On speaking, writing and authenticity

The UK Speechwriters' Guild goes from strength to strength.  Its London conference on 23 February was
the most stimulating and enjoyable yet.  Thanks as ever to Brian Jenner for his sterling work in making it happen.

As Max Atkinson notes in his blog, one of the buzzwords of the day was 'authenticity'.  Max professes himself baffled by the word:

Although several speakers had it high on their agendas, I doubt if I'm alone in remaining unclear about what exactly it's supposed to mean - other than different things to different people.

 

One of those 'several speakers' was Alexei Kapterev.  He quoted Jesse Schell: "we are living in a bubble of fake bullshit" - and suggested that we're increasingly sensitive to the inauthentic.  As a result, says Kapterev, audiences increasingly want '100% natural' from speakers.  We're willing to forgive lapses of technique or poor use of technology; what we won't forgive is inauthenticity.

 

For Kapterev, authenticity lies in the space where honesty and improvisation meet. It's closely related to passion: one of the key components of his splendid Slideshare presentation.

 

Our demand for authenticity, says Kapterev, is driven in part by convergence.  Different forms of discourse are converging - the educational, the political and the commercial. More critically, the gap between spoken and written language is rapidly closing. Kapterev expands on these ideas in his own recent blog posting, in part a response to Atkinson's posting:

... we don’t want broadcasting anymore, we are sick of it, we want to have a conversation. And in order to have a conversation you have to use conversational tone of speaking.

It's a good point. Audiences are becoming tuned to the personal and suspicious of the oratorical.  Ronald Reagan famously honed his rhetorical skills as a radio presenter in the 1940s; contemporary speakers need to consider the effect of their words on the television audience as well as on the audience in the conference hall.  We want speakers to converse with us.  

Conversation and authenticity, however, don't actually go together too well.  Or rather, the word 'authenticity' comes with quite a lot of anti-conversational baggage.  Stephen Miller, in his book Conversation, traces the assault on the values of conversation by the forces of - among other things - 'authenticity'. (There's a racy review of the book here.)

 

 

From Rousseau - who thought that polite society was corrupt and encouraged servility and hypocrisy - to Heidigger - who said that "our existential predicament ... is the rope by which we can climb out of the pit of inauthenticity" - many have the championed the virtues of the authentic over the skills of civilised communication.

Authenticity: some of the usual suspects

When we use the word 'authenticity', we're especially the children of the 1960s:

The 1960s ... saw the rise of countercultural theorists who undermined conversation by praising irrationality, promoting personal exploration, and championing authenticity.

This, I think, is the sense of the word 'authenticity' hovering over our conversation about presentations and speeches: private, unbounded by social convention, swayed by spontaneous passion.

And that's why asking many speakers to 'be themselves' makes no sense to them.  Their 'authentic' self isn't social; it's private.  If these speakers really were to improvise more, and be more honest, they would actually become inarticulate. (And sometimes, of course, they do.)

So, then: a paradox.  Audiences demand more authenticity from speakers; speakers standing before an audience feel inauthentic.  What can we do?

I think the answer came later in the conference, from Phil Collins. 

Someone asked him how Ed Miliband might improve his speaking.  Collins answered that the problem was not that Miliband spoke poorly; it was that he has nothing to say.  'What Ed needs,' he said (I'm paraphrasing slightly), "is a philosopher."

 

That's how we release a speaker's authenticity: by finding what it is they most want to say, and then helping them to say it more eloquently. The key is to articulate an idea that the speaker is passionate about.

When passion is allied to an idea, the audience senses authenticity.  And, perhaps, the speaker also feels it.