Alan Barker

Essay Writing Explained: get the ebook

Essay Writing Explained is one of my ebooks available from Bookboon.

Writing an essay means more than finding and recording facts. You need to think critically: analysing material and reaching a conclusion. It means showing that you understand the material you’ve been studying. Above all, it means presenting a coherent argument.

If you’re at high school, college or university, you’ll need to write essays - even if you're studying maths or a science. But learning to write essays also prepares us for life beyond college. In the real world, more and more of us need to be able to express ideas clearly, with good grammar and a flexible style. Essay writing gives us the skills to become more effective citizens.

How do you start? What kind of words should you use? Are you entitled to offer your own views on a subject?

Essay Writing Explained will help you produce an essay that your tutor will appreciate, and that will do you credit.

Here are a few reviews from the Bookboon website.

apple ★★★★★

A very insightful yet practical book for every writer. Thanks.

Idris Osman ★★★★★

Good book. It gives you a clear idea about how to write an essay.

Antonio Mouraz Miranda ★★★★★

One more book to help foreigners to write in English!

Karina Vieira ★★★★★

Very useful! Language is very simple and clear.

Doris J. Marshall ★★★★★

Writing an essay may be easy, but not everyone finds it the same way. Having to read this one, I have found some great ways on how to create an organized and perfect result.

Take a look at Essay Writing Explained.

 

'Every view on every question'

Winston Churchill: A Life in the News

Richard Toye

Oxford, 2020

£20.00

ISBN 978 0 19 880398 0

Richard Toye’s earlier book, The Roar of the Lion, focussed on Churchill’s speeches. The title of his new book indicates a more diffuse theme. Toye explores this very public life in three dimensions: Churchill’s own prolific writings; his media image; and his attempts to control the press.

Churchill began his journalistic career in the last decade of the 19th century, just as the telegraph and the telephone were beginning to globalize the press. He effectively ended it in 1947, with an article in Life on the Truman Doctrine.

By that point, ‘the press’ had become ‘the media’, and Churchill found himself having to navigate new channels. He famously took well to speechifying on radio, and he was hardly averse to being photographed or filmed. Indeed, in the notorious Sidney Street siege of 1911, he appeared in the newsreels, not pontificating but seeming to lead the operation from the midst of the crowd - perhaps one of the first politicians to exploit film in this way.

But he was never happy speaking to camera, and he hated the rigmarole of television. He also claimed that the new media undermined the practice of democracy: “under dictatorships,” he wrote in 1936, “the press is bound to languish, and the loudspeaker and the film to become ever more important.” Hence, perhaps, his hostility to the BBC, which he regularly accused of abuse of power.

Not that he was above trying to exercise power without responsibility himself, by censoring the newspapers – mostly unsuccessfully.

The early 20th century saw what Churchill called the ‘trustification’ of the press. As a Victorian, he regarded newspapers, in Toye's words,as “a positive force for national cohesion.” The press barons of the new century – Northcliffe, Rothermere, Harmsworth King – gave fewer than two hoots for national cohesion; they regarded themselve as political players in their own right, using the papers they controlled to influence opinion and policy.

Lord Beaverbrook, in particular, plays an important part in this story. Churchill’s response, in 1930, to ‘the Beaver’s’ newly founded United Empire Party was characteristically ambiguous: hesitant to damage a fragile friendship; cautious over committing himself to a cause that might not win popular support (protectionism touted as ‘Empire free trade’); ambitious to reassume control of the Conservative party (which he’d abandoned in the 1920s). Where did the main chance lie? What move would most advantage him?

Beaverbrook himself became exasperated with Churchill’s dithering. “He has held every view on every question,” he wrote to J L Garvin, editor of the (then right-wing) Observer in 1932; “… he is utterly unreliable in his mental attitude.” His words might suggest envy or resentment, as Toye suggests; but it was shared by many, throughout Churchill’s career.

