Wyzga On Words

Q&A Tuesday: Rhetorical Questions Make Us All Look Smart.

Q:    What's a technique to involve decision-makers and listeners?

A:    Rhetorical questions.   

Many of us are familiar with the rhetorical question: a question posed more for effect than to gain information asked by the question.

True.

What I am after is a form of rhetorical question known as anacoenosis, and its related figures of speech to include the audience. When you step out of your speech or opening statement, for example, to embrace the decision-maker with a rhetorical question you are involving the listener on a confidential level.  The inference is that you and your listener are on the same wave length learning together as you go.  Now it's a collaboration.

For example, an attorney might say, "You may be wondering right now whether...." and the juror who is thinking that responds internally with, "Yes!  I am!"  All things being equal the answer is probably close to what the listener is wondering.  It's a useful technique to create the story together building an alliance.

A rhetorical question also works when you've forgotten to tell the listener some vital piece of information that you inadvertently left out of your speech or story.  Again, you can say, "Maybe you're wondering what happened to...." and fill in the missing piece. Now you've rescued your story and collaborated with the listener who was also wondering what happened with that speech gap.

TIP:    Take advantage of rhetorical questions.  When you and your listener collaborate you both win.

Gin, Osso Bucco & Intimacy.

Some days I get weary of posting work-related blogs.

Better said, some days I want to blog on love and romance and poetry.

We are coming into what I call "The Single's Trifecta": Christmas, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day.  Those holidays when you know you don't fit in if you are "flying solo" in the world of couples.

Maybe for that reason or because I was in the mood to receive a piece of poetry that featured a cold gin martini with an olive, I was drawn in by Jacqueline Berger's languid and seductive, rawly intimate poem posted on A Writer's Almanac:

Gin

by Jacqueline Berger

I like a green olive
stuffed with a pimento
after it has been submerged
for some time in a martini.
I like to go downtown with my husband,
sit in a booth at the Grand
and let the drink rub the edge
off the inane fight we had
about the furniture salesman
and whether he treated us fairly,
my view, or whether he tried
to put one over on us,
my husband's view.
In some moods we'll fight about anything
just to make the other
carry the weight of anger
we lug all day through our lives.
But that moment
when we climb into bed
on a winter's night,
letting our bodies lie down,
letting the day be over,
its not unlike the way gin
loosens the rope, lets float
the raft into its stillest waters.
Happy hour, when the landscape
loses its daylight meaning
as it slips into the silk of dusk
before night pours down its jazzy notes
in a cathedral of crushed velvet.
We are sitting side by side in the booth,
watching the flurry of holiday shoppers
come in from the cold.
By now the salesman is a jerk,
or he's a helluva guy,
either way is fine.
We are talking about anything,
having drifted out into the calm
plainness of intimacy. Nothing
profound, just a place to rest
at the end of the day,
the cord between us swinging gently
after the bells have stopped their ringing.

"Gin" by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift that Arrives Broken. © Autumn House Press, 2010

I took the liberty of sending it 'round to chosen family and friends with this quite personal header, "Yes, there are agreeable things to be said for flying solo & yet, despite the intermittent hardships required, being a couple offers sharing & intimacy."

And what came back to me was a lovely piece to complete the story which I'd like to share with you:

"If'n you don't mind I have a couple of musings of my own. I appreciate the metaphor of the gin, I am drawn to two images. The first a piano keyboard. if you don't over stretch the simile, you can see that each key has its own destiny free to move as its spirit dictates. However when working together at about same velocity (tempo) a newer structure emerges that had only the potential to exist.The second is that of Osso Bucco, when two people form a couple each brings their own features and desires to the formation. At this time the meal is transformed. No longer a mere piece of venison or rib-eye, but a complex presentation that parallels the complexity of being a principle part of a couple. What happens then is still a part of each persons features. You mentioned "sharing & intimacy" I would also note that trust is a major part of intimacy rather than the other way around. Each trusts that the other has the best interests at all times. In my view, intimacy in not furious fighting, nor is placidly sharing a room in different chairs. To me intimacy is sharing a spiritual and emotional path with the ultimate destination not of as much concern as fearlessly  twinning of the two."

Who is the mysterious author?  I don't kiss and tell.

I will say that poetry is always a fine way to round out the story you are telling whether trying a case in a courtroom, making a pitch to a group in a boardroom, persuading a team, enticing a spouse, explaining an idea to a partner, and so on; poetry is class act communication.

Speaking The Truth Is A Revolutionary Act. What Is The Truth?

