The Rule of Three: Nobody Has a Monopoly on Effective Language

This excerpt is taken from a writing workshop put on for University of Michigan law students in the fall of 2014. The workshop was taught by Professor Patrick Barry, who previously won the Wayne Booth Prize for Teaching Excellence at the University of Chicago. The videos were filmed and edited by Brian Genoa.

[@hneufvil]

I thought this was a writing class. It seems like it is also a revisionist history class. At 0.42, you suggest that George Wallace didn't write "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever," and that someone wrote it and put it in front of him because it had "a nice ring to it."
I strongly disagree! George Wallace was a viciously racist person who made life a living hell for African Americans in Georgia. Don't absolve him by casually ascribing his hurtful words to someone else.

[@JakeLaCaze]

He is not in any way saying that George Wallace was not racist. He is saying that Wallace did not *literally* write that line, just as most politicians do not write their own speeches. Most celebrities don't write their own autobiographies or memoirs; they enlist the help of ghost writers.
When he says that Wallace went with it because "it had a nice ring to it," he is implying that it had a nice ring to it because of Wallace's agenda. No one opposing segregation would think that line had a nice ring to it.

[@colinray4186]

Political figures do hire people to write for them so that it frees up time for other duties. Speechwriting is an actual career. He's not rewriting anything, by stating a political fact. There's a good chance he played a part in bouncing around ideas until they fell upon that awful line. You don't hire a speechwriter who doesn't believe in the same ideals you do.