A bit of rhetoric can boost the impact of your research

Those articles haven't always been so heavy

Do you ever put down an article and wonder if it really had to be so hard to read? If it couldn't have been easier, lighter, more interesting? If it couldn´t have been written in a way that made it a pleasure, not a burden, to read?

Research articles don't have to be so heavy. They haven't always been this way.

Until the late 19th century, most students learned rhetoric (the techniques we use to communicate). This widespread explicit communication instruction gave everyone the opportunity to develop their communication skills: how to get their point across clearly and succinctly, how to build up a logical argument.

What changed?

Rhetoric was gradually cut to make space for other fields. It is still being taught in some places in the US, usually under a pseudonym ("communication" or "writing"), but not in non-native English speaking countries, where it could help enormously.

Learning explicit communication techniques can lessen the burden on non-native English researchers who need more help writing in English because they have less experience to draw from and fewer good examples to follow.

Because of this loss of explicit communication instruction, many of us no longer think consciously about how to communicate clearly.

A few rhetorical techniques, combined with a few linguistic theories, can help researchers make clear, logical decisions about how they convey their research, and these techniques are not hard to learn.¹

These techniques can help you write more clearly:

• parallelism
• given information to new information
• verbs instead of nouns
• light before heavy
• comparison
• repetition

We are writing unconsciously

If you have never explicitly learned how to write clearly, you are writing unconsciously. Learning to write consciously will save you time because you will be able to identify problem areas and you will know which techniques can fix them.

My students tell me that they can never go back to being unaware. They can identify what is wrong with a text; they understand that they struggle to understand it because the writer failed to use easy rhetorical techniques that could have created elegance. They do not struggle because they are not smart enough.

Elegant simplicity is an ideal that rhetoric can help us achieve. If we want readers to focus entirely on the content, we should write sentences that are so clearly structured that the structure becomes invisible. If readers don't have to work to figure out the structure, they are free to focus entirely on the content.

Rhetoric can help us achieve that.

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Footnotes

1. They can be hard to apply though! ↩