, the poll––big surprise––was conducted by Fox News. Compare it to the CNN poll conducted generally over the same period, and you'll also see that a majority––in fact a whopping majority––would not like to see Roe v Wade completely overturned.

Let me stop here to interject that this is not going to be a political post. Not that I'm ashamed of my Pro-Choice views, but because the world doesn't need another blog where people shout at each other about political beliefs. This is a writing blog and so it shall remain. However, if you've followed this blog for a while you know that I include under the rubric of writing both newspapers and the news media in general, as someone writes the stuff we hear reported, and that someone decides just what news we will hear and what we won't hear. And in this case we heard controversy where we could have heard consensus and a minefield was created where we could have found that elusive middle ground.

Look, taken together these polls show a good trend in a country portrayed as irreconcilably divided between the reds and the blues, believers and atheists, the right and the left. While a slightly higher percentage of respondents considered themselves more Pro-life, as in they probably wouldn't have an abortion themselves, or they'd think long and hard about it, they do not want to deny that right to others, or maybe even themselves should they feel differently under extenuating circumstances. You certainly wouldn't know that from the media hyping this as some cultural seismic shift.

A recent illness in my family caused me to fall a bit behind in my reading. The other day I picked up a weekly newspaper from the end of April with a blaring headline about the Swine Flu. I had to remind myself what it was all about. The Swine Flu was, like, soooo last month. Throughout the hysteria and "He said/She said" interviews, members of the World Health Organization and others from the medical community, tried desperately to bring it down a notch, knowing how easily the American public can burn out on over-hyped news. There's good reason to believe the virus will attack again and be even stronger, however, by then will anyone be listening or will the media have cried wolf once too often?

Speaking of the Swine Flu, you may have thought the epidemic in Mexico wiped out all the drug cartels. Sadly, it isn't so, only the news about the flu wiped out the news about the Mexican drug wars. And where have all the pirates gone? That's another story we haven't heard about in the past few weeks. In this world of hyper-kinetic news reporting, I often find myself disoriented. So many "crises" are covered over such short periods of time that I sometimes can't remember if an incident took place last week or last year.

A free press is one of the cornerstones of our democracy, but what's the point in the press being free if citizens aren't learning what we need to know to hold our government accountable and to make the right decisions in the voting booth? It isn't enough to report scoops that quickly, and literally, become yesterday's news. We need a more measured approach that provides details and covers a situation between the crises, when most of the important stuff happens.

What was happening in North Korea between the negotiations of the Clinton administration and their testing of a nuclear missile last year? What goes on in Israeli politics between suicide bombings?

The news media is fond of blaming their woes on the Internet, but it was long before the Internet caught on, in fact, during the First Gulf War that news agencies acquiesced to relying on news feeds rather than gathering news themselves. I personally don't believe the intended consequence was to become the mouthpiece of those in power. That was the harmful but unintended consequence of doing things on the cheap in order to return better profits to shareholders. And while it is true that, theoretically, I can read any number of varying opinions and foreign newspapers online in order to form my own opinion, many of us still feel that it takes far too much of our valuable time, not to mention, we'd like to have some entity we can trust to do the vetting––asking the right questions and verifying sources.

Just this week I switched to receiving my weekly Indian Country Today in PDF format for the same subscription price I've been paying for the print version. Why would I pay the same amount for something I get online? The same reason I, who am not American Indian, subscribed to the paper in the first place. Researching articles on a candidate I was supporting at the time, I found the articles and editorials informative, objective, and extremely well-written. While the emphasis is on Indian issues, over the years I've learned more about how the Supreme Court and Congress actually function, and how laws are proposed and passed, than I did over a lifetime of reading the Inquirer and the New York Times. In addition I read stories about Canada and Central and South America that are never reported in our mainstream media.

That isn't just what I want from news reporting and it's not just what we deserve. It's what we require to be informed citizens who can participate knowledgeably in our democracy. Provide me with that, and I will gladly pay for it, whether I receive it online or can hold it in my hand.