Thanks to Chrissie, Annette and all the good people of DSC for their help.
'Leadership Outside the Box' looks at how to embed innovation in our organisations: what it is, why we can't ignore the need to innovate, how to create a sustainable innovation strategy, creative competencies, and a few thinking techniques that can help us cross from operational thinking into innovative thinking.
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.
Thanks as ever to the redoubtable Brian Jenner of ESN and the UK Speechwriters' Guild for making it all happen.
I'm also running The Essentials of Speechwriting for ESN in London on 13 March 2015. You can book here.
Meanwhile, here are some highlights of the session.
Any speech is made up of three key elements: speaker, speech and audience. Aristotle suggested that speakers persuade audiences using three modes of appeal, based on those three elements.
Ethos persuades by the appeal of the speaker’s personality or character.
Logos is the appeal to reason through the quality of the argument in the speech.
Pathos appeals to the audience’s emotions.
Ethos, according to Aristotle, consists of three qualities.
virtue [arête]
practical wisdom [phronesis]
selflessness [eunoia]
You can build these qualities into the speech at any point, but they have particular power at the beginning of the speech.
Virtue. Show that you share the audience’s values.
You could do this by:
explicitly stating those values;
giving practical examples of how you live the values;
relating your values to your personal history;
talking about what others have said about you (modestly);
explaining how the audience's values have influenced your own; or
showing how the values have even weakened you or created a flaw in your behaviour (self-deprecatingly).
Practical wisdom. Demonstrate that you are sensible and knowledgeable.
Don't play the expert. Instead, show how your practical experience has benefited others - especially people the audience knows or respects.
Bend the rules. You’ll gain a lot of ethos from showing how flexible and adaptable you can be.
Play the mean. Express the issue as a question of two opposing extremes, and then rescue the situation by suggesting a common-sense, middle way.
Selflessness. Demonstrate objectivity, benevolence and self-sacrifice.
Show how hard it was to come to your current position. And what it cost you.
Talk about personal sacrifice. The greater good trumps self-interest.
Act hesitant. Play uncertain, lacking in confidence, not entirely sure that you're right. Ask the audience to support and help you. Speak plainly.
Logos uses argumentation to persuade. Rhetorical logic is like proper logic, but kind of looser. Aristotle: “Rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectics.”
Where dialectics uses the syllogism, rhetoric uses the enthymeme.
Where dialectics uses induction, rhetoric uses the example.
Whoa. Clarification required.
An enthymeme is an argument based on a shared assumption, rather than a universally agreed truth. That shared assumption is often called a warrant: it gives you the authority to link your reason to the case you're making. (You'll find examples in the downloadable notes.)
Structure your argument carefully in the form:
[A] because [B].
Find the warrant that links [B] to [A]; the assumption or value that you think your audience shares.
Look for warrants in:
common language words or phrases the audience uses frequently
contrary views: whatever the audience dislikes or hates, is the opposite of the shared value you're looking for
commonplaces: whatever you can identify as a core value or idea in your audience reveals a potential warrant
Look for vivid examples.
Key facts (with emotional or visual appeal, preferably)
Comparisons (simple either/or pairs)
Stories (the suspense and aroused curiosity will generate greater belief)
Make sure that you are arguing in the correct tense.
If you want to allocate blame or guilt, use the past tense.
If you want to show what kind of a person someone is, or appeal to an audience’s sense of identity or community, pick the present.
And if you want to inspire them to action, shift to the future.
(This is one of Jay Heinrich's ideas, and I think it's brilliant. I'm sure Jay will be the first to admit, of course, that it's not really his idea; it's a splendid reformulation of the classical model of deliberative, judicial and epideictic rhetoric.)
Finally, pathos seeks to persuade by arousing (or calming) the audience's feelings. Emotions provoke motion; hence the name. The pathetic appeal should be directly linked to the action you want your audience to take.
Arouse or relax? Do you want to stimulate an emotional response, or lower their emotional arousal?
To stimulate emotion:
Look for beliefs. Amplify them.
Tell stories. Develop the sense of suspense.
Speak simply. The audience will immediately distrust fancy language.
Manage your vocal tone. Find the tone that fits. Play the ‘spontaneous’ card: interrupt yourself, correct yourself, make the words seemingly hard to find.
To calm emotion:
Go passive: use passive verbs or deliberately avoid allocating blame.
