The situation speaks first

I have given the right speech in the wrong hour.

The argument was prepared. The sentences were clear. What I had missed was the room: people needed a different decision, a little more time, or words from someone else. I left thinking I had failed at delivery. The failure had begun before I spoke.

That experience changed what interests me about rhetoric, the craft of persuasion. A true statement can still answer the wrong question. A beautiful sentence can ask for attention that belongs elsewhere. Before deciding how to make an argument persuasive, I want to understand what these words could do for the people who will hear them.

What needs to change?

Imagine a committee deciding what to do about a leaking roof at its community hall. Someone arrives with photographs, repair quotations and a speech about preserving the building. Everything in the presentation is accurate. Yet the discussion stalls.

The listeners already agree that the hall matters. They are worried about spending the reserve that keeps its activities running. Another account of the building’s history will not answer that concern. The speaker has prepared a defence of the hall when the committee needs a judgement about how to care for it.

Lloyd Bitzer’s essay The Rhetorical Situation gives this failure a useful shape. He argues that rhetoric responds to a situation in which words can help bring about change. His term exigence names the problem calling for that response. The audience consists of people who can be persuaded and help make the change; the constraints are the circumstances that influence what can be said or done.¹

The roof needs physical work. Speech can help the committee decide how to arrange it. The relevant question is narrower than “How do I make them care?” It is whether these people can reach a responsible decision with the information before them.

That changes the preparation. The speaker needs to understand the reserve, the alternatives and the consequences of waiting. If those facts are missing, another evening polishing the speech will not supply them. Some of the work happens away from the page.

There is a useful objection to Bitzer here. Richard Vatz argues that speakers help create a situation’s meaning by choosing what to bring to people’s attention.² Calling this a threat to a beloved building directs attention one way; calling it a threat to the activities inside directs it another. The leak is real, but it does not write the speech. The speaker remains responsible for that choice.

I take both demands seriously: attend to what is happening, and answer for how you describe it. In our imagined hall, that means making the roof and the reserve part of the same decision. The history may still belong in the speech, now as a reason to keep the hall useful rather than a way to make reluctance look disloyal.

Character within the argument

Aristotle distinguishes three means of persuasion: the character a speech reveals, the feelings it arouses in its hearers, and the argument it offers. These are ethos, pathos and logos. His account of character is especially demanding: credibility should emerge from what the speaker says, rather than depend entirely on a reputation that arrived before the speech.³

These qualities work together. Consider a revised opening at the hall:

We need to repair the roof, and we need enough money left to keep using the hall. I have compared the options against both requirements. There is one uncertainty in the estimates that I want to explain before asking for a decision.

The speaker has begun to show judgement by taking the committee’s concern seriously. Naming the uncertainty gives people a reason to trust the account. It may also ease the fear that a cherished building is being used to rush them into a commitment. At the same time, it identifies a question the argument must answer. Character, feeling and reason are already present in the same few sentences.

No announcement of personal integrity would do that work. An unknown speaker can earn attention by naming a real cost; a respected speaker can lose it by evading one. The next paragraph has to justify the confidence the opening invites.

Feeling belongs in this work because people care about what is at stake. Aristotle observes that our judgements change with our emotional condition.⁴ The ethical responsibility I draw from that is to help people judge with their concerns in view. Anxiety about the reserve deserves an answer. Affection for the hall deserves expression. Neither gives the speaker permission to make a hesitant member feel ashamed of asking a reasonable question.

A lodge in mourning offers a quieter example. It does not need a speaker to manufacture more sadness. It needs words that can carry the sadness already there without lying about it. The right feeling is not necessarily a stronger feeling.

The test I return to is whether people leave more able to see, or merely less able to refuse.

Reason has its own discipline. I have written investment research with charts in a row and a conclusion doing its real work in the caption. The evidence looked substantial; the connection between it and the recommendation was too weak. A pile of correct facts can conceal a missing argument.

At the hall, photographs establish a problem. Quotations establish possible costs. Neither alone establishes which choice the committee should make. The speaker must show why the proposed repair meets the need, what it leaves available for other commitments, and what would make a different option preferable. If that comparison changes the recommendation, the speech has improved before anyone hears it.

This is what I value in the classical craft. It asks more of preparation than a polished performance. You have to become capable of offering the judgement you are asking others to share.

The fitting hour

Even a well-made argument has an occasion.

The ancient image of Kairos, the opportune moment, makes this memorable. In an epigram about a statue by Lysippus, Opportunity has hair at the front and is bald at the back. You can seize him as he approaches. Once he has passed, there is nothing to catch.⁵

I like the severity of that image. The words may remain true after the chance to use them has gone. People move, decisions close, relationships change. A speech composed afterwards may help us understand what happened, but it cannot be delivered into the old room.

At the hall, the useful moment might be before the budget is settled, while the committee can still compare commitments. Bringing the same case after the money has been allocated asks for a different decision. Equally, an early demand for approval may be premature if members have not received the estimates. Preparation includes making it possible for others to prepare.

This also makes me suspicious of urgency created by the desire to speak. A publishing date can help me finish an essay. It cannot, by itself, make that essay necessary to anyone else. A genuine deadline belongs in an argument; an invented one makes judgement harder. Sometimes the next useful act is a conversation with one person, a visit to the building, or letting someone better placed make the case.

The fitting hour asks us to notice when to speak and when there is still work to do.

Find the speech by speaking

A draft still has to become speech. Quintilian devotes Book XI, chapter 3 of the Institutio Oratoria to delivery, treating voice and movement as parts of the speaker’s work.⁶ He gives sustained attention to something a written argument cannot finish for us: how meaning reaches another person in the act of speaking.

Read the hall’s opening aloud. “There is one uncertainty in the estimates.” Can the speaker say that plainly, allow it to be heard, then explain it? Or does the sentence accelerate as though the uncertainty were an embarrassment to get past? The words offer openness. The delivery can reveal how willing the speaker is to practise it.

Speaking a draft also helps discover the thought. A phrase that looked substantial on the page may turn out to say very little. “Protecting our long-term sustainability” becomes “keeping enough money to run the hall through winter.” The second sentence gives someone a proposition they can question. Hearing it may expose a calculation the speaker still needs to make.

This is why I think of speaking as a craft learned through practice. Try the words in the posture and setting in which they will be used. A recording can make a swallowed qualification or a rushed transition audible. A trusted listener can tell you where they lost the argument. Revision then has a particular person to serve.

For me, the Christian belief in the Incarnation deepens this regard for embodied life. The body matters; it is more than packaging for an idea. In speaking, that conviction directs my attention to the agreement between words and conduct. Someone who invites a question must make time to hear it. Someone who speaks of shared responsibility must leave others room to exercise theirs.

Before a speech, I want to be able to answer a few plain questions. What needs to change? Who can change it? What can I responsibly ask them to believe or do? Then I want to hear the draft aloud, especially the places where impressive language conceals something unfinished.

Back at the hall, the speaker reaches the proposal and stops. The committee now has the reasons, the costs and the uncertainty before it. Someone begins a question. There is no sentence in the draft for this part. The speaker has to listen.