Geoff's Miscellany

Writer's Block

You've had it, I've had it. It's not pleasant.

As far as I can tell, there four reasons for writer's block:

1. Trying to sound profound (This is part of the game in fiction and poetry.)
2. Poor research
3. An inability to make an argument
4. Nothing to actually say
5. Bonus Reason Five: You're just procrastinating.

I have very little to say to help poets and fiction authors to overcome writer's block. What I will say is this: Write about something else. Literally just write a narrative or a poem about something entirely unrelated to the project that has left you stumped. Write a narrative about your trip to the bank or a rhyme about your wait in the grocery line. That helps me come up with sermon illustrations and illustrations for speeches on engineering topics as well.

I don't watch the Big Bang Theory and I intentionally don't watch shows with laugh tracks. BBT has a laugh track and I just decided to watch a bit of it without the laugh track:

Very little to none of that is funny. But why are there laugh tracks? Well, they work. People laugh out loud more, even when they rate material just as funny as the group that has no laugh track and does not laugh out loud. But I think more work needs to be done on longer exposure to laugh tracks. Even brief interventions can change views, which is upstream from behavior. Also, parody works wonders at promoting negative viewpoints about the target of the parody, which can ultimately change behavior.

Summary: Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, dialectic of verbal reasoning. Knowing the difference between the two will make you a better reader, listener, thinker, writer, and speaker.

Introduction

Sometimes a tool becomes so important to us, it's impossible to imagine not having it. I tend to think of shoes, my pocket knife, and my car that way. For others, it might be their phone or laptop. But all of us know of a tool that becomes quintessential to who we are because of how it increases our capacity to be human. I've taught research, writing, and public speaking for 10 years now, and the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic has become such a tool for me. 

When I was in high school, I found a little red book on hypnosis in my school library. I flipped through the pages, saw a section on inducing sleep states, and read it. When I was a kid I always struggled to sleep. The method in the book, though it was meant for trained psychiatrists to utilize on patients worked swimmingly. I used to have very few good nights of sleep. After reading those few short paragraphs, I found myself having very few nights of bad sleep. The change was remarkable.

In the past I’ve written pretty extensively about the difference between rhetoric and dialectic. The distinction between the two, I think, can be quite important for understanding Scripture. Here’s a short review:

1. Dialectic is the art of using logic and facts in order to find what is true. In reference to discourse (written or spoken) it is essentially the posture of either science or exposition. It's purpose is chiefly truth.
2. Rhetoric is the art of determining what is persuasive use well as using it. It's purpose is chiefly feeling.

When reading the gospels (themselves a form of rhetoric) one of the places where Jesus is pretty clear about what makes for a morally whole and upright existence is his endorsement of honoring your parents by caring for them financially:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how rhetoric, advertising, and imagery in general can influence our view of the world.

This got me to thinking about the nature of suggestibility and achievement as well as the relationship of false expectations to achievement.

The research on these subjects is pretty vast, so you’ll just have to look it up (I’ll probably post a bibliography in the bottom).

Anyway, suggestibility is the state of being primed to accept an idea without argument or coercion.

Since I teach rhetoric, I’m always looking for ways to give my students an edge and this leads me down all sorts of great rabbit trails: books on hypnotism, psychology, watching speeches by famous politicians, ancient rhetorical manuals, books on family systems communication, and even books on marketing.

Today I started Victor Schwab’s classic, How to Write a Good Advertisement.

He wrote it in the 1940s and one of his main points is that you have to advertise to the people who will be buying your product, not to the person you are, that you wish you were, or that you wish everybody was. He gave this list of what he thought was an alarming trend in the United States in the 40s. He thought people were leaning toward:

My first emotional reason for being a Christian is the one that is often treated as the least worthy reason to care about Jesus. It’s the doctrine of hell.

The doctrine of hell, some experience of post-mortem divine punishment for misdeeds in the present life is rejected by many intellectually and by even more practically. In fact, many people seem to reject the notion of God precisely because they find the doctrine of any sort of hell unconscionable. I’m not writing this to defend the notion of hell. Remember, this is in my emotional reasons section for why I’m a Christian. But think of it this way, instead of rejecting the notion of God because hell is a terrifying notion, consider the possibility that it is real. Whatever it is: eternal destruction, eternal torture, fire, darkness, hanging out with all the losers and jerk you hate and who hate you for eternity, etc, it can’t be pleasant. On top is hell clearly being terrible, versions of it have been believed by billions of people. Now, billions can be wrong and often are, but our instincts have a tendency to point us in the right direction if we consider them at the bar of reason. The possibility of a post-mortem punishment for immoral behavior worth checking out. Here’s why I care about hell. In real life, my normal motivation for doing the right thing is usually ease in the moment. My life is set up so that moral behavior requires little effort. I’m not sure how good of a person I would be if times got tough. But nevertheless my desire for ease does cause me to consider the possibility of hell with concern. If misdeeds are punished, then that conflicts with my desire for ease. Because of the possibility of hell there are three things I can think of to do just in case (these are not contradictory):

A few months ago I reevaluated this question from the angle of rhetorical appeal.

I did this because as I’ve grown older I’ve had two somewhat opposite experiences:

1. I've studied logic much more carefully.
2. I've learned that, in general, while people are rational (their behavior has rationale), they are not reasonable. We do not operate solely on the basis of dispassionate reason.

1. Pathos
   1. Hell
   2. Tribalism
   3. Cosmic Story
   4. Social Life
   5. Happiness
2. Ethos
   1. The moral credibility of Jesus
   2. The moral credibility of Christianity's best
   3. The power of Western Civilization
3. Logos
   1. Why I think God exists
   2. Why I think Jesus was raised