Blook Post: Varieties of Discourse @DavidGurteen
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CHAPTER: Discourse and Narrative

Varieties of Discourse Discourse - a verbal interchange of ideas especially conversation

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Introduction

I am collecting videos that demonstrate and compare various genres of discourse. Currently, I am just collecting the videos, but I plan to comment later on each one. If you have any suggestions for good videos or other genres of discourse, please let me know.

I use the word discourse to mean any spoken form (genre) of human communication, such as conversation, debate, dialogue, or interviews.

Definition: discourse

Discourse is spoken or written communication between people, especially serious discussion of a particular subject.

Tag: discourse (13)

Debates

The word debate has two meanings:

  1. An informal debate is an informal discussion between two or more people in which they express different opinions about something.
  2. A formal debate is a formal discussion, such as in parliaments or institutions, where people express different opinions about a particular issue and then vote on it.

Here are two examples of formal debates:

Munk Debate: Political correctness: a force for good?

Oxford Union Debate: Islam Is A Peaceful Religion

Interviews

An interview is a structured one-on-one conversation between two parties where one participant, the interviewer, asks questions and the other, the interviewee, responds. The purpose is usually to solicit information or the views of the interviewee.

Such interviews are frequently televised with experts in a particular field, politicians, or people in the public eye.

An interiew is not a convesration. The participants are not equals, and they have well-defined roles.

Interviews can broadly take three forms.

  1. A friendly interview is when the interviewer is overly courteous and never challenges the interviewee on their responses. The interviewer’s purpose is to allow the interviewee to express their opinions freely.
  2. A challenging interview is when the interviewer courteously challenges and constantly presses the interviewee on their views. The interviewer’s purpose is to try to reveal the truth of the situation.
  3. An aggressive interview is when the interviewer challenges, goads, and baits the interviewee. In this case, the interviewer’s purpose is to ridicule or reveal the hypocrisy or lies of the interviewee.

This article in the Guardian, The Aggressive Political Interview by Jason Wilson, examines the history of televised political interviews.

I plan to say more here about how political interviews have evolved over the last 70 years to become less passive and more aggressive and the consequences of that change.
Friendly Interviews
Munk Dialogues – Rudyard Griffiths interviews Zhang Weiwei

Challenging Interviews
David Frost interviews Margaret Thatcher about the sinking of the Belgrano

Aggressive Interviews
Cathy Newman interviews Jordan Peterson

Andrew Neil interviews Ben Shapiro

Jeremy Paxman interviews Michael Howard

One-to-One Conversations

One-to-one conversations like interviews can be friendly, challenging, or aggressive.

Friendly Conversations
Lex Friedman has a conversation with Douglas Murray

Agressive Conversations
Jordan Peterson, in conversation with Helen Lewis

Panel Discussions

Typical Panel Discussion with Q&A

Somewhat better panel discussion with Q&A

Group Conversations

J. Krishnamurti, David Bohm, and G. Narayan (1980)

Knowledge Café

Al Jazeera Cafe – Kenya’s unwinnable war

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Status: Work in progress.

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Introduction: Discourse and Narrative **
Narrative and Story **

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Tags: Bohm Dialogue (4) | conversation (186) | debate (23) | dialogue (60) | discourse (13) | interview (2) | panel discussion (1)

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One thought on “Varieties of Discourse Discourse - a verbal interchange of ideas especially conversation”

  1. On formal debates, you might want to include the US Presidential Debates, both for their history and their performative element. To stay away from contemporary controversies, and example might be the first televised debate Kennedy-Nixon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYP8-oxq8ig), or for their historic importance and as examples of a totally different debate style the Lincoln-Douglas debates (https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/lincoln-douglas-debates-1858/). It might also be important to connect debates to the principles of parlamentarism, for which it is a foundational element.
    A possible item might be not spoken forms of discourse such as the scientific form of discourse by publication of papers, or online forms like discussion fora, wikis (with the associated example of wikipedia battles for control of the online record), or even the forms of discourse (civil or otherwise) practiced on social media in general, maybe incl. trolling or other forms of detraction and manipulation. Formal and IMHO fairly effective forms of this might be consultations by government agencies, standard setting processes by industry and other association (think RFCs of the IETF).
    On interviews, it might be worthwhile to distinguish push- vs. pull interviews, i. e. interviews, where the interviewers want to get what they are looking for vs. those, where the interviewee wants to push their points. Discussion could include sponsored interviews, interviews with pre-cleared questions and investigative interviews and depositions.
    Attached to the panel discussion, townhall formats might be added, where the emphasis is on the few-to-many communication between the speaker or panel and the audience, as opposed to the few-for-the-many of the panel discussion or in extremis the speech.

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