An important part of describing is determining the point of view of your story. Generally, there are two ways that book editors would advice you to tell a story (“you” is the silent member of the Trinity, assumed yet unassuming):

First person

This POV is when an “I” is telling the story.  Sometimes this “I” can be merely an observer, like Dr. Watson or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, or the “I” can be the main character in the story like Sammy in Updike’s A&P.

The use of “I” should be carefully determined, as it works differently for the authors and for the reader. An author sees the “I” as a stand-in for him- or herself, but the reader sees “I” quite differently, for the “I” is stand in for the reader.

Detective stories are particularly good for this kind of narrative, since the reader sees what the detective sees and can truly “match wits” as the mystery unfolds.

Third person

This POV is the most common.

• Omniscient is when the narrative voice is aware of all details, including people’s emotions and motives.

• Limited is when the narrative voice is allowed only into the head of the main character (or protagonist).

• Objective is when the narrative voice only describes what can be seen or heard.

How does POV work?

In the following passage, we can see how point of view works:

Desmond walked by the ornate door carefully, still embarrassed by interrupting his hosts’ argument, and picked up the heirloom phone to call his shiftless brother-in-law for a ride home.

• We are allowed into Desmond’s emotional state (he’s embarrassed) but someone is calling the brother-in-law shiftless. Who?

No point of view is superior to another, but when performing your book editing it is important to be sure that your narrative is consistent. So, if you set off to write in a limited perspective, the story should remain limited.
–Dr. Dan

Is there any kind of communication or conversation that we have to negotiate and deal with more than argumentation? I don’t think so. While performing dissertation editing, I always concentrate on the strength and soundness of the writer’s thesis or argument.

All communication is an argument of some kind

In a practical sense, who isn’t always arguing—excuse me, talking—with your spouse, partner, friend, boss, underling, or complete stranger in the tube or a bar or while standing in line for a table, tickets, or tram? Arguments—I mean, discussions, of course—break out routinely, nauseatingly, incessantly, as we homo sapiens tend to want our way, viewpoint, gripe or gut reaction heard, known, and heeded. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re the passive, silent, non-confrontational type and you keep it to yourself. But it’s highly likely that your silence is just disguising a raging interior dialogue with the offending person who can’t hear what’s going on inside your head.

All those arguments and disagreements, conflicts and debates can be broken down into four types of claims, inferences, appeals, or approaches to whatever topic is being bandied about. It helps to understand yourself, if not the other person. We’re all coming from our own paradigm, our own set of assumptions, perceptions, biases, and experiences. To successfully argue, it helps to know where we’re all at, so to speak.

It all starts with definitions

So many contentious conversations and positions are stuck in park, frozen in stone, two fists striking at each other, knuckles cracking over sheer misconceptions about definitions. We’re arguing about two different things. We don’t define our terms the same way. You think a word, a concept, a subject means one thing, while your opponent or adversary thinks it means another. I even have such debates with the staff at my dissertation editing service. Even fellow PhDs regularly disagree about the exact meaning of certain terms or words.

The dictionary has multiple definitions of a word

As with the other three types of claims, we have to be honest with ourselves, go to the source, perhaps even a dictionary, to be sure we’re on the same page. Usually, it takes more than a dictionary. It takes articles, studies, books (plural) to straighten out the fundamental meaning of what we’re arguing about.

Take conservatism vs. liberalism. There’s as many conceptions of those terms as there are people on the planet. I was perusing Quora today (a great Q&A social media site) and that was one of the hottest questions du jour. What do the terms mean? You can’t even begin to intelligently and soberly debate the issues affected by the dichotomous terms until you know the person you’re discussing the issues with agrees with you on the meaning of the terms themselves.

And then there’s the denotation and connotation of the definitions

They lift (or lower) us into 3-dimensional chess match of meaning. How about pro-life and pro-choice? The entire flaming intense debate starts with the definition of life. Or how about this: Does pornography exploit women? Depends on your definition of “exploit.” And did you know that major land developers lobbied for years to have Congress rewrite the definition of “wetlands,” so that once the new definition took effect, what was a wetland and off-limits on Tuesday, became a non-wetland and was open for development on Wednesday?

