Author of The Elements of Eloquence. His key contribution is deceptively simple but profound: revealing that Shakespeare’s signature trick was alliteration.
Shakespeare didn’t invent most of his stories. He ripped them off from ancient sources. Chronicles. Legends. Existing plays. What made them Shakespeare was the language. And specifically, the rhetorical techniques he layered into that language.
He’d take a scene from an old text and add alliteration. Repetition. Inversion. Tricolon (three parallel phrases). Anaphora (repeated word at the start of successive clauses). Puns and double meanings. None of these are new. They’re ancient tools. But in Shakespeare’s hands, they became transcendent.
Forsyth’s book is a practical guide to these elements. It’s not theory. It’s mechanics. Here’s how to use rhetoric to make an idea stick. Here’s why three items in a list feel more satisfying than two or four. Here’s how parallel structure creates momentum.
This matters for business storytelling because most founders treat writing as idea-delivery. Get the concept right and the words will follow. But that’s backwards. The words are the concept in the listener’s mind. Your idea lives only in the shape you give it.
Rough prose with brilliant ideas dies in the room. Fluent prose with ordinary ideas lands. That’s not shallow—that’s recognition of how humans actually process information. We don’t extract pure meaning from sentences. We respond to rhythm, repetition, pattern.
Forsyth teaches the specific tools Shakespeare used. When you understand them, you start seeing them everywhere. In Apple’s copy. In brand manifestos. In pitch decks that work. In the sentences that stick with you weeks later.
The elements aren’t decoration. They’re the difference between being heard and being forgotten. Between a story that lands and one that fades. Between writing that persuades and writing that merely informs.
That’s why Forsyth matters to business storytellers. He proves that eloquence isn’t inspiration—it’s craft. And craft can be learned.