News Argument Anecdote

Of the three kinds of telling maybe anecdote is talesmanship’s grandfather

3 Kinds of telling

Here are three kinds of telling: News, Argument, and Anecdote. (No doubt there are others as well.) We use the news mode when we say, “It rained last night.” We use the argument mode when we say, “The ground is wet because it rained last night.” We use the anecdote mode when we say, “I couldn’t sleep last night — I kept hearing thunder. At last I got up and went out. The wind was howling and lightning flashed in the East. Then I felt drops on my face and hands. Soon it was pouring and I was soaked through. The ground was muddy and slippery and I fell twice trying to make it back inside. Oh, you should have seen it!”

Modes and Uses

Each mode has its uses. In news mode we want to convey information quickly succinctly and effectively — we want our audience to understand what happened. In argument mode we want to persuade our audience that some fact or connection is true.

In anecdote mode we want to guide our audience through an experience or connected series of events. But we can also use anecdote to convey information and we can order a tale so as to persuade or convince our audience of something. In short anecdote can serve any of the three goals.

Efficiency vs. Experience

News and Argument mode each is the most efficient for its purpose. But anecdote mode is the most vivid and memorable. And maybe it’s the father of all the other modes. It recreates experience. It mirrors our memory of how things happened to us. It may be the first and the last way we communicate in our lives.

The Old Woman

We know an old woman who seems to have lost her ability to tell people news. Instead she tells them stories. It seems beyond her mental powers to say, “It rained last night.” She must tell you the story of her night instead. And if you grow impatient and try to force her to leap to her conclusion (and convert her speech to news mode), she will falter and must recollect herself. Only when she has gathered the threads of her tale and found the place she had reached when you interrupted will she be able to carry on — in just the way she would have had she not been interrupted.

Memory and Talesmanship

The story of our experiences holds more than their conclusions. Conclusions are the essence of news and argument, and men may have invented these modes in order to communicate this essence in the most efficient way. But the story holds more: it also holds what it felt like (or must have felt like) to be on the scene when the events took place and we reached our conclusions about them.

These sensual experiences make the events memorable and lifelike, as though our audience relives the events. And so by experiencing the events of the tale vicariously our audience can learn from them as though they lived the events themselves.