The author is the authority

Definitions are written by authorities. There’s power in the pen. So when conducting your own thesis editing,pay strict attention to definitions.

I’m angry today, so I haven’t got time to be clever, cute, metaphorical, or entertaining in this blog. Why am I angry? I witnessed an example of Political Correctness (P.C.) that has me enraged and feeling helpless to combat.  It interrupted my book editing work, so that really ticked me off even more. I’m not even ready to put my exact thoughts on this specific incident into words yet. But I will discuss P.C. itself as a way of venting and informing.

No doubt some of you already know and understand P.C. pretty well. But, regardless, a good solid, well-composed primer never hurts. So here’s mine.

P.C. is a totalitarian, anti-American, anti-First Amendment imposition of a speech (and presumably thought) code upon people, with the express purpose of intimidating them into silence. It is a creation of certain political groups and powers, designed to stigmatize people who hold viewpoints that conflict with those currently in vogue and favor. If you hold any position that is deemed politically incorrect, you can be fired from your job, kicked out of a club or group, or even expelled from a college.

We are not talking about racial or ethnic slurs here; those are obviously ugly and have no business being uttered in civilized society. Once in a while we get some very prejudiced clients who come to us for dissertation editing or book editing. We turn them away. We brook no quarter for fools.  But what we’re talking about here are opinions, ideas, and/or political beliefs or positions about a variety of topics. Some groups and positions are considered “good” or “correct” while others are considered “bad” or “incorrect.” Look out if your views are considered “bad” or “incorrect.”  The media, some powerful politicians, “public opinion,” and various favored groups dictate who is P.C. and who is not P.C..

If this all sounds very mysterious, vague and difficult to understand, that’s because it is. How such ostracizing, stigmatizing, and judging of one’s rightness or wrongness can happen in America is a testament to how far our freedoms have eroded from the days of the Founding Fathers, who warned of such encroachments upon our basic civil liberties in many historic documents, such as the Constitution of the United States of America and the Federalist Papers. Various factions, backed by bands of litigious attorneys—most notably, the ACLU—now browbeat dissenters into submission through threats of lawsuits based on the flimsiest, most pathetic reasons, including “you offended me, so I’m going to sue you, or fire you, or both.”

The War on Facts is related to P.C. because basic facts no longer matter in many of today’s most important issues. What matters more are your “feelings” and “visions” and “beliefs” about subjects, regardless whether such feelings, visions and beliefs can be supported by cold hard facts. “That’s  my opinion and I’m entitled to my opinion” is the comeback mantra of those who usually cannot support their opinions with facts.

The P.C. crowd loves and even worships opinions and feelings over facts—for they often base their personal and political decisions upon them. If they “feel” you have “offended” them, for instance, then it doesn’t matter one bit that what you said is a concrete fact. If the fact itself is “offensive,” “insensitive” (that’s another favorite feeling of theirs), or otherwise “distasteful,” never mind that it is demonstrably accurate and true, you are judged politically incorrect and subject to their condemning wrath. Facts just do not matter if those facts get in the way of their political or social engineering goals.

In fact, the P.C. crowd hates certain facts because those facts disprove their theories and contradict their overarching objectives to remake the world in their utopian image. The reverse is also true: the P.C. crowd often makes up stories, perpetrates hoaxes, and tells absolute lies to support their points. When their lies are exposed, their common response is that “it doesn’t matter if what I said is true or not, it’s what I feel (or believe, or sense, or predict, etc).”

Again, I know the preceding facts may seem, to some of you, too bizarre to be true, but they are. I have seen many examples in my life of this outright deception and mendacity by the P.C. crowd. Just one example is this: a noted feminist who earns $5000-10,000 per lecture on college campuses, tells her adoring audiences this disgusting untruth: “All men are rapists.” That is the thesis of her speech to her largely feminist audiences. When told that such a statement is a lie, she says it doesn’t matter if it’s not actually true. What matters is that all men would be rapists, could be rapists, might be rapists, or don’t care about women being raped, and a variety of other rationalizing statements that fail to adequately change the fact that she calls all men—all men—rapists. The fact that all men are NOT rapists does not matter to her or her audience. The only thing that matters is her sick, twisted opinion of men in general.

