Dancing with words: The UK Speechwriters' Guild International Speechwriting Conference, London, 16 May 2013

Another inspirational conference from the UK Speechwriters' Guild, in association with the European Speechwriter Network.

All hail to Brian Jenner for continuing the good work.

Today's proceedings, ably chaired by Phil Collins, aimed to explore the international dimension of speechwriting. But another theme that emerged during the day was the relationship between words and physical expression.

Edmée Tuyl crystallised the theme in her unusual and provocative presentation, Dancing on Words. 

Edmée trained as a ballet dancer before becoming a speechwriter; she asked us to consider how we might express words and phrases by physical movements - much to the embarrasssment of some, and the delight of others. 

Which words are danceable?  Concrete words, claims Edmée: they create images and memories in the audience's mind.  But her thesis went further:  we experience words physically.  Gesture is as natural to us as speaking.  Connect to the physical expression of language and we discover a whole new dimension to speechmaking.

It struck me, as I listened and waved my arms about, that rhetorical tropes and schemes are also gestural: analogues of physical movement that trigger neural circuits untouched by dictionary meaning.  The speaker's first and last responsibility is to hold the audience's attention.  Gestures - physical, musical, verbal - are the key attention-grabbers.  For years we've been telling speakers to stop moving around.  Maybe we should reverse the advice.

Videos of ballet dancers drove the point home:  one clip of a dance set, not to music, but to a recording of Gertrude Stein reciting one of her poems, was especially revelatory.  You need to see this.

 

Idioms express abstract ideas as phyical images.  And they are notoriously tough to translate.  José Iturri invited us to consider the plight of interpreters, struggling to recast the idioms of one language in those of another.

Understanding is as much bodily as cerebral.  Rory Sutherland, winner of the 2013 Business Communicator of the Year Award, sparred with Collins over the merits of behavioural economics, a discipline that seeks to counteract the overly rational approach of traditional economics and suggests provocatively that capitalism works because it suits human instincts. (Well, Rory - maybe...) 

Like Daniel Kahnemann (whom I praise elsewhere in this blog), Sutherland understands that human decisions are rarely if ever wholly rational.  Rhetoric, indeed, operates to persuade us in that liminal zone between conscious and unconscious.

 

Tim Bale and Max Atkinson both riffed on the perplexing shift in rhetorical style demonstrated by British political leaders in the last few years.  Bale suggested that David Cameron has shown a noticeable shift from authenticity to authority in his speeches since becoming PM.  In the past, he based his arguments on common sense rather than research, on premises held to be self-evident rather than empirical research.  Latterly, his logos has become more didactic, characterised by an explicit desire to teach the people - and his party - a lesson.  Whether this shift will serve him well in seeking re-election remains to be seen.

Max Atkinson bemoaned the collapse, as he saw it, of oratorical style in the mediated pronouncements of all three current mainstream party leaders.  These clips were predictably dismal. I wonder whether what we are witnessing here is not so much collapse as befuddlement:  to orate for television, as Collins pointed out, requires a different register from the passionate declamations of a Thatcher or a Kinnock.  And nobody seems to know quite how to do it.

Meanwhile, Annelies Breedveld-Smit encouraged speechwriters to take courage.  It's a lonely job.  Her three core principles bear repeating;

Never give up.  Keep going, even when the going gets tough.  The rewards in a speech well received are worth all the effort.

Talk to real people.  Excape from the ivory tower, the corridors of power and the Brussels Bubble.  Try to explain your speaker's position to a stranger in the pub.  Listen to the language of ordinary folk and shoehorn it into your speeches.

Take care of yourself.  The Dutch marines are obsessed with the cleanliness of their socks.  Why?  Because dirty socks are unhygenic socks; unhygenic socks cause foot infections; a marine with a foot infection is useless.  Likewise, speechwriting is demanding; we need to look after our health, our well being and our personal relationships.  Without all these to support us, we shall never be able to rise to the occasion that the next speech demands.

The keynote speech was delivered by Denise Graveline.  Why are speeches by women so hard to find?  Why do women remain silent and invisible so often? 

Denise mentioned many women whose speeches deserve to be better known. I particularly applaud her mention of Ursula Le Guin, whose Commencement Address at Mills College in 1983 is magnificent.

As for Denise, her blog,The Eloquent Woman, says it all. 

We all - women and men - need to listen to her explanations and act on her advice.