The Power of Storytelling

This weeks readings made sense to me! Not only did they make sense to me, I was following along because I wanted to. I was invested in what the authors had to say and I wanted to see where each point led and how it connected to the next. My feeling is that I was able to connect in this way to the texts because of one very important element.....STORY TELLING.

Storytelling is a concept that we have not gone over much in class, and I am not totally sure if this is even an acceptable concept to relate to rhetoric but let me tell you, if we are supposed to view rhetoric as something meant to persuade us, then there is no way, in my opinion, to persuade a reader quite like telling a story. Hearing from a colored man in the time of slavery abolition and his ways of navigating through rhetoric and public speech while dealing with his new found freedom and the backlashes of that freedom is the most gripping and captivating way to hear about public speech and rhetoric. Hearing the story of a woman, who was raised in a time of oppression for females especially in church settings, who is part of devout Methodist family that had a ministry, and her interpretations of the voice of women in these situations is the best way to do so. Screw eloquence, screw order...The only order I am concerned with in rhetoric is the order in which you choose to tell your STORY. Personal experience and testimony is the most effective way of rhetoric in my opinion.

"I trembled in every limb. I am not sure that my embarrassment was not the most effective part of my speech, is speech it could be called. Mr Garrison followed me, taking me as his text; and now, whether I had whether I had made an eloquent speech in behalf of freedom or not, his was one never to be forgotten by those who heard it." This is Frederick Douglas telling a story of an influential speech he heard by a fellow abolitionist, and how it influenced him and the way he felt when he heard it. It is the STORY of how he was influence by speech and rhetoric, and how it shook him to his core that day. WOW! A lot more captivating than some old Greek dude telling me what I should and shouldn't do just because....Right?

"But all this is hardly more absurd than the revelation of failure (after I thought myself a veteran on our ranks) made to me the most unwittingly by a dear old lady down in Delaware, who, after I had talked an hour by the clock on the 'Aims and Methods of W.C.T.U.' said in a droll soliloquy as she scrawled her name upon my membership card: "I'm sure I don't know that she wants us to do,  but I reckon it;s a good deal in temperance work as it is in goin' to prayer meetin' of a dark night--I cant see but a step a step to a time....' Therefore, take nothing for granted save that each of them is fitted out with brain and heart and conscience on which you are to act by knowledge, sympathy, conviction." Here, Willard tells the story of a conversation that she had with a woman about temperance and how it helped her develop new opinions and beliefs.This is a narrative! There is a story to follow, there is dialogue to sift through, there is a message being conveyed! Something I can sink my teeth into, something I can follow. Narrative and storytelling is a method of rhetoric that works best for me. Whether that is correct or not!