The intricate, shifting network of political, press and personal interests makes this a tough tale to tell. Toye contributes all the solid scholarship and balanced judgement that distinguished The Roar of the Lion. The story catches fire at several points: the South African escapades; the Edwardian controversies; his prescient forecasts from the sidelines after World War Two, as Britain slipped from centre stage politically.

At other times, perhaps inevitably, the narrative slackens a little. Photographs of the main players, and a timeline, would have been helpful.

To his great credit, though, Toye resists reducing the complexity of Churchill’s character, both psychological and dramatic. This life in the news seems to anticipate another 20th-century invention: celebrity. Everything contributed to the cultivation of ‘Winston’: the books, articles, speeches and political machinations; the watercolours and the bricklaying at Chartwell; even road accidents and visits to the zoo. The circumstances of his birth had been mildly, usefully, scandalous (just five months after his parents’ marriage). And by the time the day dawned of his funeral – meticulously planned himself, apparently, as ‘Operation Hope Not’ – Britons had fallen for the myth. Richard Toye’s book shows us how hard, and at times desperately, Churchill had worked to create it.

Mixing method and experience: 'Leading Lines' by Lucinda Holdforth

Leading Lines

Lucinda Holdforth

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd (6 Feb. 2020)

ISBN-10: 1460757297

ISBN-13: 978-1460757291

 

 

There are, broadly, two types of speechwriting book. There are manuals offering a systematic method, the most celebrated of which, currently, is probably Richard Lehrman’s The Political Speechwriter’s Companion. And there are the memoirs of speechwriters, most of them, according to Lucinda Holdforth in her new book, “laments over totally failed speechwriting relationships.”

Leading Lines sits – quite comfortably, in fact – between these two camps. Dr Holdforth herself is no failure: she’s worked at the highest political and corporate levels in her native Australia. She knows whereof she speaks.

And she’s produced a real page-turner.

Leadership, she says, is changing.

“During my own long career I have witnessed the emergence of new, non-elected leaders with tremendous overt or hidden politician influence, for better or worse. The most significant of these have been corporate leaders.”

She cites, too, the rise of advocacy groups, charitable organisations, and “new leaders … from previously untapped and sometimes unlikely sources”, all of whom need to speak well. In fact, she’s said elsewhere,

“when any individual gives a speech, they become a leader. They have the precious opportunity to lead their listeners to a new attitude or understanding or insight.”

To reverse the logic: giving a speech inevitably makes a leader of the speaker.

Politicians usually have an implicit understanding of the need to harness the power of rhetoric. But “words do not have the same automatic positive connotations for corporate types,” writes Dr Holdforth. CEOs tend to see communication as “an unpleasant addition to their job, rather than central to its execution.” But, she says, “if you want to lead, you have to persuade. If you want to persuade, then you will need to give speeches.” You may need a speechwriter to help you. Leading Lines is aimed at both speechwriters and speechmakers (though, in truth, I wonder how many will find it).

Speeches themselves are increasingly taking on a life beyond the podium. They’re now broadcast through a host of channels; indeed, “this wide dissemination is one reason why a great speech is such a valuable investment: it becomes a driving and unifying communication tool.”

In this wider environment, they become subject to new pressures and constraints. Dr Holdforth goes as far as to say – echoing Mark Thompson in his book Enough Said – that “political correctness has been a disaster for plain speaking and public discourse.” She notes an increasing scepticism among audiences:

“Anyone who takes on a traditional leadership role in the modern world comes up against a wall of cynicism – legitimate cynicism.”

As she sees it, the way to deal with both challenges – the well-meaning but baroque obfuscations, and the jeering hostility that they so often provoke – is to focus on argument.

Finding the argument is at the heart of her strategy when working with a speaker. Many of her business clients give her what they see as a speech structure; she recognises it as “a record of their thinking process, culminating in the main message. The task of the speechwriter is to flip the order, and make sure the main message is up the front and structures the entire speech.”  

