What’s the meta-point being made by your obnoxious metaphor-laden text? What’s the reason for your abuse of rhetorical questions? It’s not effective communication. You demonstrate just how when you’re too heavy on simpleton-wowing flash, you risk losing the part of the audience that demands respect.
Jonathan, I’ll try again, with less flair... My comments were to the original post, which asks if “dark arts” are justified and I say simply, yes. I think lots of otherwise very smart people who like to communicate with bare logic and none of the cultural niceties of linguistic foreplay can actually alienate the people they hope to persuade. You may have just done that, assuming you were trying to persuade me of something.
Re: losing the audience that demands respect, firstly I was trying to be illustrative in a funny, not disrespectful way, and more importantly I was not talking about you, at all. I am talking about arguing with people who are unswayed by the logical content. “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit!” What? That’s a freaking POEM: rhyming doesn’t make it true! …and yet, history teaches us that Johnny Cochran was a genius: OJ walked. That’s the world you and I live in, unfortunately. How shall we persuade it? Logic isn’t enough.
I’d presumed, (and I suggest my tack is actually quite respectful of THIS readership), that the very part of the audience you’re cautioning me not to lose doesn’t need to be convinced, ’cause they can “do the math” already. The facts will work just fine for them. No, I am hunting smaller, game.
At the risk of another metaphor, I’ll reach for resonance. Different antennae resonate to the beat of different wavelengths. A high power signal of surpassing precision will pass unnoticed through an antenna not sized to receive it. It is possible to give one’s opponents too much credit.
What’s the meta-point being made by your obnoxious metaphor-laden text? What’s the reason for your abuse of rhetorical questions? It’s not effective communication. You demonstrate just how when you’re too heavy on simpleton-wowing flash, you risk losing the part of the audience that demands respect.
Here’s my gloss of your three paragraphs:
1) “Losers always whine about their best”
2) If you’re right, and you don’t persuade, then your speech wasn’t good enough.
3) It’s fine to design your speech so as to mislead the dumb and the inattentive toward your side.
To the last I’d add the obvious caveat that you should consider how much of your audience you lose if you do it gracelessly.
Jonathan, I’ll try again, with less flair...
My comments were to the original post, which asks if “dark arts” are justified and I say simply, yes. I think lots of otherwise very smart people who like to communicate with bare logic and none of the cultural niceties of linguistic foreplay can actually alienate the people they hope to persuade. You may have just done that, assuming you were trying to persuade me of something.
Re: losing the audience that demands respect, firstly I was trying to be illustrative in a funny, not disrespectful way, and more importantly I was not talking about you, at all. I am talking about arguing with people who are unswayed by the logical content. “If the glove does not fit, you must acquit!” What? That’s a freaking POEM: rhyming doesn’t make it true! …and yet, history teaches us that Johnny Cochran was a genius: OJ walked. That’s the world you and I live in, unfortunately. How shall we persuade it? Logic isn’t enough.
I’d presumed, (and I suggest my tack is actually quite respectful of THIS readership), that the very part of the audience you’re cautioning me not to lose doesn’t need to be convinced, ’cause they can “do the math” already. The facts will work just fine for them. No, I am hunting smaller, game.
At the risk of another metaphor, I’ll reach for resonance. Different antennae resonate to the beat of different wavelengths. A high power signal of surpassing precision will pass unnoticed through an antenna not sized to receive it. It is possible to give one’s opponents too much credit.