We simply cannot allow the media, various groups, academic lunatics, attorneys, politicians, and the overall climate of intimidation and fear to silence us when we disagree with a position and/or wish to state facts that others may find unpleasant, offensive or otherwise politically incorrect. I make such all my thesis editors jump on and decry any such statements when they’re performing their thesis editing. Not all facts are created equal, but there do exist some concrete, indisputable facts about just about any issue or subject. It’s a portentous and potentially apocalyptic development for civilization as we know it when the factualness of concrete facts can be brazenly decried or even denied, while bald-faced lies can be thrown in our faces and declared to be facts.

Here’s a seemingly innocuous but actually rather controversial subject: rhetoric.

Is rhetoric good or bad?

Bad if you’ve been victimized by a crafty rhetorician—either someone you bought a car from, or voted for in an election, or even dated or married, only to find out this man or woman was great with words, but the words were empty or deceitful or disingenuous. It’s also something to root out when performing dissertation editing, because scholarly writing demands the objective and formal use of language. But before we stereotype rhetoric, let’s define it. Starting with definitions is the first step in a careful, critical analysis. Always best to be sure we’re on the same page—definitionally anyway.

The 1st step in critical analysis: Define your terms

Rhetoric is the skilful use of language to persuade or argue. An early definition of to “argue” is to “clarify.” I love that because it implies that if I can just be clear enough, I should be able to persuade you to see things my way. Argumentation is, after all, a means of fulfilling desire.

Aristotle & Bill Clinton: Masters of Rhetoric

2350 years ago, Aristotle taught how to compose a convincing argument through his rhetorical triangle of logos, ethos, and pathos. Employing these three elements makes your case pretty compelling. President Clinton also was, and still is, a master of triangular argumentation. He never gave a major speech—perhaps not even a minor one or even an impromptu townhall reply to an audience member’s question—without triangulating his words. As he infamously replied to a Congressional inquiry regarding the stain on Monica’s blue dress: “It depends on what your definition of is is.” The funny thing is, he’s right.

Logos

Logos means the “word.” Quite simply, you have to use the right words. For example, our dissertation editing service examines the writer’s message for its internal consistency: your claim, contention, or thesis must be clear; your reasons must be logical; your supporting evidence must be factual. Aristotle designed a syllogistic structure to test the logic of an argument: from the premise, to the reasoning, and then the conclusion. It’s deductive; it makes sense.

Ethos

Ethos refers to the character or credibility of the author or speaker. Ethos is conveyed through reputation, credentials, tone, and style. It’s the way the writer/speaker refers to opposing views that shapes his/her ethical image that appeals to the audience. A speaker or writer creates that ethos by being knowledgeable about the issue, demonstrating fairness, and building a bridge to his/her audience by stressing shared values, assumptions, and benefits.

Pathos

Pathos refers to emotion—the impact of the message on the audience—its motivational appeal. A writer or speaker creates emotional appeal by using concrete language, specific detail, and personal experience. The issue is humanized through a moving, compelling anecdote, an actual example of how the topic impacts real people.

Face the facts: We are all rhetoricians

Tricky stuff or common sense? What salesmen and politicians do, or what you do when you want someone to agree with you? Both, obviously. We all do it, or wish we had the skill to do it. And what’s wrong with that? We should make our words and argument clear. We should demonstrate we’re credible authorities. We should show people what’s in it for them or how it affects them. Funny, though, isn’t it, how the word “rhetoric” has a negative connotation? Sheer hypocrisy, really. We condemn salesmen and politicians for their slick rhetorical skills while attempting to use those same tactics and strategies in our own daily communications. The fact is we’re all rhetoricians—to one degree or another.