Writers today are facing a clarity epidemic. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, clear and plain language that is considered accessible to all has taken writers’ rooms by storm. Yet this attempt to create unbiased journalism has stripped the genre of its most powerful tools. Journalism not only has the power to inform audiences about the world around them, but it also has the ability to directly call people to action through stories. While a creative writer often relies on allegory to generate political dissonance, journalists can use language to bridge audiences to events as they happen. Figurative and emotive language are instrumental tools to generate action in an audience, yet convention bars journalists from this in a misguided attempt to be more relatable. This type of language belongs to what Cicero called the grand style “that one uses for the most important goals, like moving listeners to repentance or moral action”. I'd like to give a brief introduction to Cicero’s three styles, the appeals of grand style, and why journalists need it in their repertoire.
Cicero's Styles
Cicero coined three styles that have remained in popular rhetorical education since his writing in ancient Rome. The first is the plain style, which has the most prominence today and can be seen most prominently in listicles and social media news. Plain style is characterized by its ascetic nature with a lack of ornamentation and emphasis on clarity. Writing that is designed for generalized audiences is often written in a plain style in order to create a broad net of meaning and hopefully exclude biases from the rhetor. This is the style for proofs, statistics, and emotional restraint.
The second style, inventively named the middle style, is often considered the style of pleasure. It often moves between plain style and grand style, including some uses of figurative language but is still largely detached from emotional appeals. This style would allow for more localized language and closer connections to particular audiences but would still appear staunchly unbiased. I see this most commonly found when I watch local satellite news. Often these reporters and crew members have an open personal investment in the journalism they are putting out because it’s accepted by their audience that their credibility stems from being from that particular local.
Finally, there is grand style, the emotional and dramatic foil to plain style’s pseudo-intellectualism. Grand style is considered the most artistic of the styles and today it's often derided for its dense, flowery use of language. Grand style is also where the most humanity is introduced to rhetoric. In speeches, this can mean rhetors using grand style may decide to use pacing and emotional displays in order to help persuade their audiences such as crying, shouting, or stuttering. These appeals are meant to augment the language being used and prioritize the rhetor as an active part of the conversation, whereas plain and middle styles attempt to hide the rhetor and their inherent personality.
The Problems with Plain Style
If plain language is known and applauded for its accessibility, its clarity, and its effectiveness in conveying the truth then surely journalism is right to prioritize it above all others. In our current age of misinformation, is the only way to combat it to return to plain and simple truths? If it were truly that easy to persuade people with clear and simple truths then it’s unlikely misinformation would be as rampant as it is. These very appeals to a singular truth are exactly what has allowed misinformation to take root in society. Without conflicting viewpoints, how are readers meant to understand how rhetors came to their conclusions if the writing has divorced any semblance of bias and context? Some niches of journalism, like criticism and reviews, have relaxed their expectations for plain style because it’s important for readers to connect with the rhetoric in order to give their opinions credence. Why then is news writing not given the same sense of connection and instead stripped to the bare bones of its publisher's style? It seems that journalists have been taught that the best way to deliver the facts of a situation is to remove themselves and their humanity from the situation. For fear of being seen as emotional, or even worse as having an agenda, journalists are taught to be impersonal and distant from work which likely has great emotional consequences for themselves and their audiences.
Plain style has only become more prevalent with online publications that attempt to appeal to the widest audiences possible and in order to do so create a sterile language that is less likely to require cultural context. Writing is not the only avenue this has happened in the news. Take for example reporters for local news stations who are able to speak in their natural dialect and speak of personal ties they have to their stories. Compare that to reporters trained for national news coverage who are trained so strictly they have created a unique yet homogeneous accent that in an attempt to sound like it’s from everywhere ends up sounding like it’s from nowhere at all. This uncanny and alien kind of communication is as lazy as it is ineffective. It eliminates a rhetor’s consideration of the audience as a group made of individuals with particular cultural dispositions and instead appeals to some hypothetical transcendent rationale within them. Except that someone’s sense of logic and rationale is intrinsically connected to their demographics and cultural values. In the United States, how is a liberal journalist who is from the northeast and college-educated meant to create truths that persuade conservative blue-collar Americans? If we assume that empathy is not an innate virtue of people and instead something that can be fostered and nurtured then we open avenues of communication between extremists who otherwise would have no way of knowing what the other one meant.
The Need For Grand Style
All this is not to say that it is the job of all marginalized people, regardless of their careers as journalists or otherwise, to argue on equal footing with those who communicate in bad faith or have no ability to see others as equal to themself. Those people have chosen to close themselves off to the rhetorical process of persuasion, but they are also a small population. Most people are willing to learn and debate, but that means that there need to be ways of communicating that don’t inherently prioritize and disenfranchise one person’s background over another's. Which is exactly what plain style does. It places one voice as the universal norm and requires everyone outside of that demographic to assimilate. In the United States, white affluent voices are treated as the norm and that’s reflected in our standards of journalism. In order to even be listened to, infinitely diverse people must shed the very things that make them passionate and compelling rhetoricians in the first place. Current political discourse creates unnecessary divisiveness by denying people the ability to explain themselves and why they think the way they do. Algorithms and social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok prioritize this brevity, insisting that if journalists want to find success on their platforms they need to invest in generalized, repostable quips over nuance and extended discourse.
If people did not act as though modern technology has ended perspectivalism, rhetors would be free to write to their audience with the nuance necessary to generate real change. A paraphrase of Cicero my article references states that successful rhetoric “...depends on shade and depth to increase by contrast the prominence of its brilliant features…” and grand style can create that contrast by appealing to readers' aesthetic and emotional senses. It would also allow for something Cicero called inflecione sermonis or irony in their work, “so that even when praising another or disparaging himself, he in fact is making a more subtle point.” Subtly is a lost art in contemporary writing where rhetors are not trusted to guide their readers through their use of language and so must disguise all clever and masterful tricks behind the veneer of indifference. People are more than data points and statistics, they are complex and changeable stories of their lives. Only using plain style does a disservice to the people whose stories journalists are attempting to tell, and to the journalists themselves whose individuality makes their voice invaluable to their work.
Comments