“A leader’s speech works best as the resolve product of thinking, not a record of the thinking process. The voice of reason has an integrity and a sense of resolution… Speechwriting is no a transcription services, but a creation service. The words don’t just reflect an idea; very often, they also shape and crystallise it.”

Here is a rhetorician boldly reasserting the centrality of what Cicero called invention in rhetorical practice. “This clarity of writing,” she says, “is about more than just a modern and mobile style. It is a form of ethics.” Rhetoric without argument is facile and trivial. But we who value rhetoric, she says, must not succumb to despair in the face of Etonian classical allusions or incoherent ranting.

“The answer to rhetoric that we don’t like … is … not less rhetoric, it’s more and better rhetoric.”

And what makes it better is a focus on argument. Everything in a speech – the speaker’s authority, the stories they tell, the emotions they conjure – everything derives from their core argument.

Dr Holdforth invokes Barbara Minto: she of the famous Pyramid Principle, born of McKinsey and now ubiquitous in the corporate universe, if still rarely followed. Too many corporate communications managers, for instance, supply speechwriters with lists of bullet points described as the ‘outline’ of a speech. “Joining the dots,” writes Dr Holdforth, “just creates a list of ideas, not an argument.”

A leader’s argument must also address the beliefs and values underlying their audience’s cynicism. “Any thorough argument,” she writes, “must increasingly go back to basics and question the underlying assumptions” – and she invokes Stephen Toulmin’s warrant-based model of argumentation to support her thesis.

Leaders, of course, must also tell stories. Dr Holdforth sees that stories supply our deep need for meaning, so any story that the leader tells must knit with a robust argument to supply that meaning.  She points out, strikingly, that the argument will often itself supply the emotion that lifts a speech. “Clients tell me they want their speech to have stories with passion,” she writes, “as if passion were an ornament that you could paste on any old speech draft, rather than the intellectual energy driving and shaping it.”

She’s particularly good on ceremonial speeches. “Many of us,” she writes, “live in a lonely and godless world, and we hunger for ceremonies that lend significance to our days.” But, in fact, “few occasions reveal deep, underlying divisions and discord more than a ceremonial event.” The job of a ceremonial speech, then, is not so much to generate energy as to channel the energy already in the room: “to tap into that energy and reflect it back to the audience.” The speaker should remind us “why we love each other despite our flaws, and stick together despite our differences.” The speech, she says, “becomes a form of communion.”

So, in this new book, Lucinda Holdforth supplies a rich mix of method and experience. Where Lehrman’s book is like taking a training course, Leading Lines is like an apprenticeship. If you’re a professional speechwriter, buy two copies: one for yourself and one for your speaker. (Bookmark the opening of Chapter 4 for their attention.)

Keep it close at hand; you’ll find yourself coming back to it. Leading Lines is a book that just keeps giving.

Arguing with passion

Leading Lines

Lucinda Holdforth

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd, 2019

ISBN-10: 1460757297

ISBN-13: 978-1460757291

There are, broadly, two types of speechwriting book.

There are manuals offering a systematic method, the most celebrated of which, currently, is probably Richard Lehrman’s The Political Speechwriter’s Companion.

And there are the memoirs of speechwriters, most of them, according to Lucinda Holdforth in her new book, “laments over totally failed speechwriting relationships.”

Leading Lines sits – quite comfortably, in fact – between these two camps. Dr Holdforth, be it said at once, is no failure: she’s worked at the highest political and corporate levels in her native Australia. She knows whereof she speaks.

And she’s produced a real page-turner.

Leadership, she says, is changing.

"During my own long career I have witnessed the emergence of new, non-elected leaders with tremendous overt or hidden politician influence, for better or worse. The most significant of these have been corporate leaders.”

She cites, too, the rise of advocacy groups, charitable organisations, and “new leaders … from previously untapped and sometimes unlikely sources”, all of whom need to speak well. In fact, she’s said elsewhere,

“when any individual gives a speech, they become a leader. They have the precious opportunity to lead their listeners to a new attitude or understanding or insight.”

