Rhetoric's Long Game

From the reading: Rhetoric's Long Game

Here is a question worth sitting with: why does a pitch deck feel more convincing when a speaker says only by listening do we truly understand instead of we only understand when we listen? The words are the same. The cadence is not. Inversion — the deliberate flipping of subject and verb — has been the secret weapon of lawyers, senators, and priests for two thousand years. Now it runs through the best investor presentations on the planet. The forensic rhetoric that Cicero used in the Roman Forum to sway juries is, structurally, the same persuasive device a founder uses to close a Series B round. So compelling was Cicero's use of tricolon — three parallel phrases building to a climax structure — that Roman senators reportedly wept in the chamber. Nobody cried at the first iPhone keynote. But they did queue for three days.