Ch 10: Building Intimacy and Distance — Rhetorical Distance

How to read a chapter that teaches style tools

Chapter 10 hands you levers for controlling how close or formal your writing feels. The value is in the tools and the examples that show them working — not in memorizing definitions.

What today is

Planner note 597 is the whole Top Hat chapter, about 5,571 words. Read it there; this page only guides the reading and gives you the checkpoint.

What today is (2)

Read in order — the chapter stacks: grammatical person, then register and language, then a full worked example. The author opens with a radio-DJ metaphor for voice; that image is the through-line, not a throwaway.

What rhetorical distance means

Rhetorical distance is the perceived separation between the writer and the reader — how close and personal, or how formal and removed, a text feels. It is an effect of language choices, not a fixed property of the topic.

What rhetorical distance means (2)

You already do this daily: you sound one way texting a friend and another way in a paper. The chapter's job is to make those instincts deliberate so you can dial the distance the situation needs.

Lever 1 — the grammatical person

First person (I, and the community-building we/us) tends to build intimacy and identification. The chapter's Sherry Turkle and Gettysburg Address examples show how personal voice and an inclusive we pull an audience in.

Lever 1 — the grammatical person (2)

Second person (you) can create intimacy but is risky: if a reader does not fit the situation you place them in, it pushes them away. Watch the chapter's Krugman column and its edited Tomb Raider passage for the payoff and the pitfall.

Lever 1 — the grammatical person (3)

Third person generally creates the most formal distance and a sense of an objective observer — common in reporting and lab reports. The Susan Sontag example shows a writer choosing distance on purpose even about a personal subject.

Lever 2 — register and language

Register is the style or variety of language you use for a particular setting or purpose. It shifts through word choice, formality, jargon vs. plain language, dialect and code-switching, sentence structure, and how much attitude or voice you let show.

Lever 2 — register and language (2)

The chapter lines up four contrasting registers — the 1974 Students' Right to Their Own Language resolution, a Stanley Fish blog post, Vershawn Ashanti Young's reply written in African American English, and Gloria Anzaldúa on Chicano Spanish. As you read each, ask: is this writer building intimacy or formal distance, and how?

See it work — King's Letter from Birmingham Jail

The final example reads Dr. King's 1963 open letter. Because an open letter is addressed to one audience but read by a larger public, it holds two rhetorical distances at once.

See it work — King's Letter from Birmingham Jail (2)

King addresses his fellow clergymen directly and indicts them publicly, while the white-moderate reader is positioned more as a witness — kept close through an earnest, respectful, elevated register, then pressed toward action. Notice how formal tone and intimate earnestness coexist rather than cancel out.

When you've finished the chapter

Take the Chapter 10 checkpoint: three short questions and one essay, three tries each. The shorts check whether the three levers landed; the essay asks you to state the chapter's claim and show how it builds it.

When you've finished the chapter (2)

Nothing here goes to the course. If a short will not come, reread that section rather than inventing a term the chapter does not use.

Final checklist

Tick these off as you go. Saved in this browser.

• I can define rhetorical distance in one sentence.
• I can say how first, second, and third person each change the distance — and name one risk of second person.
• I can define register and point to how one of the four register examples builds intimacy or distance.
• I can explain the two rhetorical distances in King's letter.
• I finished the Chapter 10 checkpoint.