Obama evolved. The NAACP evolved.
The NCLR has evolved. How do you get your friends and family to evolve into support for LGBT rights?
The
Movement Advancement Project's excellent
Talking About LGBT Issues series gives research-driven rhetorical and messaging frameworks that work best for meeting reluctant folks where they are. They include warnings about civil rights framings, how to hit emotional marks that emphasize commonality and cover things like adoption, marriage, transgender etiquette and employment protections.
posted by klangklangston
on Jun 25, 2012 -
17 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2011 -
72 comments
An attempt at a
collaborative translation of Plato’s Protagoras. Every day for a few months, Dhananjay Jagannathan will post roughly a page of the dialogue, side by side in Greek, in his own translation, and in Jowett’s classic 1871 translation. He's invited readers to comment and offer suggestions to improve the translation. Jagannathan's goal is to communicate Plato in English the way readers of his would have interpreted his Greek.
posted by unliteral
on Jun 30, 2010 -
11 comments
"...the aspiring speaker needs no knowledge of the truth about what is right or good... In courts of justice no attention is paid whatever to the truth about such topics; all that matters is plausibility..." A
Glossary of Rhetorical Terms with examples.
posted by sluglicker
on May 31, 2008 -
7 comments
My Right Wing Dad is a new-ish and rather informal blog that aims to provide "a chance for folks to examine the unrestrained rhetoric that is quietly passed from in-box to in-box in America," by hosting a collection of the emails that form an often untraceable and unacknowledged part of public discourse in the U.S., especially on the Right. Tagged by category (for example:
God,
college,
flag,
liberal, and
World War II), the amateur archive presents a range of colorful opinion, not all of it strikingly accurate, and some of it offensive. In efforts to understand
liberal and conservative habits of communication, it may be worth considering the role of forwarded email in the electoral process, and the
reasons that the forwarding of email is popular among some people, and whether this behavior tends to correlate with particular political opinions. The emails hosted on MyRightWingDad may in any case be enlightening, unless you're already on the forward list of someone in the know.
posted by washburn
on Aug 15, 2007 -
105 comments
Do you know your rhetoric? You can hear how it is used in the
top 100 American speeches of all time, 63 of which have the original audio recordings!
(prev.) The list has some odd omissions, such as the
Gettysburg Address (and here in convenient
presentation form) and non-American speakers like
Churchill, so this shorter
international list may be useful. While the slow decline in the quality of presidential addresses
is much lamented,
scriptwriters are stepping up, see for example,
top movie speeches of all time ("Smells like victory" beats "You can't handle the truth"). So, MeFiers, do any of these still inspire, or is rhetoric dead?
posted by blahblahblah
on May 24, 2005 -
31 comments
Want to see the results of all the hateful anti-gay rhetoric? While other forms of crime continued to fall, the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs has documented a 4% increase in anti-LGBT crime in 2004, coming on the heels of a 26% increase in the last half of 2003. This spike in violence parallels the exact same period since the Right went into demonic, anti-gay hyperdrive following the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision in July of 2003. Since then, church pews and the public airwaves have been awash in ugly, anti-gay rhetoric and fear-mongering.
"These words obviously do not just vanish into the ether - as intended, they are absorbed and become fuel and justification for violence. To say otherwise defies reality. -- The
Matt Foreman, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (via think-bomb)
And these are just the
reported incidents.
posted by amberglow
on Apr 28, 2005 -
114 comments
Why I Hate Advocacy. Baseball, politics, and programming languages? Mark Jason-Dominus created a classic article that is really about the general human tendancy towards flawed dialogue and the pitfalls surrounding evangelism, even though it's specifically directed towards the perl programming community. Indeed, as
in the past, some may see the "spectre of Metafilter itself" in Mark's words.
posted by weston
on Aug 4, 2003 -
19 comments
The Wooly Bullies Of MetaFilter - Uncovered! Sweating heavily as I perused this unholy website's rhetorical machinations late into the night, I was suddenly shaken by a strange feeling of dread, for it was the spectre of MetaFilter itself I was seeing before my bulging eyes, in all its hideous familiarity, emerging from the fetid depths of my guilt-wracked soul...
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Feb 27, 2003 -
16 comments
Standing With Osama? "Some of the more bilious right-wing pundits... have taken to describing those who oppose the invasion as 'siding with Saddam.' But if such sleazy rhetoric is allowable, then maybe we should say that those like our President, who seem to have ignored Osama’s decrees, or like Powell, who are hawking a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection based on overblown evidence, are standing with Osama." Is this accusation fair? If so, is it productive? I doubt it, but I'm not certain. Rohan Gunaratna, the author of
"Inside Al Qaeda," warns that an invasion of Iraq would
undermine the international campaign against Al Qaeda and give terrorist groups a new lease on life. Oh well,
at least it's funny. [Via
Cursor.] [More inside.]
posted by homunculus
on Feb 19, 2003 -
21 comments
The tendency toward
euphemism, catchwords, bites and labels displacing description of uniquicity. Battles of rhetorical titans!
posted by semmi
on Apr 18, 2002 -
5 comments
Propaganda analysis: A very interesting page on how to recognize and avoid emotionally-charged propaganda and political rhetoric. A broader question would be, how do you go about analyzing competing truth-claims made by environmentalists and anti-environmentalists, pro- and anti-gun control activists, Moonies, socialists, libertarians and capitalists? Are there any hard and fast rules you use to choose who and what to believe in a world of name calling and information glut?
posted by hanseugene
on Jan 17, 2002 -
5 comments
Having trouble keeping your parallelism and chiasmus straight? Or biting your nails over whether to use zeugma, prozeugma, or diazeugma? Fear not. The
Handbook of Rhetorical Devices is here.
posted by tdecius
on Sep 17, 1999 -
0 comments
