Organizing A Negative Letter to Peer or Subordinate

Earlier this semester we discussed thinking of Ethos as power.  We discussed various types of power, such as the power of authority, the power of numbers etc. These lessons are relevant to negative messages, as well.

As we said earlier, psychological Reactance will likely lead our audience to react negatively to negative messages by trying to re-establish his or her own independence and freedom.  In order to ensure that this does not lead the audience to take negative energy out on us, we need to re-establish our own authority and “keep the audience in its place.”  Sometimes this is like playing poker because the audience actually has more power than he or she believes or even more power than ourselves, and so we must act carefully to make ourselves seem larger than life.

The easiest way to do this is to make them feel smaller than life.

Toward this goal, we can organize our messages like this:

1) Use a rhetorical question.  Begin with a reference to the reader’s sanity.  This will make the reader stumble over the question by being caught “off guard”.  They may wonder whether you are serious or kidding, being sarcastic or just angry.  Meanwhile, you gain control of the communication.

Example:  Are you crazy?

2) Add punctuation for emphasis.  Depending on your needs, add:

An exclamation point: Are you crazy?!

A couple explanation points: Are you crazy?!!!

An adjective: A you f###ing crazy?!!!

3) The insult. Now caught off guard, you can move on to your next point:

Example:  Insult the audience’s intelligence.

Example:  Insult the audience’s gender.

Example: Insult the audience’ body.

Example:  Insult the audience’s race.

4) If necessary, you may wish to combine #2 and #3.

Example: You are an f###ing insult to your gender!!!

5) Establish a general, often genetic relationship between the insult and the audience’s heritage.  Because the audience may not know who his or her father is, it’s best to insult the audience’s mother.

Example:  Yo mama so fat she goes beep beep beep when she backs up.

Example:  Yo mama so ugly that when you were born the doctor slapped her.

Example:  Yo mama so stupid she got hit by a parked car.

6) Help the reader with the solution.  Ask him or her to extricate his or her head from his or her arse.