 

Ahead of me on the freeway is a beater of a car with a bumper sticker: "In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

I should know the source but I am forced to Google it.  Of course!  George Orwell. 

A slightly different version comes up: “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”  George Orwell

I am curious about the differences between the two quotes.  Language should be neither lax nor sloppy but precise.  On the one hand the quote refers to a singular time of universal deceit; and on the other it refers to many times.  Are we then encouraged to tell the truth once?  As in pick your battles carefully?  Or are we being prepared that there will be multiple occasions of universal deceit for which we must be prepared to speak up?

Looking around it appears that universal deceit is universal time after time.

And then there is the difference between telling the truth "is" versus "becomes" a revolutionary act. What makes telling the truth a revolutionary act?  If it is not a revolutionary act to begin with, how does it become one?  What brings it to life?  What is the genesis?

Finally, what truth is being told?

This sounds like a discussion question from law school when a professor asked, "What is justice?"  Lawyers, among others, often plead for justice for their clients.  Is it the same for both? 

I don't have the answers.  I don't even have all the questions.  I'm just saying that if we are to pay attention to what we want and ask for, what is it we want?  How do we define it?  How will we know it when we see it? 

Back to Orwell who is credited with the quote in his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four.  1984 - it seems quaint. 

What has changed in the several decades?  Is Orwell still relevant?  Is truth?  What about the revolutionary act of telling the truth? 

Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at Rupert Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid, testifying at a judicial inquiry into cell-phone hacking claimed, “Phone hacking is a perfectly acceptable tool, given the sacrifices we make, if all we’re trying to do is get to the truth,” Mr. McMullan said, asking whether “we really want to live in a world where the only people who can do the hacking are MI5 and MI6.”

No, he said, we do not."

According to McMullan, Julian Assange, and a host of other sources telling the truth is not as simple as a bumper sticker might make it appear; although it made me think.  I wonder if everything is fair game now.

When Perplexed, Return To Your Roots And Allow Yourself To Be Deeply Lost.

Maybe you know this feeling of "being lost in a dark wood where the true way is wholly lost to you."  [Dante]

What do you do then?

I know what I do: I go back to my roots in storytelling and poetry.  I summon the voices of those whose work I rely on.  As I have written before, one such voice is the poet and author David Whyte.

I have been memorizing a poem I heard Whyte read.  I was lucky to find it on line to share with you.  The poem is part of an interview on the topic of creativity which you may read in whole or in part by clicking here.  The poem gives one permission to stand still, forget about the logistical conversations that consume our mind asking how to get from here to there, and for a moment be deeply lost in what you yearn for.

"There is a teaching story out of the Northwest Native American tradition that would be told by an elder to a young girl or boy who asked the question, "What do I do when I am lost in he forest?" In other words, "What do I do when I've lost my creative fire?" which is really "What do l do when I forget who I am?" It has been rendered into modern English in a marvelous way by David Wagoner. Here is the answer the elder gives:

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead

and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here.

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers.

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it you may come back again.

saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you.

You art surely lost. Stand still.

The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you."

As a storyteller I believe that the choices I and my fellow tellers make about the stories we tell are driven as much by us and our own needs as by the need of the story to be told.  It has been my experience time and again that a program of stories I prepared to tell at a gathering was shifted around by some force of creativity or intuition.  A story not on the program but which ended up being told is the very one that someone in the gathering needed to hear.

I cannot account for it; that's just the way it is.  Sometimes, you must let the story find you.

James Joyce, Dublin, & The Emotional Meaning Of The Story You Are Telling.

 

James Joyce, the Irish novelist and poet wrote these words, “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” 

For years I have taught what I understand Joyce meant with this line.  What I believe Joyce meant was that when he wrote about Dublin he did it in such a way that every reader could experience his own city in the descriptions and images of Dublin.   The images were universal.  And because they were universal, they were emotionally meaningful to the reader.

Your listeners are the same.  They are looking to hear what is universal to their experience in the particular one of your client.     

For example, a common civil litigation theme is death of a loved one.  A focus group research participant or even potential jury member may not have experienced the death of a loved one - but every single one of us has experienced loss.  This universal experience of loss helps the listener find emotional meaning in the particular experience of the client’s story because they can relate to a time of tears. 

For the listener, now the story makes sense.  Now they can act on your behalf.  You have translated an intangible concept into workable images that are compelling for the simple reason that they are emotionally meaningful.

 TIP:    Forget winning on a stack of facts.  It's like cuddling up to a cash register: it rings but it has no warmth.

