At dinner the other day, my sister told excitedly about a course she attended in presentation technique (what earlier times knew as rhetoric, I suppose) with Ragnhild Grødal. Grødal advocated the use of "rhetorical circles": Ask a question, provide the answer, and give an example. Pause and repeat.
Rhetorical Circles was a new concept to me. Yesterday, reading Kant and the Platypus, I realised that Umberto Eco writes in such circles. This latest semiotic theory book of his is way more entertaining than the previous ones. (Or is it just that I am reading it in Danish? No, I don't think so.) He is approaching the humor of his short essays, while keeping the rigour and the scary terminology (are these hypoicons surrogate stimuli or have they passed the crisis into mode beta, you reckon?). And much of the ease of the style comes from the repeated device of posing a problem, discussing it, and constructing an example that makes it clear. From there, he moves on to another problem.
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