To reverse the logic: giving a speech inevitably makes a leader of the speaker.

Politicians usually have an implicit understanding of the need to harness the power of rhetoric. “Words do not have the same automatic positive connotations for corporate types,” writes Dr Holdforth. CEOs tend to see communication as “an unpleasant addition to their job, rather than central to its execution.” But, she says, “if you want to lead, you have to persuade. If you want to persuade, then you will need to give speeches.” You may need a speechwriter to help you. Leading Lines is aimed at both speechwriters and speechmakers.

Speeches themselves are increasingly taking on a life beyond the podium. They’re now broadcast through a host of channels; indeed, “this wide dissemination is one reason why a great speech is such a valuable investment: it becomes a driving and unifying communication tool.”

In this wider environment, they become subject to new pressures and constraints. Dr Holdforth goes as far as to say – echoing Mark Thompson in his book Enough Said – that “political correctness has been a disaster for plain speaking and public discourse.” She notes an increasing scepticism among audiences:

“Anyone who takes on a traditional leadership role in the modern world comes up against a wall of cynicism – legitimate cynicism.”

As she sees it, the way to deal with both challenges – the well-meaning but baroque obfuscations, and the jeering hostility that they so often provoke – is to focus on argument.

Finding the argument is at the heart of her strategy when working with a speaker. Many of her business clients give her what they see as a speech structure; she recognises it as “a record of their thinking process, culminating in the main message. The task of the speechwriter is to flip the order, and make sure the main message is up the front and structures the entire speech.”

This approach brings to mind Barbara Minto – whom Dr Holdforth mentions in passing – and her famous Pyramid Principle, born of McKinsey and now ubiquitous in the corporate universe, if still rarely followed. Too many corporate communications managers, for instance, supply speechwriters with lists of bullet points described as the ‘outline’ of a speech. “Joining the dots,” writes Dr Holdforth, “just creates a list of ideas, not an argument.”

“A leader’s speech works best as the resolved product of thinking, not a record of the thinking process. The voice of reason has an integrity and a sense of resolution… Speechwriting is no a transcription services, but a creation service. The words don’t just reflect an idea; very often, they also shape and crystallise it.”

Here is a rhetorician boldly reasserting the centrality of what Cicero called invention in rhetorical practice. “This clarity of writing,” she says, “is about more than just a modern and mobile style. It is a form of ethics.” A well argued speech provokes counter-argument and debate, the very life blood of democracy. Rhetoric without argument is facile and trivial. But we who value rhetoric, she says, must not succumb to despair in the face of Etonian classical allusions or incoherent ranting.

“The answer to rhetoric that we don’t like … is … not less rhetoric, it’s more and better rhetoric.”

Everything in a speech – the speaker’s authority, the stories they tell, the emotions they conjure – everything derives from their core argument. That argument must also address the beliefs and values underlying an audience’s cynicism. “Any thorough argument,” writes Dr Holdforth, “must increasingly go back to basics and question the underlying assumptions” She invokes Stephen Toulmin’s warrant-based model of argumentation to support her thesis.

Leaders, of course, must also tell stories. Dr Holdforth sees that stories supply our deep need for meaning, so any story that the leader tells must knit with a robust argument to supply that meaning.  She points out, strikingly, that the argument will often itself supply the emotion that lifts a speech. “Clients tell me they want their speech to have stories with passion,” she writes, “as if passion were an ornament that you could paste on any old speech draft, rather than the intellectual energy driving and shaping it.”

She’s particularly good on ceremonial speeches. “Many of us,” she writes, “live in a lonely and godless world, and we hunger for ceremonies that lend significance to our days.” But, in fact, “few occasions reveal deep, underlying divisions and discord more than a ceremonial event.” The job of a ceremonial speech is not so much to generate energy as to channel the energy already in the room: “to tap into that energy and reflect it back to the audience.” The speaker should remind us “why we love each other despite our flaws, and stick together despite our differences.” The speech, she says, “becomes a form of communion.”

