ABSTRACT
Walter Ong describes women’s writing in the early nineteenth century as less formal than writing influenced by classical rhetoric, a discourse tradition associated with manliness in the nineteenth century. From Cicero forward, classical rhetoric was assumed to demand toughness and power to persuade listeners—as opposed to “effeminacy,” which would vitiate the speaker’s effectiveness. Early analyses of American women’s public speaking employ classical rhetorical approaches, as exemplified by Lillian O’Connor in Pioneer Women Orators. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell describes women’s speeches as having a characteristic style that is personal in tone, relies on personal experience, invites audience participation and attempts to create identification with the experiences of the audience. Margaret Fuller’s often relies on strategies of conversation in Woman. She employs informal strategies at the lexical, sentence, paragraph, and segmental levels. At the sentence level, Fuller uses comments inserted by parentheses or dashes, giving the impression of a comment spoken aside in a different tone.
