How my rhetoric PhD makes me a better storyteller

I’ve been thinking about how earning my PhD in Rhetoric and Public Culture helps me tell stories for people and organizations. One of the most common questions I’m asked is “what is rhetoric?” And that’s a great question. I used to just say: rhetoric is the study of how words and symbols work. Now I say that rhetoric is the history and practice of non-fiction storytelling. For the mass of rhetoric PhD’s in my feed, this might not track if you’re in the specialized field where all stories are little more than an object of critique. Rhetoric has always been about the practical art of communicating.

The biggest thing I see when comms folks talk about storytelling, it’s often (but not always) one of two things. The first is that storytelling is little more than incorporating personal antidotes. Sometimes it’s how to present a personal antidote. And that’s believed to be storytelling. That’s not. That’s telling a story. Storytelling is different. The second way is that storytelling is how you share a feeling about a topic or product, usually through a pithy phrase. So, storytelling is communicating a feeling. While this is closer, it's not quite right.

Instead, storytelling is about creating a narrative where you take the audience from point a to point z. And rhetoric is how you get them there. Most people think that Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is “persuasion.” But that’s only partly true. Rhetoric is “the ability to find the available means of persuasion in any given situation.” Rhetoric isn’t focused on the result … because you can’t control what the result will be. Rhetoric is about how you get the audience there. How you get someone to consider the possibility that what you’re saying has merit. The movement from beginning to end … that’s storytelling. And it changes with every audience you engage.

My rhetoric PhD shapes how I tell stories because I’ve studied the greatest communicators and asked a simple question: How do things (the story and words) fit together? How do words create the message that, years and centuries later, still move us? 

The answer to that question isn’t simple. It’s multi-faceted. I will give you the simple answer, though. The simple answer is something I’ve already said: a story takes the audience from point a to point z. A story takes them from where they are to where you hope they will consider going. The wording of that last sentence is vitally important.

The mistake that many aspiring speakers make is thinking that to be motivational or engaging, they need to be inspiring from the beginning to the end of their speech. They want to inspire at a level of 10/10, making the entire speech overly intense and exhausting. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. There are a myriad of reasons why this is a bad idea. The biggest reason is, you guessed it, because there is no story there beyond the ending that's something like ... LET’S BE EXCITED!!! 

The ending isn’t the story. Where you want to take the audience isn’t the story. Rather, how you get the audience from the beginning to the end … that’s the story. This is why I’ve found it helpful to think of the story not as a series of things, but rather how you thread one key idea (a throughline) that goes from beginning to end.

The story is how you get them there. And this is how I do it. 

First, name the audience’s experience. This is why I use an emotional structure (Aristotle taught me this … that emotion and reason are inextricably linked). You can read more about how I create an emotional structure at jeffmotter.com. 

When you identify what emotion you want the audience to feel when they leave, that’s when you think about how to get them there. What emotions do they feel about this topic? You must name what they’re feeling so the audience feels like they’re looking in a mirror. Name it accurately and the audience will step into your story willingly. Because the audience always has a choice. This is why the overemphasis on a BIG HOOK is terribly wrong. It’s a gimmick. Yes, you need a great hook but it’s to get the audience to see themselves in the story, not to shock and awe them into submission. 

Second, I layer the information onto this emotional structure. This is where I create an idea outline, which you can read more about at jeffmotter.com or just enroll in one of my self-paced courses. 

Yes, information is important but a good speech is not an information dump. If you’ve ever been to an industry conference, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Your information is vitally important but how you talk about it matters more. As you prepare for that keynote or talk, if you are creating a list of “what does my audience need to know,” then you’re doing an information dump. Ok, it’s more complicated than that. Let me say that again: if your final draft reflects only what the audience needs to know, you’re doing a dump. If you are brainstorming with what the audience needs to know, that’s great. It just can’t be the format of the final version. 

Third, you create the connective tissue. This is the fun part. This is where you fit everything together and create beautiful prose. The other thing reading the greatest speeches of all time taught me highlights how form and content cannot be separated. Not ever. 

So, if you want people to feel frustrated, you need to write in a way that makes them not only hear frustration but feel it through your voice. Your voice must mirror sounding frustrated. And that sound starts in how you write it. Punchy. Disjointed. Or whatever form your writing needs to take to make them feel that way. And I’ll say one thing about AI … AI writes like an Instagram or TickTock reel. BIG open: “Hey you, I bet you didn’t know this! But here’s the thing that matters.” It’s only bad writing if the form and content don’t match. LLM AI doesn’t have the capacity to match form and content. Yet.

Finally, what I’ve learned most from my PhD in Rhetoric is how words work to create things. I now have a toolkit of tricks and a base of knowledge I would have never gained if I was only a speechwriter. Concepts like association/dissociation, speaking genres, indentification & division, arrangement, style, invention, audience (so much more complex than you think), and so much more. Studying rhetoric has made me a better practitioner of it. But here’s the thing that is far and away the most helpful idea that I use ever single day. 

How the components of a story work together to create the probability that people will listen to what you say (again, for the people in the back: you can never guarantee a persuasive outcome because the audience has the right to refuse). What taught me how to tell a non-fiction story is Kenneth Burke’s pentad: scene, act, agency, agent, and purpose. Those are the parts. That’s it. Maybe I’ll write another article about this.

For my Rhetoric Ph.D.’s, I know in the classroom the pentad is used exclusively to critique other people’s stories. But that’s not its greatest contribution. Using it to create stories is how we should be using it. (See what I did there? The negative to the positive … one of the legit ways to write to increase curiosity that people accusingly scream: AI AI AI AI!)

My Rhetoric Ph.D. gave me tools to create stories that resonate. I’ll forever be grateful for that.