Preparing to Emulate/Innovate/Compose:

Most of you will simply work directly from the sample sentence and emulate it directly. However, if you have difficulty generating content for emulating the sentence, and as a means to generate a wealth of material to work from, take these three actions:

1. Draw out the central value at stake in the unwritten sentence, together with its charge, negative or positive;
2. Articulate its antithesis;
3. Articulate the cause of each antithetical value.

So, working from our example from Forsyth:

1. Draw out one of many central values: "honor."
2. The antithesis might be "shame."
3. Then we supply the cause or rationale for each statement (this is the scheme called aetiologia, and prosapodosis when there are two or more parallel statements): 

"exacting revenge on those who have slighted you will restore your honor, and establish your fame throughout all time";

​"failing to act out of cowardice means others will go unpunished for willfully harming your honor and will thus leave you ashamed before the world and for all of history."

The result of this work should be the context and purpose of what I call a controlling value. And once this is done, it becomes possible to unfold the full antithesis of two opposing controlling values beginning with the most crafty of maneuvers: paradiastole.

Paradiastole is the rhetorical scheme of distinguishing two similar things as different, using redescription to do so. For instance, when we take a virtue and recast it as a vice, or a vice as a virtue. So, we have to look and see: how could honor be recast as a vice? And how could shame appear in the light of a virtue?

Shame could be redescribed as vulnerable intimacy, connection, relationship. Honor could be redescribed as self-centered-ness that destroys relationships.

Then back to aetiologia and prosapodosis: adding a sufficient rationale to each:

"Listening to the other in humility, letting the other be the way they are and the way they aren't, allows intimacy and deepening of connections to the other";

"Knee-jerk reactions to seize one's advantage over others will ultimately destroy the other and oneself."

To begin this step, you will construct a network of controlling values, beginning with the "unwritten" version of the figure, placing it according to its negative or positive charge as a context or purpose of a controlling value. You will then proceed to write out the three other terms of the full network, each time just writing out what the figure means, innovating from it with each iteration.

Download the Power Point document (to the right here), which you can use to display a given network.

rs_controlling_value_template.pptx
File Size:	141 kb
File Type:	pptx

Download File

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