So, in this new book, Lucinda Holdforth supplies a rich mix of method and experience. Where Lehrman’s book is like taking a training course, Leading Lines is like an apprenticeship. If you’re a professional speechwriter, buy two copies: one for yourself and one for your speaker. (Bookmark the opening of Chapter 4 for their attention.) Keep it close at hand; you’ll find yourself coming back to it. Leading Lines is a book that just keeps giving.

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.”

Remembering Fred Metcalf

 

 

My colleague Brian Jenner told me today that he'd heard of the death of Fred Metcalf.  Fred was one of modern rhetoric's unsung heroes: a jokesmith and writer for the great and good, who has not received the recognition he deserved - and undoubtedly shunned.  His lugubrious, subversive humour will be greatly missed. 

Read Brian's obituary - where are the notices in the national press?  Fred deserves better. 

Here is my short review of his book, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Political Quotations.  The very title somehow conjures a wry smile. 

 

 

 

Fred Metcalf:  The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Political Quotations

Biteback Publishing, 2012

ISBN 978 1849542 241

£9.99

A good book of quotations is like a box of superior chocolates.  You enjoy one, and before you know it...

Fred Metcalf’s collection of political quotations is among the most superior.  His range is remarkable, historically (from Cicero to blog postings from 2012) and stylistically.  He includes one-liners and slow-burners of up to 60 words; he quotes real people and fictional characters (The West Wing is well represented).  Some of the humour is broad (including – perhaps a few too many – American stand-up comedians); some traditionally witty; and some satirical (Yes Minister is here). 

You’ll find writers, actors, activists and plenty of real politicians, many of them with their own entries:  quotation collages that deliver caricatured, often surreal pen portraits.  The entries on national characteristics brazenly celebrate their own political incorrectness.  Metcalf is happy to include Anon, and its more recent descendant, the bumper sticker (“GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE. ABORTION CLINICS KILL PEOPLE.”)  “That’s humour at work,” chuckles Metcalf in his introduction; “ever ready to undermine your most precious and long-held beliefs.  It thinks it’s funny!”

One quibble.  The dictionary is arranged by subject, including issues, movements, philosophies and political parties.  My pedantic side would have welcomed an index of authors. 

Use this book in two ways.  Reach for it when you want to add the sharp tang of a ready-made quotation to a speech.  And study it closely to discover the secrets of being quotable.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fred and Rodger Evans at a recent European Speechwriters Network conference

Modular enchantment

Trivium:

the classical liberal arts of grammar,logic & rhetoric 

Edited by John Martineau

Wooden Books, 2016

£14.99

ISBN 978 1 907155 18 5 

John Martineau has developed Wooden Books, based in Glastonbury, as a collection of beautifully crafted pocket-sized oracles, which he describes as “a mathemagical ancient wisdom series”. Each book promises knowledge hidden, forgotten or downright arcane, in modular form (no chapter runs to more than two pages). Production values are high: Trivium, like all the other titles in Martineau’s catalogue, cries out to be picked up.

Enlightenment and entertainment are cunningly intertwined.

The trivium is the trio of liberal arts that, in medieval universities, comprise the humanities: grammar, logic and rhetoric. (Wooden Books has also produced a companion volume, Quadrivium, covering the four ‘scientific’ arts: maths, geometry, music and astronomy.) The subjects are ‘liberal’ because they liberate the student into citizenship: without them, we cannot participate fully in civil society. (Tell that to the vice-chancellors of our universities...)

Trivium will give you a pleasurable smattering of each art, with some amusing add-ons to keep you turning the pages.

This is actually a compendium of six short books by different authors – with three appendices by yet more; as a result, each section treats its subject slightly differently.

