Will some of you help me and please read this rather short (1 page) English summary of my MA thesis? It should take you no more than 2 minutes!

As some of you from over at ILM may know, I am from Denmark. I study rhetoric at the University of Copenhagen, and I am handing in my Master Degree Thesis this Friday. A one page English summary is required for the assignment, and I would be very grateful if one or two of you would just eye it through for language. Comments would be more than welcome.

Thanks, thanks, thanks in advance. You will be in my thoughts (really!) when I hand in the sucker the day after tomorrow.

6. SUMMARY IN ENGLISH

This Master's Degree thesis is an investigation into one of the most aggressive disputes in modern Danish political history. The dispute was ignited by right-wing politician Ulla Dahlerup's speech at Dansk Folkeparti's (The Danish People's Party) annual congress 2003. In the speech, she fero-ciously attacked the Danish left and the intellectual elite. Soon, that same elite responded with a number of fierce letters, published in leading Danish broadsheet newspapers.

The point of the thesis is to go beyond the sheer personal attacks and thoroughly ana-lyse the more complex rhetorical dynamics, which contributed to the debate's hostile climate. This includes analysing the speech itself, the responses it provoked, and the press coverage of the debate.

Using Dutch theoreticians Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendort's pragma-dialectial rules for reasonableness in discussion, it becomes clear that Dahlerup doesn't really re-spect the opinion of others – in facts, she tries to hijack the truth: she appeals very heavily to pity, and she tends to represent her opponents' standpoints very unjustly, and to her own advantage. She often presupposes that her own world-view was universally valid, she refers to herself as an author-ity when it was dubious to do so, and she doesn't distinguish between her opponents when she ought to. All this is intensified by her extremely vivid and emotional use of metaphors.

On the other hand, her opponents respond in a both high-pitched and superior tone: They disrespectfully attack her person with great vigour, they misrepresent her and others' stand-points, they try to impose their own world-view upon their audience, and they lack clarity in lan-guage – often because of presuppositions which seemingly serves as a form of showing off. Also, they exaggerate the consequences or magnitude of their opponents' standpoints.

The debate was further polarized by the press: Firstly, an investigation inspired by American linguist Deborah Tannen's work yielded the fact that most Danish broadsheet newspapers used a variety of war metaphors in their coverage of the debate. And secondly, applying communi-cation professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson and editor Paul Waldman's concepts of lenses and frames on the coverage of the debate shows us that the newspapers weren't merely objective bystanders: Sometimes the journalists' self-image as unmaskers of strategy and pinpointers of debate led them to stage the debate as simple one-on-one fights, even when that wasn't at all in accordance with the truth. These journalistic tendencies most likely contributed to the debate's fight-like atmosphere.

The thesis shows how journalistic aggression and debaters' lack of respect for the counterpart can corrupt dialogue and thereby cause a serious democratic problem.