Alan Barker

Thoughts on speechwriting: Philip Collins

 

A selection of comments on speechwriting from Philip Collins' new book, When They Go Low, We Go High.

Numbers in  brackets are page numbers where the quotes appear.

You can find a review of the book here.

 

 

 

The aim of good public speaking is to borrow the rhythms of everyday speech but aat the same time to heighten its effects. The objective is to write high-octane ordinary speech, as if an eloquent person were speaking naturally at their best, fluent and uninterrupted, with all the connecting threads edited away.(11)

An audience gets only one hearing, and pictures dwell longer in the mind than abstract arguments. (24)

It’s not, in the end, you who decides whether a passage works. The audience will decide for you. (27)

… the speech conciliated opposing parties. Note how this is done by avoiding specific positions, on which the speaker can be pinned down… This is a more flowery section than the rest, which is usually the tip-off that a writer has less to say. (32) [Thomas Jefferson, 4 March 1801]

Blessings and happiness should find their way back into our rhetoric. (35)

Great rhetorical prose is not complex. It is ordinary speech elevated to the heights. (40)

A smooth transition is one of a speech’s technical problems and Lincoln here packs it into a single word. (43) [Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address; the word is 'consecrate']

Speeches should accelerate, intellectually and audibly, as they come to their end. (43)

A lot of hard work goes into making a speech sound simple. (48)

One of the dangers of rhetoric … is that it can run away with the speaker. (51)

Occasion matters to the verdict of greatness. (55)

Obama is the master of the glorious compromise, the beautiful consensus, the slow change that lifts the heart. (61)

Respect your occasion. (66)

Rhetoric cannot work when the phrases are too lavish for their topic. (87)

Poor speakers try to rouse the audience with only a rising intonation and an increased volume at the end of a line, but the applause will only ever be resounding when the vocal trickery is deployed for an important, completed thought. (107)

The composer of a speech always faces a question about where to locate the best line. Should it come, like their finest hour, at the end? Should it open the speech? Or should it be… buried in the text? (120)

Soft-pedalling on a crucial point gets you a reputation as a fraud. A reward greets being candid. (133)

Character is a set of virtues we display which add up to who we are. But we also use the word  ‘character’ to describe a figure in fiction. That usage too is relevant to rhetoric, and it is highly relevant to the imagined community of a nation. (169)

Criticism is better countered if it is named honestly. (171)

Franklin is not only talking about an open mind. He is dramatizing an open mind. The axiom of the novelist and the screen-weriter – show, don’t tell – applies to the good speechweriter too. (176) [17 September 1787]

Every speech ever made has one of three possible functions: to change knowledge, perception or behaviour. (177)

A trial defence rests more on the character of the plaintiff than any other rhetorical form. (193)

These are brave words on an extraordinary occasion, which is the essence of a great speech. (200) [Nelson Mandela, 20 April 1964]

In situations of political oppression and adversity much has to be said by implication and allusion, allegory or metaphor. It would be dangerous to spell out the implications. A metaphor requires the listener to rewrite the speech’s meaning as he or she listens. (205)

Scriptwriters and playwrights hide plot twists in a joke. In the midst of laughter an audience drops its guard. … A joke in a speech has the same dual function. (229)

Every speechwriter knows that editing is the greater part of writing, and anyone with a facility for language can write a long speech quickly. Writing the correct and appropriate short speech takes time. (237)

Wilberforce exhibits a primary skill of democratic politics – the patience to argue for a secondary item as aa preliminaty to the principlal aim. (239) [12 May 1798]

It is always important to end well. … There are two ways to finish. One is with elevation, the other is with pathos, but either way, the audience needs to be prepared, with the progress of the argument and the inflection of the voice, for the approaching conclusion. (244)

Pankhurst makes this case because she wants to be, rhetorically, the soul of reason to show that violent methods attach to valid ends. She is also a single-issue campaigner who has chosen a battle she might win – the franchise – rather than start a forlorn fight for everything, which yields nothing. (249) [24 March 1908]

It is always good to have a watchword, to embody the message in a single phrase. (262)

All speeches can be analysed by their use of time. Some speeches settle scores with the past. Some describe a current predicament and some project perfection into the future. (272)

Like all drama, a speech needs valleys and peaks. You cannot jump from summit to summit. An audience will be carried along with a passage of rhetorical grandeur if it seems to derive from an argument and bring it to a resolution. Like a joke requiring the set-up, or the recitative between the arias, the duller sections matter in the construction and, even though they may not dwell in the mind, the speech would suffer for their absence.  A brilliant speech is a whole entity and its more prosaic passages cannot be dismantled without doing violence to its finer parts. (272)

It is overwrought to reach straight for ‘wrong and wretched, squalid and brutal’ in the opening paragraphs. … This is like melodramatic characterisation in a poorly conceived opera. The drama starts in histrionic mood without any justification. The audience senses at once that this is Kinnock’s starting assumption rather than his reasoned conclusion. If you do not already share his starting assumption then the bald assertion is unlikely to be persuasive. (282-3) [15 May 1987]