Turn to Andrew Aberdein's and Adina Arvatu's section on rhetoric – and there’s no need to read Trivium end-to-end – and you’ll find a decent enough introduction to its classical roots (but nothing about later rhetorical theory). There are gaps, even in such a brief overview: although it describes the five canons, it barely mentions topics of invention and deals not at all with the skills of delivery. You’ll find a few intriguing pages in the appendices on proverbs and the art of memory, but no fewer than 37 of the section’s 52 pages are given over, perhaps inevitably, to figures of speech.

Rachel Holley does a much better job with grammar. It would be hard to imagine a more cogent account.If you're looking for a straightforward guide to the basics, you won't go far wrong.  (Though at one point, at least, Ms Holley does go wrong - very slightly.)

At the other end of the scale, Earl Fontainelle promises much with logic and actually over-delivers: some aspects of the subject are introduced without being explained.

These core sections are framed with material reflecting the development of the humanities in the Renaissance. Octavia Wynne takes us on a wonderful journey through poetics: you need never worry again about distinguishing an anapest from a villanelle. As with every section, the quotations are wide-ranging and rich. The final book in the collection, by Gregory Beabout and Mike Hannis, offers the most through-written account of its subject, ethics.

Trivium opens with a marvellously batty “poet’s dictionary of enchantments” by John Michell, whose esotericism places him at the very heart of Wooden Books’ ethos (some of us fondly remember his book, The View over Atlantis, and his musings on ley lines...) Michell sees each letter as embodying some kind of natural meaning; “in some cases,” he suggests, “even the shapes of letters ... seem to accord with the sounds they denote.” With a nod to Plato’s Cratylus and some splendid cartoons, his dictionary opens the ear to the infinite possibilities of euphonics.

Trivium, then, is a book to dip into for inspiration and delight, though at a fairly hefty price. Put it in the bathroom (other small rooms are available).

The best lack all conviction

Mark Thompson: Enough Said

The Bodley Head, 2016

ISBN 978-1847923127

£25.00

The simple answer to the question Mark Thompson asks himself  – “What’s gone wrong with the language of politics?” – is that it has split in two. 

On one side, “the weirdly affectless and dehumanized style in which many public policy documents are written.” 

On the other, “honesty of emotion and at least the appearance of being willing to engage with the lowliest members of [a] chosen community.”  Thompson labels these two rhetorics rationalism and authenticism. 

“Something has gone awry with our politics,” he says; but it’s a mark of his intellectual sophistication that he resists simplistic explanations.  Instead, he places public language “in the centre of a causal nexus”: “our institutions and organizations,” he writes, “are living bodies of public language, and when the rhetoric changes, so do they.”  He quotes George Orwell (whose Politics and the English Language he submits to a nuanced analysis): “the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and … one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”

The dichotomy between gutless rationalism and the “punctiliously immoderate language” of authenticist politics is hardly a new phenomenon. As I read this book, I kept hearing Yeats's words from 1919: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst  / Are full of passionate intensity.”

In our own day, rationalism is evidenced in the impenetrable policy wonkery of government departments and NGOs, which Thompson traces to the gradual breakdown of technocratic consensual politics in the post-war period.  As data has become ever bigger, it has become harder to explain or justify policy decisions clearly.  (Deciding on a third runway, for example, is far more difficult than deciding to build Heathrow in the first place.)  Decision-making must involve compromise, but compromise hardly figures in political campaigning, which has by now become more or less a continuous process.  “The zone of ambiguity and flexibility,” writes Thompson “– that zone where almost all political progress takes place – has become rhetorically insupportable.” Instead, rationalism fetishises dialectic (and evidence), while the authenticist foregrounds narrative.  The rationalist venerates facts and evidence; the authenticist dismisses both as 'factoids', preferring greater, fuzzier, 'truthier' truths.

From a longer perspective, Thompson seeks the roots of both rhetorics in the Enlightenment. 

Rationalism derives from the empiricism of Hume and the positivism of Comte, and authenticism from the counter-Enlightenment writings of Johann Georg Hamann, through Hegel and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche and Heideigger (in whose work it connects explicitly to nationalism). 

