Getting the argument right: Phil Collins and the art of speechwriting

The Art of Speeches and Presentations: The Secrets of Making People Remember What You Say

By Philip Collins 

Published by John Wiley and Sons (206 pages)

ISBN 9780470711842, £14.99

Philip Collins is on a mission.  Tony Blair’s former speechwriter has written The Art of Speeches and Presentations “on the assumption,” he says, “that if people were more confident of the material they had in front of them, then they might be less fearful of delivering it.”  Many speakers worry about how they will perform on the podium, “but they do not worry enough about writing the speech in the first place.”

The point’s well made.  Some write speeches; some write speeches for others; and some present.  Presenters, by a kind of oppositional definition, tend not to write speeches.  Writing, for them, tends to mean ‘writing the slides’.  Collins wants to help all three groups find better words when they speak in public.  It’s a tall order.

Hence, perhaps, his initial unease in deciding the book’s purpose.  This isn’t a collection of war stories to rival those of Ronald Millar or Peggy Noonan; nor is it an anthology of great speeches. 

 

And, although the book is founded on classical rhetoric, it’s not, he says, a guide “to the technical aspects of rhetoric”. (Although, surreptitiously, that’s probably what he would like it to be.  He does need to check one or two facts: Aristophanes play, The Clouds, satirises Socrates, not Plato.)  Collins wants his book “to be more immediately practical.”  Yet I had the sense throughout that he wasn’t entirely comfortable writing a manual.

The first sign of discomfort is the way he presents his approach.  “No book like this,” he claims half-apologetically, “is complete without a mnemonic,” so he offers us DETAIL, an acronym that’s really his version of the traditional five canons of rhetoric, plus a sixth: ‘I’ stands for ‘individual’.  Before we consider the individual, we must consider the audience, their – and our – expectations, the topic, and the language; delivery – unsurprisingly – comes last.  This gives us AETLID.  It feels clunky.

In the early chapters, Collins treads water.  There’s good stuff here – “good speech writing is like ordinary speech, heightened” – but much that’s perfunctory: larger audiences, we learn, demand a more formal style.   The chapter on ‘expectations’ is really about the speech’s function.  Collins takes the classical categories of deliberative, forensic and epideictic oratory – political, legal and celebratory persuasion – and adapts them to contemporary needs.  Classical rhetoric says little about explaining, now one of the main functions of corporate presentations.  So Collins offers three possible functions for speeches: to inform, to persuade and to inspire (with “ceremonial address” tagged on). 

The distinction between persuasion and inspiration is fuzzy, but he hits the nail on the head when he says that “informative is the dullest category". 

Business presenters intuitively know this; it’s why they reach for the slides, trying to drum more information into the audience’s heads.  The effort’s usually futile: all they do is split the audience’s attention. Informative presentations need a subsidiary function, and Collins offers help finding one.

It’s in this chapter, and the next, that he catches fire.  He’s at his best by far when he focuses on topics.  “Get the main argument right,” he says, “and you cannot write a bad speech.”  His advice for creating a strong argument is brilliant: “try writing the opposite of what you have written.  If it makes sense, you have a credible topic.”  These chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

Collins is also wise about the process of writing. “Writing,” he says, “is arguing silently.”  (The same point was made by Isocrates, still massively underrated as a source of rhetorical wisdom: “the same arguments we use in persuading others when we speak in public,” he wrote, “we employ also when we deliberate in our own thoughts”.)

 

Given this evident good sense, it’s a pity the chapter on language is so thin.  The most useful thing he does is write out the speech he has been working on, stage by stage, through the book.  Otherwise, we’re exhorted to read Orwell (good advice but hardly groundbreaking), offered the inevitable list of clichés to avoid (he seems oddly harsh on the word ‘proactive’), and told a four-page anecdote that may or may not be about Henry Kissinger, with a rather limp punch-line.  We need more.

Collins translates Aristotle’s concept of ethos as ‘character’.  He wants his speaker to find their performing self: “it is very common,” he says, “to see people go missing when they start to speak.”  But the tortuous exercise by which we are supposed to do this has a whiff of Maoist self-criticism about it. And finally, once we’ve discovered what we’re doing wrong, the advice evaporates:  “Knowing yourself better than anyone else, you are the best person to decide what you need to do to put it right.”  It all seems unnecessary.  Ethos, after all, is about reputation more than character; it must be demonstrated and performed.

For speechwriting is artifice.  “Pathos,” writes Collins, “can’t be manufactured” – words that ring distinctly hollow after watching an hour of Sport Relief.  The whole point of writing a speech is to manipulate an audience’s thoughts and feelings more effectively, through the words we choose. 

 

All of which makes it even more disappointing when, in his chapter on delivery, Collins pulls the rug from under his own feet by suggesting we reduce our speech to key phrases on cue cards.  It’s the final move in a strategy to accommodate the corporate presentation in a manifesto for speechwriting.  The tension has been uneasy throughout the book and it remains, sadly, unresolved. 

Collins ends his book by suggesting that “profound public speech has become more difficult than ever before.”  He cites three main reasons: television; democracy and the fragmenting of culture that it fosters; and the lack of “causes that demand greatness.” “The real enemy of grand rhetoric,” he laments, “is the wonderful twentieth century.”  I’m not convinced. 

But Collins still believes in the power of language to inform, persuade and inspire.  He’s amazed that so many corporate leaders don’t care about being dull and unclear.  “They should care because to speak poorly in public is a bad thing to do in itself.”  He’s echoing Quintilian’s (inevitably gender-biased) definition of rhetoric as ‘a good man speaking well’.  And he’s right.  If his book helps some of us become better people by speaking better, it will be through his admirable insistence on thinking and writing clearly.