A Journey into the Heart of Silence: The Rhetoric of Expression, Gesture, and Thought

This essay won or received an honorable mention for The Boothe Prize for excellence in first-year writing. The Boothe Prize recognizes and rewards outstanding expository and argumentative writing by undergraduate students in first-year classes that satisfy the WR 1 requirement. In each award-winning essay, student writers demonstrate clarity of argument, excellent integration of research-based evidence, and compelling prose style. This essay argues for the underappreciated expressive power of nonverbal communication, drawing on examples from silent film and other media to show that there is a truth that can be accessed by gesture and body language, and not by speech.