TIP:    Couple your best facts with the context within which those facts took place, and add the key personal or social value or values that fortify this narrative.  For example: rapacious home mortgage loan lender (facts) + securing profits over people (context) + greed, taking advantage and social disregard (values) -> story.

TIP:    Take THIS story to the focus group research participants and listen:  “This is about....”  “All that happened here is....”   "I’ve seen/heard about this kind of thing before...."  "It’s just like my mother/father/granny always used to say....”  Absorb what is emotionally meaningful to them.

TIP:    Take away what is persuasive (or not) about your legal story.

TIP:    Rewrite the story in your best "clear, concise and cogent manner" as I have always said and will continue to say.  It's right there on my office telephone answering message.

Context Is Key To Understanding.

If you could peer through your splayed fingers to look at Serena's face in sections, what would her eyes say to you?  What about her mouth?  What about her scrunched up face?  If you did not know she was holding a tennis racket, what about her thrown-back arm?

A study published in Eureka Alert on October 3, 2011, entitled "In reading facial emotion, context is everything," reminds us again that "Humans are exquisitely sensitive to context, ....."  Excerpt.

"In a close-up headshot, Serena Williams' eyes are pressed tensely closed; her mouth is wide open, teeth bared. Her face looks enraged. Now zoom out: The tennis star is on the court, racket in hand, fist clenched in victory. She's not angry. She's ecstatic, having just beaten her sister Venus at the 2008 U.S. Open.

"Humans are exquisitely sensitive to context, and that can very dramatically shape what is seen in a face," says psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard School of Medicine. "Strip away the context, and it is difficult to accurately perceive emotion in a face." That is the argument of a new paper by Barrett, her graduate student Maria Gendron, and Batja Mesquita of the University of Leuven in Belgium. It appears in October's Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

The paper -- reviewing a handful of hundreds of studies supporting the authors' position, says Barrett -- refutes the contention that there are six to 10 biologically basic emotions, each encoded in a particular facial arrangement, which can be read easily in an image of a disembodied face by anyone, anywhere.

Facial-emotional perception is influenced by many kinds of contexts, says the paper, including conceptual information and sense stimuli. A scowl can be read as fear if a dangerous situation is described or as disgust if the posture of its body indicates reaction to a soiled object. Eye-tracking experiments show that, depending on the meaning derived from the context, people focus on different salient facial features. Language aids facial perception, as well. Study participants routinely did better naming the emotions in pouting, sneering, or smiling faces when the experimenter supplied words to choose from than when they had to come up with the words themselves.

Equally important is the cultural context of an expressive face. People from cultures that are psychologically similar can read each other's emotions with relative ease, an effect that similar language or even facial structure does not produce. Culture even influences where a person seeks information to interpret a face. Westerners, who see feelings as inside the individual, focus their attention on the face itself. Japanese, meanwhile, focus relatively more on the surroundings, believing emotions arise in relationship.

The real-world implications of such research are "substantial," says Barrett. For instance, it offers needed nuance to the understanding changes in emotion perception in people with with dementia or certain psychopathologies, and even in healthy older people, all of whom "may have difficulty accurately perceiving emotion in static caricature faces, but might do fine in everyday life," where context is available. In law enforcement, "the Transportation Safety Administration and the other government agencies are training agents to detect threat or deception using methods based on the idea that a person's internal intentions are broadcast on the face." If they're learning to decipher faces out of context, "millions of training dollars might be misspent," says Barrett. This means that a misguided psychological notion could be putting public safety is at risk."

TIP:    Likewise, when you are telling a story to a decision-maker, know that they rely on context.  What is context?  In this case it means the situation or circumstances within which the event took place.

For instance, say you are called on to defend a battered woman who stands accused of stabbing her husband to death claiming she was in fear of her life.  Strangely, in the few minutes that preceded the stabbing the woman was calmly sitting at her computer doing research on some subject.  How do you explain the apparent disconnect?  You use her actions to show the context of her life: this is how a woman "living in a combat zone" might behave to maintain some sense of "normalcy."  The key to understanding another's actions is context, as Attorney Michael G. Dowd has demonstrated in a career defending battered women.

TIP:    Whether you are explaining a proposal, seeking to persuade a listener to your point of view, or arguing a legal story to the decision-maker, know that a stack of facts will not do the job. 

TIP:    Humans crave context to make sense of the world.  When you create the context within which the facts reside, you have opened the door to understanding.  You can begin to answer for the listener: "How is this (my world view and experience) like that (your story)?"

Law School & "IRAC" Drained Many Of Us Of Imagination. TIPS To The Impossible Story.

