Rhetorical Control:
The Ghastly Resort Hotel

from The Practice of Writing, Robert Scholes, pp 234-235

 

You have just landed a job writing advertising copy for a resort hotel on a small island off the coast of the United States.  The hotel management has brought you to the island for a few days of exploration, during which you have noted the following features:

 
  • The hotel seems made of plastic.  It features shiny, new, bright, loud colors and wildly patterned wallpaper.
     
  • The rooms are very small, the walls are thin, and music from the hotel bar can be heard all night long.
     
  • Hot water for bathing is seldom available.
     
  • The hotel band, a group of local kids playing on garbage can lids and harmonicas, seems to know only three songs.
     
  • The island is run by a dictator whose soldiers are everywhere.  You saw three of them savagely beat a ragged child who tried to steal a loaf of bread.
     
  • The one town on the island is really a small village full of battered shacks with outdoor plumbing facilities.
     
  • The beach consists of a small amount of imported white sand spread over the local mud.
     
  • A swimmer at the beach was recently attacked and badly wounded by a barracuda.
     
  • At two minutes after sunset, hordes of large, vicious mosquitoes come out.
     
  • It is blazing hot while the sun is out but damp and cold at night.
     
  • The hotel owns one large motor launch.  Every few days, when the launch is in good repair, it takes a crowded group of tourists to a small sand bar where they look for shells but mostly find cans and bottles left by other tourists.
     
  • The food in the hotel is highly flavored with some mysterious local herb that lingers in your taste buds for days.  The most frequently featured dish is a local specialty: squid.
 
All in all, this is not a place you would choose for yourself or recommend to a friend.  But the job is important to you, and you have already run up a large bill that you cannot pay until you receive your fee for writing the copy.   You decide that you will not leave out any of the material from the above list (to satisfy your conscience), but you will try to put everything in the most favorable light possible (to appease your employer).  You sit down in your room to write the most attractive copy you can.  You can hear the band playing one of their three tunes.  You begin to write ...

But before you begin, let us give you some technical advice.  You have several problems to contend with here.  One is organizational.  The twelve items you have to cover must be grouped in paragraphs according to some system.  You must look for natural groupings and then organize your writing accordingly, with an appropriate introduction and conclusion.  Another problem is connotation.  Nothing in your copy must have an unpleasant connotation.  The word barracuda, for instance, would be as out of place as the word cancer in a cigarette ad.  The problem, in turn, leads to a denotative problem.  To satisfy what is left of your conscience, you must use some word or phrase that points to the barracuda you happen to know about, although this reference must be disguised or prettied-up in some way.  And so it is for every detail.