Copywriting
Academic Piece
Formal language
Rhetoric, a seduction weapon
At first, I did not want to see or hear anything about it. I did not want to walk by, or catch it out of the corner of my eye. It bothered me from the title to its length. But time was short; and in the end, whether I liked it or not, I had to deliver the work. There was no way out, I had to face Chillón, and it had to be as soon as possible.
The first 6 pages were tortuous, I refused to understand him, and I got the feeling that he refused to explain himself. I reread paragraph by paragraph tirelessly, without any result; and suddenly, for some reason, the words began to become clear. Chillón began to unravel in my head.
Little by little I started buddying with it, but it was hard. It's like those people you don’t really know but don’t like; and then, after you talk for a while and abandon your prejudices, you notice that it was not that bad and even interesting. At first, it was out of obligation, then out of pleasure, a bit painful pleasure honestly, but accepting the text meant accepting the headaches surrounding it.
After losing count of how many times I had read it, I began to understand what Albert Chillón raised in his work “The linguistic turn and its impact on journalistic communication”: the need to stop seeing journalism as a pragmatic occupation that seeks -as from with a delimited repertoire of learned techniques and skills- to capture an objective reality. To be able to see it as an intellectual profession, a profession crossed both by a critical and interpretative capacity, as well as by practical and expressive skills. So, he proposed, for this matter, to start feeding journalism with the so-called "linguistic turn".
The linguistic turn would allow us to think that "... it is not the things that enter into consciousness, but the way we relate to them..." (Chillón 1998:6). In order to understand what the author meant by this, first of all, we must be aware that everything begins in language, that words do not designate things; but the human being, by forming language, expressed their appreciation of things, the way they see, feel and relate to them. Therefore, things do not exist to then be described, designated and recognized by language -as is believed-, but it is the language itself and the way it is used, the one creating our perception of things.
For this reason, that solvency that is given to journalism as an "objective" practice has no reason to be, for a
straightforward fact: journalism is built out of language, and language is strictly subjective. And much less can we speak of an "objective reality", given that "...there are as many realities as there are individual experiences..." (Chillón 1998:8). Consequently, the "realities" and "truths" are, precisely, inexact and subjective, attached to personal and particular experiences.
And if, with our own style of using language, we build reality, why can't journalistic practice be rhetorical practice at the same time? The journalist as a communicator needs to be heard; for that, he first needs to capture attention and transcend. In order to get out of the ordinary, appeal to rhetoric, to the literary practice of journalism, is essential.
An example of this matter, is the column of the newspaper Página 12 "If a winter morning (...)" by Eloy Martínez. In which he narrated - to achieve an extremely pleasant reading - a true snow nightmare. He recounted in a few pages a New York morning of harsh winter, snowstorm, confusion, chaos and despair.
What caught my attention was his way of capturing, and expressing things without saying them ultimately. In the midst of his odyssey, he exhibits his fear of near death, expressing it with statements such as "I thought of Jack London, and his story Love of Life, the last one readen to Lenin while he was dying..." or "... I thought I was in a nightmare and I would never wake up." In addition, with his words he took me into the story in such a way that reading the snippet "the reader already knows that, if I write these lines, it is because I arrived safely", was a shock of reality, a reminder that I was reading his own words. It was clear that he had not died, but the doubt did not escape until he confirmed it.
Just as if he had written his lines in order to become an example of the properties of the linguistic turn, Eloy Martínez managed to break with all schemes of the never well considered –by Albert Chillón- “objective journalism”. Getting rid of any hesitation there might be about these theories. Undoubtedly, journalism must be seductive, and what weapon of seduction more lethal than rhetoric can exist? To conquer you have to seduce. A fair quota of poetry is never redundant to make the public fall at the feet of a sensual journalist.