The word “rhetoric” has a messed-up etymology. It represents the opposite of its original meaning. Aristotle defined the word as “effective writing or speaking”; think Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Yet rhetoric connotes sophistry or “empty” and “phony” words.

How can our words reflect true rhetoric rather than sophistry? In a word, sincerity.

Sincere rhetoric focuses on without pandering to or seeking to exploit readers. Like any estimable work of art, whether a novel, essay, or painting, it’s subjectively true, responsible, and other-directed. It’s an end in itself.

Sincere rhetoric may not be well-meaning or true, however. In the essay “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell cited Edgar Allan Poe’s most macabre short stories as evidence that sincerity was the sine qua non of effective prose.

Poe’s outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is it, then that stories like ‘The Black Cat’, ‘The Tell-tale Heart’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher” and so forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it.

Sincere rhetoric should be the goal of writers, not just a goal. Setting this as the goal differs from accomplishing it, and you may wonder how to do so. At the risk of over-simplification, I say sincere rhetoric can be achieved in one of two ways.

On the internet, the most popular method relies on the first-hand experience and uses the first-person point of view. It says to readers, “Believe me because I did this.” Examples run the gamut from the mundane—reviews of the best hair-care products or the effects of running every day for a year—to the sophisticated—building a house in a forest or working at a fire lookout. Let’s call this first-hand sincere rhetoric.

Despite digital-age popularity, its intellectual lineage stretches as far back as St. Augustine’s Confessions. In the last 130 years, the best-known examples include books such as Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Madhouse, Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia or Down and Out in London and Paris, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed.

The second method also relies on subjective experience but from another person’s point of view. While a few writers use second-person point of view, my favorites use a third-person limited point of view. The writer enters the subject’s cranium and describes his or her thoughts and feelings. This method says to readers, “Believe another person did this.” Let’s call this third-hand sincere rhetoric.

Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism was a glorified manual on a third-person limited point of view. Instead of relying on narration, select quotes, an omniscient point of view as in traditional journalism, it relied on scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, and third-person point of view.

Mr. Wolfe claimed he needed two hours minimum with a subject to produce high-quality third-person limited point of view. Everyone else seems to need being immersed or “embedded” within a sub-culture such as U.S. troops in Iraq or the urban poor. The writer actually lives like the people he writes about as a pauper, soldier, waitress or maid.

Of this method’s many practitioners, I like David Simon’s definition of the method. In an obscure 1991 interview, the co-creator of “The Wire” described his use of it as both a Baltimore Sun reporter and in his transcendent first book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets:

The ‘distanced observer’ is what’s most valid, most important and most precious to the reader. I am the de facto storyteller. My point of view wins. I got the ink.

The great disease there is that our points of view are decidedly similar: middle class, maybe a little less white middle class than they were. It’s the point of view of the collective consciousness of that centrist point of the country that we’re writing for in al of our demographic surveys. We’re looking where circulation grows, and it’s always that guy with the 2.4-car garage and the 3.2 kids, and he has an information-sector job. We’re all really sort of writing for that guy.

The horrible thing about that is that after a while, the stories don’t capture anything but our own sense of what the story should be.

… When I wrote Homicide, I came to the conclusion – and I only came to this conclusion after struggling around, trying to write it in pure journalistic perspective – that this story would be best told if the narrator, rather than adopting the communal voice of the newspaper, adopted the communal voice of the city homicide detective.

Homicide was written very consciously. It’s not me slipping out of my own subjectivity. It’s me consciously embracing the subjectivity of my source material, saying ‘The world doesn’t care what David Simon thinks. There’s plenty of David Simons filling up newspapers all over the country.’

They would like to know what Richard Garvey thinks about the world or Donald Worden or Tom Pellegrini or any of these other detectives who are living this extraordinary event year in and year out.”

Both methods have drawbacks and costs, besides the obvious ones, such as a susceptibility to plagiarism and fabulism.

First-hand sincere rhetoric risks being a bulletin board for the middle- and upper classes; you can afford to review stereos or comfort a dying hamster, but what of the poor or working classes?

Third-hand sincere rhetoric requires not only the cooperation and trust of your subjects but also months and years of staying with them. A writer can’t just approach a Baltimore homicide detective and expect him to narrate his life, Rosebud-style.

Elaborating on the pros and cons of each method may be a future blog post. For now, I think we can agree that following the lead of Nellie Bly, George Orwell, and David Simon is sound.

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