I can hear it like it was yesterday: "Follow IRAC."  For the non-lawyers among us this acronym stands for "Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion."  IRAC was the guiding light for first-year law students to use to brief their cases", i.e., read a case, analyze it and summarize your analysis for class discussion. 

You can't blame law school.  There was a job to be done in three short years: create lawyers out of lay people.  IRAC was a quick route into the mire and thicket of figuring out what a case was about and turning it into a discussion.   But in the process of following this rote formula we were asked to leave our creativity by the wayside.

Case law is the living record of who thought what and why on a particular issue at a certain point in time.  The case law came about because some human being had some social, political, intellectual, religious, and/or economic issue that could be decided only by the courts.

However, human beings and their issues are by their very nature messy, mucky, radiantly robust and not easily confined to rote formulas.  Yes, IRAC may have given us a structure to analyze cases but it disavowed knowledge of the human side of the problem.  Human matters also require creativity.

TIP:    As I have taught for decades, a legal story is a three-part creature that comes alive when you marry content (facts and evidence) to context (circumstances within which all those facts and evidence took place) and add a underpinning value that binds it all together.  This way we can answer the question: "Who did what to whom under what circumstances and with what means towards what ends?" that will be our legal story.

TIP:    Find the key value to the legal story.  Why a value?  People vote values.  They can get together to decide issues grounded in values.  Values are the "Universal Truths" that echo the same way no matter whether you are in Alaska or Afghanistan.  For example, humans value integrity, accountability, health, independence, fame, fortune, family, community, and the list goes on. 

TIP:    Identify the value that underscores your legal story and you are more than halfway to the theme of your case.  

TIP:     Respect IRAC, give it its due, and go back to your storytelling roots.

TIP:    Create the impossible.

"There is no use trying," said Alive; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.  "When I was your age I always did it for half an hour a day.  Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."    [Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]

 

Diana Nyad Made It Further Than Any Of Us Who Say The Swim Defeated Her.

Yesterday a friend sent a text telling me that Diana Nyad did not complete her 60-hour Cuba-to-Key West swim.  I had posted a blog about Nyad's planned adventure back on July 21, 2011.

Here's the good news: she kept on swimming while facing down a seized-up right shoulder, an asthma attack, and violent vomiting.  She kept on swimming while ocean swells buffeted her.  She kept on swimming nearly 29 hours in open ocean - until she no longer could.

Nyad made it close to swimming halfway across the Florida Straits before she decided that hers would be a fairy tale with a different ending.  Read Don Nan Natta's report in the NYTimes, "Cuba-To-Florida Quest Defeats Swimmer, 61." 

But ignore the word "defeats."  So what that Nyad did not make the whole of the swim.  So what that there were still open water miles remaining.  So what!

Nyad had trained and prepared for two years swimming upwards of 12 hours (yes, hours) every other day and lifting weights in between.  At an age when others are joining quilting clubs and ferrying golf clubs in a cart, Nyad was showing the world - and the generations of girls who need such a role model - that the water does not know how old you are.

I am reminded of a poem that was told to us one bitterly cold night as we hunkered down in the Canadian Rockies under a blue plastic tarp with wind and rain and hail and snow for company.  A copy of the poem hangs in my office with photos from that Outward Bound week: five women and the two "girl guides" we affectionately so named because they were younger than the youngest of us.

    "The River

    You are older, it seems, than some people and so they call you old.
   
    Old, old, old.  You have wrinkles you do not cover, and your hair is grey, and you have lived for some 79 years on this earth without much complaint.
   
    There is nothing much to complain about but some people look at you and think you should stop now, rest now, grow old now, gracefully.

But you live gracefully enough, and you don’t have time to grow old.

You have a canoe.

And that canoe has a river.

And that river does not end.

And you watch the river flow and watch it flow and watch the leaves
change color.

And soon will watch your hands turn 80 years old in the middle of a river bend.

You still hike 5 miles at the end of the day and that is how you rest,
that is how you rest.

    So let the young ones sleep.  Let the whole world sleep.

    You will sleep when you have to. 

    For now, you are crossing the water. You are crossing the water.  And there is yet so much water for you to cross."

 

While I would like to end it there I feel compelled to tack on something of use for the lawyers in the world who help me make my livelihood helping them with their legal storytelling.

TIP:    Yes, you lose cases.  Yes, an opponent bested you.  Yes, all that planning and work and preparation did not give you the fairy tale ending you dreamed of.  Does that mean you are defeated?  Not in my book. 