Overplay your own emotion.
Level the three key vocal features: volume, pitch, pace.
Use humour.
Create rapport. Mirror the audience’s language. Include them in your thinking (We all know that...; like you, I’ve often found; I’m sure there’s not a person here who hasn’t at some point...)
Don’t announce the emotion. They’ll resist on the spot. Take the audience by surprise.
Task or relationship? Where does the audience like to invest their feelings? Scientists tend to invest in research results; nurses in the welfare of their patients; business folk in the bottom line; and so on. Find your emotional examples from among the audience’s emotional investment banks.
And here, once more, is the full set of notes from which this post is taken.
A colleague has just asked me about readability statistics. People don't always find them on Word; and when they do find them, they don't always know what they mean.
So here's a quick guide.
First, find your statistics.
In Word 2007:
When you have opened a Word file, with lots of text in it, go to 'Review'.
Click on 'ABC Spelling and Grammar'.
In the dialogue box, click the 'Options' button (bottom left).
In the next box, tick the box marked 'Show readabiity statistics'.
Click 'OK'.
Now run the grammar check. At the end of the process, a set of readability statistics will appear.
In Word 2003:
click on the Tools drop-down menu;
then Options;
then the Spelling and Grammar tab;
toward the bottom of the tab, under Grammar, make sure the Show
readability statistics is checked.
Now, run spelling and grammar check through your
document. At the end of the
process, the readability statistics will appear.
The readability pop-up has three areas.
Counts
The first area – Counts – tells you how many
words, characters, paragraphs, and sentences are in your document. Though you
might not need to know how many characters your document has, knowing your wordcount is often helpful.
Averages
The
second area of readability statistics shows you:
the average number of sentences you have per paragraph;
the average number of words in your sentences; and
the average number of characters per word in your text.
These are valuable measures. Remember that they are averages.
Target numbers for each average are roughly as
follows.
Sentences
per paragraph: aim for at least 3; preferably a number
somewhere between 3 and 5.
Any paragraph
with fewer than two sentences probably won’t be developing its topic
adequately. Any paragraph with more than
six or seven sentences may be wandering or going into too much detail.
Words
per sentence: aim for a number between 15 and 20.
If the number is over 20, you probably have a
few too many long sentences around (remember, it’s an average.) And a number lower than 15 may suggest that
you are writing too many short sentences: ok for a child or language learner,
but probably not for your usual readership.
The most common problems with sentence length are that writers produce
sentences that are too long or too complicated.
Characters
per word: aim for a
number between four and six.
English
uses lots of very short words; if this average goes too high, it means you are
using too many long words.
Readability
statistics
This section gives you three scores.
Passive
sentences
The first measure is of the number of passive
sentences you have written. The passive voice means that the object of a
sentence has something done to it. (“The ball was thrown by Jim.”) This differs
from the active voice, where the subject is doing something (“Jim threw the
ball.”)
We prefer active verbs to passive ones.
Passive verbs are not incorrect.
You might want to use a passive verb when you don’t know who did
something, or you don’t want to admit it (“A mistake was made in processing the
application…”). Passive verbs have other uses, too. On the whole, though, prefer active verbs to passive ones.
I'd say a passive sentence score of 10% or less is acceptable.
Transform as many passives into actives as you
can.
Flesch-Reading
Ease Score
This is based on a 100-point scale. The higher the
score, the easier it is to understand your document. It’s pretty hard to
achieve a score higher than about 60.
Aim for 45-50.
Flesch-Kincaid
Grade Level score
This score relates to US school grade levels. A score of
8.0, for instance, means that your writing it geared toward an eighth grade
reading level.
For those of us not in the US, grade levels relate to actual
age as follows.
So a
Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level score of 10 will mean that you are aiming roughly at
‘an educated reader’ of about 15 years old. I suppose we could correlate this to a 'reading age' of 15 - which is, apparently, the average reading age of the British public.
It's all rather complicated.
To
keep matters simple, we can say:
the best score to aim for is somewhere
between 9 and 11.
It’s
important to note that Word generates these statistics mechanically. I'm not at all sure how accurate they
are. But they do alter if you edit a
piece of text well. They offer some
kind of objective measure of the quality of a piece of writing.
So readability stats can also inform a conversation between you and your manager about what constitutes good writing.
