AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and
this week on Wordmaster: a Web site that offers an interesting look at
United States life and history, through examples of how Americans use
rhetoric, the language of persuasion.
RS: Michael
Eidenmuller is an assistant professor of rhetoric and public address at
the University of Texas at Tyler. He says an average of five-thousand
Internet users a day visit his site, americanrhetoric.com.
AA: What he calls the "heart" of the site is a huge database of
political and religious speeches from the last two centuries. These
come in text form. Many also have audio and in some cases video.
RS: And there's lots more at americanrhetoric.com, which Professor Eidenmuller originally created for his students.
EIDENMULLER: "You'll find quizzes, various exercises in rhetoric to
kind of get the student acquainted with how we, in America anyway,
conceptualize the discipline of rhetoric. And, gosh, you'll find an
area dedicated to 9-11 [the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001],
beginning with the radio reports of police units observing what it is
they're seeing as in the Pentagon situation, for example, when the plane
crashed into the Pentagon.
POLICE OFFICER: " ... it was an American Airlines plane headed eastbound over the pike, possibly toward the Pentagon."
DISPATCHER: "Ten-four. Cruiser 50 direct?"
OFFICER: "Fifty, 10-4."
SECOND OFFICER: "Thirty-six, I'm en route. I see the smoke."
AA: We asked Michael Eidenmuller what are some of the most popular speeches on his site.
EIDENMULLER: "By far the single most popular speech, as measured by
the number of hits it gets per day, is Martin Luther King's 'I Have a
Dream' [delivered at a big demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial in
Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963.]"
MARTIN LUTHER KING: "
... freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children
will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color
of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream
today!"
AA: "Now we've just recently lost a man who was known as the Great Communicator, President Ronald Reagan."
EIDENMULLER: "Right."
AA: "Has there been an influx of people to your site, downloading his speeches?
EIDENMULLER: "Yes, the site activity has over the last week and a half
has approximately doubled, and the vast majority of the increased can
be accounted for by people accessing Reagan's great speeches."
RONALD REAGAN (January 28, 1986): "Ladies and gentlemen, I'd planned
to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the
events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a
day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by
the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with
all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss."
RS: "What is there in the style of Ronald Reagan, what does his rhetoric style tell us about the life and times?"
EIDENMULLER: "Much has been made about the tone of Ronald Reagan's
delivery. He tended to convey rather sophisticated policy ideas in a
neighborly way, quote unquote. But I think that he took presidential
rhetoric in terms of style in a slightly different direction. He really
greatly preferred telling stories that would capture both the emotional
tone as well as some of the substance of the ideas that he was trying
to communicate. And this was a kind of populist rhetoric that really
hadn't caught on at least to the extent that it did under Reagan's
direction."
RS: "What can students of English as a foreign language learn from this Web site, learn from listening to great speeches?"
EIDENMULLER: "Several things. I think that American rhetoric for
foreign, students foreign to English as a first language anyway, it's
useful for closing the gap, I think, between the formal study of
American English grammar and syntax and perhaps the idiomatic expression
of American language.
And by the way, a significant
minority of American Rhetoric audiences, two things, emanate from
outside the United States. The greatest single percentage of these come
from Communist China, interestingly enough. So it's useful for closing
the gap between what you study formally and then how things actually
play out rhetorically. I think it serves students, it teaches them to
appreciate the role of public rhetoric in American-style democracy
certainly.
"There is an argument that says America, like
Rome, is largely an idea. And if one accepts that argument at some
level, it's an easy move from there to say that ideas are always and
only expressed persuasively through rhetoric. And so an appreciation and
understanding of the great rhetoric that has been produced in this
country would help the student to understand the history of the ideas,
really the way this country is made as an idea."
AA: And you
can find thousands of examples of everything from speeches to movie
clips at americanrhetoric.com. It's creator is Michael Eidenmuller, an
assistant professor at the University of Texas at Tyler, who says he
regularly gets visitors from some 200 countries.
RS: We've
posted a link at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster, where you can
also find archives of our segments. And our e-mail address is
word@voanews.com. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne Skirble.
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)
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