Write in particular, not in general. (288)

… the crititique of your opponent is implicit in a clear description of your own view. You don’t help yourself when you serve up insults on a trowel. (289)

… speeches alone change nothing unless the background events are grand enough to warrant the rhetorical indignation. (300)

It is a basic rule that whenever a speaker starts to confuse politics with nature it is time to run for the hills. That speaker will always be trying to smuggle in something undesirable in which other human beings are regarded as not worthy of equal consideration. (323)

It’s not quite true that all good speeches both read well and sound well. (341)

Speaking a better future into existence

Philip Collins

When they go low, we go high: speeches that shape the world – and why we need them

4^th Estate, 2017

ISBN 978 0 00 823569 7

£8.99

Ignore the clunky title. Philip Collins’ impressive new book is not just another anthology of speeches, but a powerful and passionately argued polemic.

Collins believes fervently in liberal democracy. And open, public speech is democracy’s very life blood. But our democracy is in poor shape. “If we want to attend to the good health of our democracy,” he writes, “and we really must, then we need to attend to the integrity of the way we speak about politics.”

The ailment, he claims, is disillusionment, which he suggests may arise from democracy’s manifold successes over the decades. Those successes mean that there’s less to fight for; all too often, political speech has become dull. In fact, he suggests, “most political speeches today are unnecessary.”

But democracy will always face new conflicts and threats. “It is the nature of human beings to disagree. Politics is the means by which that division is recognised, negotiated and settled.” That’s why politics demands speech: “it is in the spoken word that the defence of politics has to be conducted.” A speech is a performative act: it enacts the very process of politics. In this argument, then, rhetoric and politics become virtually synonymous.

Disenchantment with politics fosters the illusion that there is an alternative. The current contender is populism, which Collins roundly condemns but perhaps doesn’t quite pin down. If democracy – he quotes his hero Camus – is the system for those who know that they don’t know everything, the populist always claims to have all the answers. 

Collins places populism in the context of a long and heterogeneous absolutist tradition. Democracy demands patience – “and patience,” he writes, “is usually in short supply. Many distinguished people have called for a short cut to utopia.” But, from Plato to Mao, the politics of the shining path invariably leads to tyranny. And tyranny silences, with catastrophic consequences.

Collins develops his thesis into five claims. Politics gives voice to the people, promotes peace over war, speaks nations into being, improves the condition of the people, and tames the worst human instincts. “All of these virtues,” he writes, “require poetic political speech,” so he creates five main sections, illustrated with a clutch of speeches and bookended with essays elaborating his argument.

These essays are the most engaging parts of the book: at times, more so than the speeches themselves. Collins' practical insights into speechwriting are useful but sporadic. (You can find a selection of them here.)

More absorbing are his broader discussions, pitting the slow-burning successes of democratic politics against the demagogues and the revolutionaries – all those who thought that they were on the right side of history. Camus, writes Collins, “understood that history doesn’t have a side. History does no work for us; we have to choose for ourselves.” The greatest speeches – in the face of time and chance – make that choice.

Tyranny denies the possibility of choice by removing the possibility of conversation. “To live in utopia is to be amidst perfection already achieved. Nothing develops and nobody can change their mind.” Collins analyses oppression in rhetorical terms. Camus again: “Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.”

That remarkable sentence signals the ambiguous power of rhetoric sitting at the heart of Collins’ argument: the power to overcome fear, despair and isolation by welding its audience into a community.

Populism does so by demonising. Collins watches Hitler scapegoating Czechoslovakia, in the speech he gave in 1938, immediately before annexing the Sudetenland. “One of the puzzles of Hitler’s rhetoric,” he writes, “is how someone whose thinking was so disordered, in every sense of that term, could be so effective on the stage.”

The solution is in the rhetoric itself, which bodies forth the utopian dream in the very act of entrancing its audience. The order Hitler craved was possible only the podium. By creating an identification between himself and his audience, he manages to seal off, for a while, the exigencies of reality. As Collins writes: “the novelty in his rhetoric was to create a bound community, a Volksgemeinschaft, just by talking it into life… This is the trick of the shaman. He has created a need and a Weltanshauung and claimed it was what the people thought all along.”

Exactly. Binding is what rhetoric does. As Collins himself ruefully admits, “it is the pinnacle of what every speaker would like to achieve; for rhetoric to be true as soon as I say it, and because I say it.”When

Political truth has to be talked into life. It’s never transcendent; it always emerges from the clash of arguments. You’ll find yourself arguing with Collins as you read. That’s surely his intention. And, because, as La Rochefoucauld said, “the passions are the only orators that convince,” Collins argues that democratic politics must rediscover “the principle of hope.” Rhetoric matters because we need a “better, more enchanted politics.” The responsible democrat must describe what has gone awry and find words to speak a better future into existence. “The spectre of utopia is profound fear; its promise is extraordinary hope. The purpose of politics is to contain the fear so that the hope can thrive.”