Authenticism fuels the contemporary distrust of the political class.  Nietzsche, along with Marx and Freud, figures large in what Thompson calls “the school of suspicion”: all three “detected a layer of falsity and deception in human utterance that must be stripped away before the truth can be revealed.”  The meme of ‘false consciousness’ proliferated in the (very authenticist) counterculture of the 1960s and has now gone mainstream.  The presumption of bad faith in every politician (“Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”) also colours the investigative and analytical journalism that forms such a major part of Thompson’s own career (DG of the BBC, CEO of Channel 4, CEO of the New York Times). 

His analysis of these two competing rhetorics thus spirals, like a widening gyre, to encompass the media, celebrity advocacy and all the other components of an increasingly complex public space.

At every turn, his deep understanding of rhetorical principles – from Aristotle onwards – is leavened by vivid stories drawn from his experience.  He discusses Thatcher and Reagan, Berlusconi and Putin, Clinton and Trump.  He describes the parabolic adventure of spin from Campbell to Cameron.  All the big stories are here – the notorious Belgrano phone-in on Nationwide, Jo Moore’s “a very good day” email after 9/11, the David Kelly tragedy – and, in substantial chapters that repay repeated study, Thompson explores how a failing public language affects the discussion of three contentious issues: the presentation of scientific research, the decision to go to war, and the boundaries of free speech. 

How, then, to address the crisis? Thompson calls up our capacity for prudence – what the Greeks called phronesis – to help us “perform a sense-check on anything that sounds too good to be true.”  One way to develop prudence, he suggests, is to put public language “at the heart of the teaching of civics.”  It’s a tall order: “the humanities as a whole,” he writes, “stand at low tide, judged less economically valuable … than the sciences.”  But if the most important question confronting any society is how we are to live with each other, then becoming skilled in public language must be a first step in addressing it.  Thompson’s words should raise a cheer among all right-thinking liberals: “Let’s teach our children rhetoric.”

And where can we professional rhetoricians seek improvement, at the verbal end?   “The seeds of renewal,” writes Thompson, “germinate in unexpected places:” in the language of the immigrant, the refugee and the marginalized; in satire; and – intriguingly – in hip hop.  And he sees a promising new bud within political discourse itself.  “Though it is often spoken by the weak and dispossessed,” he writes, “there is something unstoppable about the language of fairness.”

Mark Thompson’s remarkable – and remarkably readable – book bulges with useful information and ideas.  For anyone who contributes to public language, Enough Said is essential reading.

Creative thinking: a reading list

People often ask me to recommend books about creative thinking.  Here's a short list of the books that I've found most useful over the years.

A reminder: I run courses on creative thinking, problem solving and innovation.   Download these course outlines to find out more.

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Contact me if you're interested in working with me in any of these areas. 

First, some books I simply have to recommend, because I know the author so well.  Click on the covers to find out more.

 

 

Casting the reading net further afield, I would probably start - unsurprisingly, perhaps - with Edward de Bono.  He was enormously prolific, and the best book to start with might be Lateral Thinking for Management.  It introduces his core concepts: lateral thinking and vertical thinking, first- and second-stage thinking, and a whole lot more. 

Tudor Rickards is a source of great wisdom: Creativity and the Management of Change  has inspired me in all sorts of ways.  I also make use of Simon Majaro's book, The Creative Gap, and Vincent Nolan's The Innovator's Handbook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want more academic material, try these titles.  The Routledge Companion is edited in part by Rickards; and the material published by the Open University is unfailingly excellent.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you're looking for something a bit lighter but full of practical ideas, I recommend Roger von Oech's bestseller, A Whack on the Side of the Head.  (Von Oech has also produced a Whack Pack:  a set of cards that are great for stimulating creativity and creative conversations.)

And finally, for a distinctly different approach to the creative process, you could take a look at Robert Fritz' book, Creating.