I recall Margie asking me so to share the full text of that wonderful Roland Barthes quote on the enthymeme (drawn from "The Old Rhetoric" (1964), an essay that appears in the book The Semiotic Challenge). Here it is:
"The enthymeme has the pleasure of a progress, of a journey: one sets out from a point which has no need to be proved and from there one proceeds toward another point which does need to be proved; one has the agreeable feeling (even if under duress) of discovering something new by a kind of natural contagion, of capillarity which extends the known (the opinable) toward the unknown. However, to produce all its pleasure, this progress must be supervised.... [The] enthymeme is not a syllogism truncated by defect or corruption, but because the listener must be granted the pleasure of contributing to the construction of the argument; it is something like the pleasure of completing a given pattern or grid."
It's an appealing way of thinking about writing because it's both definitive (it suggests a very clear structure for one's argument) and generative (the order/format/length of your argument grows organically out of what you have to say). That is, it provides both a structural framework and a catalyst for initiating the process of thinking. It's a bridge between invention and arrangement.
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