The dream is an old one, but the assumption that you can really become a more adept or compelling speaker from an instruction manual is optimistic, at best. Language is so complicated, and has so much nuance, that it often frustrates not only our attempts to harness it for self-improvement, but also the attempt to set down rules to do so--as we can see in two recent books.
Both of them aim to be humorous, accessible additions to the improve-your-language-improve-your-life genre. And both are genuinely enjoyable. The first is “Word Hero,” by Jay Heinrichs, a longtime editor and writer, and author of the best-seller “Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion.”
He offers a set of 43 techniques--many of them tools of classical rhetoric given friendlier names (antistatis, a figure of speech meaning “opposite stance,” is given the easier, if blander, name of “repeat changer”)--that he promises will help you, too, come up with deathless prose, suitable for inclusion in books of quotations and on needlepoint pillows.
Heinrichs uses highly quotable examples from both the usual suspects (Churchill’s “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result”) and from pop culture (Jesse from “Glee” telling the club that they need to “stop being such asses and start being badasses”).
The most interesting parts of “Word Hero,” though, are the step-by-step techniques Heinrichs provides for making such grand or punchy language your own. By taking good models and “unwriting” and rewriting them, he asserts, we can build a kind of rhetorical muscle memory, making us more fit for the task Heinrichs calls “witcraft”--creating memorable, evocative phrases that, if we’re persistent and lucky, may well appear in Bartlett’s someday.
