Lecture
Rhetoric—translated from Greek, is the theory of eloquence. Business rhetoric is an applied branch of general rhetoric oriented toward equipping executives and specialists with rules for handling the word. Business rhetoric first and foremost takes into account the factors that influence communicativeness, serving as an instrument of communicative interaction.
Failure to master it at the proper level — is one of the substantial causes of many failures among executives and specialists, of their low personal standing within work collectives. This is easy to verify if one looks closely at how ineffectively they use such rhetorical methods of communicative influence as persuasion, suggestion, and imitation.
Eloquence is the most important mark of a modern executive's professional fitness. The art of speaking must be learned. First of all, one should master the basic principles of speech influence.
Business rhetoric employs the following principles of speech influence: accessibility, associativity, sensory quality, expressiveness, intensity.
• Accessibility presupposes a balanced content of speech, taking into account the listeners' cultural and educational level, their life and work experience. Many people hear what they want to hear. Therefore one should take into account the social composition of the audience (pensioners, young people, women, research workers, etc.). An effective technique is to actualize the content, use little-known information (novelty and originality), and combine heterogeneous items of information while ensuring their reliability.
Associativity means evoking empathy and shared reflection, achieved by appealing to the listeners' emotional and rational memory. Techniques used for this include analogies, references to precedents, and figurative expression. A special set of techniques involves drawing on poetry, music, painting, video films, and the like.
Sensory quality calls for the broad use of color, light, sound, drawings, and models in communicative interaction. The more thoroughly and variously human senses are engaged, the more effectively information penetrates the human psyche and the more actively the process of assimilating it proceeds there.
Expressiveness presupposes emotional intensity of speech, its emotional subtext, and the expressiveness of the speaker's facial expressions, gestures, and posture. Such inner openness on the speaker's part testifies to their full dedication. Passion, unfeigned joy or sorrow, compassion — all these are concrete forms of expressiveness.
Intensity characterizes the pace of delivering information and the degree of the speaker's mobility during communication. Different information and different people require a differentiated pace of presentation and assimilation of what is heard. One must take into account people's temperament, their readiness to accept a particular kind of information, and their personal interest in it. For example, a speech before an organization's council and a speech at a street rally are naturally delivered at a different pace. In this connection it is important for the speaker to gauge the audience's mood and to be able to offer it an acceptable speed for assimilating information.
These principles of communicative interaction attain their greatest expressiveness when the rhetorical toolkit is used skillfully. Its practical purpose is to give communicative interaction an impact on people's thoughts and feelings. This rhetorical toolkit appears in the form of the following set of communicative effects: visual image, first phrases, argumentation, the quantum release of information, intonation and pause, artistic expressiveness, relaxation, dispersion.
• The effect of visual image is calculated to make an impression from the speaker's outward appearance, which evokes sympathy or antipathy even before the speaker has begun to speak. An attractive appearance, an elegant manner of address, a benevolent, open gaze — all this has a positive effect on people even before the speech begins.
• The effect of first phrases as a rule reinforces or corrects the initial impression made by the speaker. The main criterion for the effect of the initial phrases is the attractive information contained in them. It may be well known, but presented in a new interpretation, accompanied by original examples. When preparing a speech, it is very important to determine the main social groups of the audience, their mood and expectations, and the particularities of their emotional makeup. Therefore one should have on hand a set of opening phrases oriented toward the social groups that predominate in the audience.
• The effect of argumentation is based on the logic of the speech, which lends it soundness and persuasiveness. If logic is the internal organization of speech, then its external side is theoretical and practical argumentation. Theoretical argumentation includes scientific propositions and concepts, while practical argumentation includes concrete facts, figures, and statistical data.
• The effect of the quantum release of information is one of the effective rhetorical devices for holding the audience's attention. It is based on the pre-planned placement of new thoughts and arguments throughout the speech. In this way the speaker keeps attention active by releasing quanta of fresh information at certain time intervals.
• The effect of intonation and pause is a highly accessible and productive rhetorical instrument in terms of results. Specialists maintain that intonation and pauses contribute a 10— 15% increment of information. Such is the peculiarity of human perception. Giving a word or phrase a particular vocal tone, as a rule, evokes certain associations in the listeners. As a result an informative increment occurs beyond what the speaker is literally saying.
Pause is a delicate rhetorical instrument. Its use is effective when the speaker is confident that the listeners have become actively engaged in the communicative process, that their thinking, memory, and imagination are intensively participating in it. It is then, for the listeners' independent reflection on the information received and for connecting their own knowledge to it, that a pause is useful.
The effect of artistic expressiveness is connected with the ability to turn thoughts into appropriate words, to construct sentences correctly, and to observe the rules of word stress. The logic of the speech suggests which phrases deserve a place in it. Not every phrase can be inserted into a speech. Only phrases that do not disrupt the sense of the presentation and that give it a verbal form accessible to comprehension may be used.
The effect of relaxation is used by the speaker to help the listeners. The ability to listen is of great importance. The more complex the speech, the greater the effort the listeners must exert to concentrate their attention. The purpose of the relaxation effect is to relieve emotional tension. A classic example of this is humor. Thanks to humor a natural pause for rest is created, and an opportunity arises to restore emotional energy.
The effect of dispersion. Consider the following figures: if the intended content of a speech is taken as 100%, then 90% of it takes verbal form, of which 80% is actually spoken aloud, of which 70% is heard by the audience, of the volume of information heard 60% is understood, and about 25% remains in memory.
is subject to continuous loss of information and subjective distortion. There are many reasons for this. One of them is designated in rhetoric by the concept of “dispersion losses.” This refers to the scattering of information as it is received from the speaker.
In conclusion, let us offer a few practical recommendations to executives and specialists.
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