The Elements of Eloquence

The experience of reading this book was both completely enlightening and completely maddening.

Let's talk about the good first. I've never learned much about classical rhetoric, so it was kind of a revelation to get such a quick introduction to some of the analytical vocabulary of phrasing. I'd never really understood why the study of music was part of rhetoric in classical education, and this book opened up the similarities between some speech devices and the small details of melodies and progressions.

The bad is that Forsyth uses an extremely regular structure, where a hybrid phrase is used as both the last example in a chapter and the first example of the next. This is clever the first time, and increasingly monotonous as the book goes on.

The ugly...ugly? Maybe that's too harsh. A warning: Forsyth adopts a tone that is somewhat playful and irreverent, part mockingly self serious. I appreciate the attempts to include a fairly catholic assortment of examples from both high and low culture. This hipness by being too cool to care about being hip backfires as often as it lands, giving the impression of, as a New Yorker writer said of Malcolm Gladwell, “a young person's idea of an old person.”

If you love language, and aren't turned off by ironic mansplaining, I highly recommend it.