TIP:    Win, lose or draw you gave your client the opportunity to tell her story.  And for those of you who have been following my teaching, speaking and writing lo' these many years, you know I am fond of quoting the writer Zora Neale Hurston who said, "There is no greater burden than carrying an untold story."  You may not realize it but there is a gift in helping lift that burden off your client's shoulders. 

TIP:    When you are looking out over that sea of expectant faces in the venire panel for the allies who will help you tell your client's story in court, make sure to voir dire them on two questions:  (1) "What was your proudest moment, and how come it made you proud?; and, (2) "When you felt you were defeated at something, what did you do then?"  The answers will give you the measure of the allies you seek. 

Storytelling, Suffering, Healing, Diabetes And Lawyers

Valerie Gribben, writing for the NYTimes [Practicing Grimm Medicine Can Be Grimm Work] tells us of her experiences as a medical student using the Grimm's Brothers' fairy tales to relate to and make sense of the diseases, illnesses and suffering that befell people she cared for.  Medical textbooks and other articles could not answer the questions she had about what to do when bad things happen to good people.  She explored the fairy tales of her youth to get insights into the human condition.  Excerpt.

"The practice of medicine bestows the sacred privilege to ask about the unmentionable. But what happens when the door to Bluebeard’s horror chamber opens, and the bloody secrets spill onto your aseptic field of study? How do you process the pain of your patients?

I found my way back to stories. The Grimm fairy tales once seemed as if they took place in lands far, far away, but I see them now in my everyday hospital rotations. I’ve met the eternal cast of characters. I’ve taken down their histories (the abandoned prince, the barren couple) or seen their handiwork (the evil stepmother, the lecherous king).

Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.

So I now find comfort in fairy tales. They remind me that happy endings are possible. With a few days of rest and proper medication, the bewildered princess left relaxed and smiling, with a set of goals and a new job in sight. The endoscopy on my cross-eyed confidante showed she was cancer-free.

They also remind me that what I’m seeing now has come before. Child endangerment is not an invention of the Facebook age. Elder neglect didn’t arrive with Gen X. And discharge summaries are not always happy; “Cinderella” originally ended with a blinding, and Death, in his tattered shroud, waits at the end of many journeys."

As a storyteller serving as a litigation consultant I have often relied on the stories that fill my head and bookshelves.  Among many others, "The Healing Heart - Communities" has helped me help lawyers and their clients to grapple with, comprehend and explain their cases. For instance, "Things are not always what they seem."  [The Emperor's Clothes]; "Chasing the illusive ending." [Moby Dick]; "The good guy is not always a human. "[Little Red Riding Hood]; and so on. 

Lawyers and stories go together like bread and jam. 

Now, what about those clients we have who are ill? 

Here's the connection to diabetes: A friend and colleague, Cathy Feste [[email protected]], was asked  by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to oversee developing a storytelling tool for people with diabetes.  The educational tool is distributed free of charge by the CDC.  The title is, "Stories To Reach, Teach and Heal: A Guide For Diabetes Health Educators." 

Telephone the CDC toll-free at 1-800-232-4636 or go online:  [email protected].  

Included in the tool is a CD of the stories being told to help those who might be reluctant to tell their own stories.  You will also find guidelines for telling and stories for healing.

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe Relied On An Accessible Message

An Accessible Message.

It is said that upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln asked, "Is this the little woman who made this great war?"

Who knew that Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, would influence a mass of people to go to war on the issue that this country could in fact live without slavery?  

Annette Gordon-Reed writing a book review for The New Yorker entitled, The Persuader, clearly and cogently reminds us about the power of a well-told story.  The book has been called "one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history."

Stowe grew up on reading and storytelling.  The men in her family were preachers.  They preached in stories, like Jesus who relied on parables.  Why?  When you use a story to persuade, inform, and motivate you are making the message you want to deliver accessible to the listener.

With this background Stowe absorbed the power of a "heartfelt story artfully told."  Excerpt.

"Stowe, to, understood how influential narrative could be, and with "Uncle Tom's Cabin" she achieved what endless speeches in the halls of Congress, political tracts, harangues, and newspaper articles failed to do: she made the reality of slavery palpable to the American public.  As one Southern commentator noted, "Thousands will peruse an interesting story, and thus gradually imbibe the author's views, that would not read ten lines of a mere argumentative volume on the same theme."" [Emphasis added.]

TIP:   Americans listened.  More than that they began to own the story of slavery in this country.  What would you give to have your jury, audience, clients peruse your interesting story?  You would give it all because you know how you rely on narrative to influence, persuade and inform.  You would give them a story they want to hear and own and re-tell.