General and Specific Terms
Effective speaking depends to a large extent upon the inclusion of specific terms as contrasted with general terms. "Glittering generalities" never make people listen. They mean nothing because they say too much. Study the following selections to see how the concrete phraseology used makes the material more telling, how it enforces the meaning. Pick out the best expressions and explain why they are better than more general terms. In the first, note how the last sentence drives home the meaning of the first two. Listeners may understand the first two, they remember the last.
Civil and religious liberty in this country can be preserved only through the agency of our political institutions. But those institutions alone will not suffice. It is not the ship so much as the skilful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.
George William Curtis: The Public Duty of Educated Men, 1877
Describe the significance of the best expressions in the following speech made in Parliament by Thomas Babington Macaulay.
All those fierce spirits whom you hallooed on to harass us now turn round and begin to worry you. The Orangeman raises his war-whoop; Exeter Hall sets up its bray; Mr. Macneill shudders to see more costly cheer than ever provided for the Priest of Baal at the table of the Queen; and the Protestant operatives of Dublin call for impeachments in exceedingly bad English. But what did you expect? Did you think when, to serve your turn, you called the devil up that it was as easy to lay him as to raise him? Did you think when you went on, session after session, thwarting and reviling those whom you knew to be in the right, and flattering all the worst passions of those whom you knew to be in the wrong, that the day of reckoning would never come? It has come. There you sit, doing penance for the disingenuousness of years.
Why was the style of the extract below especially good for the evident purpose and audience? Why did the author use names for the candidates?
When an American citizen is content with voting merely, he consents to accept what is often a doubtful alternative. His first duty is to help shape the alternative. This, which was formerly less necessary, is now indispensable. In a rural community such as this country was a hundred years-ago, whoever was nominated for office was known to his neighbors, and the consciousness of that knowledge was a conservative influence in determining nominations. But in the local elections of the great cities of today, elections that control taxation and expenditure, the mass of the voters vote in absolute ignorance of the candidates. The citizen who supposes that he does all his duty when he votes, places a premium upon political knavery. Thieves welcome him to the polls and offer him a choice, which he has done nothing to prevent, between Jeremy Diddler and Dick Turpin. The party cries for which he is responsible are: "Turpin and Honesty," "Diddler and Reform." And within a few years, as a result of this indifference to the details of public duty, the most powerful politicians in the Empire State of the Union was Jonathan Wild, the Great, the captain of a band of plunderers.
George William Curtis: The Public Duty of Educated Men, 1877