Alan Barker

The Essentials of Speechwriting - training for diplomats

Download Speechwriting for diplomacy brochure

In the age of the soundbite and the tweet, formal speeches remain one of the key tools in the diplomatic bag.  And with good reason: speeches weld audiences into communities.  They establish policy positions, influence perceptions and help to build consensus in a way that no other form of communication can.  The impact of a powerful speech can endure for years. 

Speechwriting is often seen as a ‘dark art’.  Why do some speeches succeed and others fall flat?  How to avoid dull platitudes?  How to say something meaningful and memorable?

Diplomats come to speechwriting by many routes.  Most learn on the job: working out by trial and (sometimes embarrassing) error what works and what doesn’t.  But writing speeches need not be a hit-and-miss occupation.  We can formulate a method that will exploit our experience, save us time and dramatically improve the quality of our speeches.  That method can help us:

• formulate striking key messages;
• structure a speech as an engaging performance;
• use rhetorical devices to give our language flair; and
• make our ideas more memorable.

We can even learn to create a text that actually helps the speaker speak more effectively.

This brochure tells you more.

Download Speechwriting for diplomacy brochure

Take a look.  If you like what you see, contact me.

Shove It To Them: the 8th UK Speechwriters Guild Conference, Oxford 2014

Brian Jenner has done it again.   The 8^th UK Speechwriters’ conference, held last week in the splendid surroundings of Trinity, Oxford, proved once more that, although speechwriters may prefer influence to credit, they do enjoy coming out into the light and seeking out their own kind. 

Celia Delaney, our Chair and MC, established an atmosphere of fun and camaraderie within seconds.  She opened with a gag and closed with a song.  Unaccompanied.  Which is more than I would dare.

 

Two innovations caught my attention this year.  The first was an open mike session, conjured through urgent necessity, which gave two delegates the opportunity to take the floor and speak for ten minutes.  Energising and diverting, this should become a permanent fixture.

Both speakers on this occasion highlighted the conference's internationalism.  How does rhetoric change in different political circumstances?  How does it cross cultural boundaries? 

Neringa Vaisbrodė, for example, works in Lithuania, where memories of totalitarian doublespeak are still fresh.  When she contemplates rhetoric, she finds it hard to shake off feelings of “dishonesty, danger and disbelief”.   As speechwriter for the President, she embodies the reinvigoration of  democratic political discourse.  

Social media create new challenges.   Twitter, says Naeinga, helps her sharpen her messages, though it’s not especially user-friendly (too many long words in Lithuanian).   

Her key insights: ignore all the ‘very important’ requests from senior civil servants and ministers; and don’t be afraid to deliver a draft you consider sub-standard.   “Better done,” she says, “than perfect.”

Willi Vogler, speaking on the main programme, echoed Naringa's sense of rhetoric's troubled reputation.  He brought greetings from VRDS, the German Speechwriters' Association, which is working hard to reinstate speechwriting as a profession in a country understandably nervous about oratory.  VRDS is already well down the road towards accrediting speechwriters and establishing standardised terms and conditions for their hire.   

Villi ended by quoting a useful dictum from Otto Brahm: “What has been crossed out cannot be a flop.”

Jens Kjeldsen opened the conference by asking:  why do speeches matter?  What’s  the USP of a speech?  Its ability to weld an audience into a community.   The unified response that derives from being physically present in the same space can't be replicated in any other medium.   Jens’ big idea was that stories in speeches only persuade when they become arguments: not mediated by dialectic but physically embodied.   When speakers invest themselves in rhetorical arguments, putting themselves on the line, and entrusting the audience with their cause, we identify with them and thus with their position.   Logos meets ethos.

(Jens has written extensively.  I've found his paper on PowerPoint  particularly useful.)

Caroline Johns offered insights from the world of corporate speechmaking.   Caroline is Chief of Staff to Deloitte’s global Chairman, Steve Almond.  Have a clear theme, she told us; make use of surprise; and exercise good judgement.   If in doubt, cut it out.   Caroline is a historian and championed the virtues of thorough research.   Analyse complexity, she says, and explain it simply.  Good advice.

Sam Leith brought the core principles of classical rhetoric to life.  The author of You Talkin' to Me told us to scrutinise every sentence.   If it’s not contributing to the logos, remove it.   Speakers sometimes talk big for fear of revealing that their ideas are small.   Figures of speech are fun; Cicero’s joke books, apparently, are not.

David Krikler took fun to the edge.   Where else are you likely to be if you write for an Israeli ambassador?  Activists urge a boycott of Israeli dates as fast-breakers for Ramadan?  Suggest that people buy more and support a two-date solution.   The Egyptians complain that Israel is despatching sharks to terrorise tourists at Sharm El-Sheikh?  Adapt the Jaws poster to read – yes – ‘Jews’.   

Humour, says David, has five benefits: 

• it establishes rapport between speechwriter and speaker;
• it can cut down to size the more outrageous claims of your opponents;
• it can ‘shove it to the audience’ with memorable power;
• it can allow the speaker to refer to the elephant in the room; and
• it can help deliver difficult messages.   

Ben Locker reinvigorated the old AIDCA technique with a fascinating sales letter written in the 1920s by Lewis Victor Eytinge.   (‘C’ is for ‘caution’:  what rhetoricians would call rebutting the audience’s objections to your case.)  Ben was good on the three types of headline: those that stimulate curiosity; the ones that being news; and the ones that offer a benefit.   Moral:  know your audience’s concerns and address them.  (This emerged as another strong theme in the conference.)

David Day brought huge experience as a preacher to the conversation.   His principles:  mention the elephant in the room (or the pew); put faces on the words; and address grace not guilt. 

 That second principle breaks down into six methods. 

• Use personal disclosure (but don’t overdo the grisly details). 
• Visualise concepts (personify Generosity as a person, for example – David is clearly much influenced by Bunyan). 
• Use images to re-arrange the mind’s furniture (a person is like a fountain, never the same but maintaining its shape; now consider the resurrection of the body).
• Find instances and examples (shades of Aristotle’s enthymeme).
• Use testimonies ('don't just take my word for it...').
• Tell illustrative stories (he didn’t use the word, but we are surely talking parables here).

(David's written two books.   Find them here.)

Incidentally, 60% of Americans believe that the Bible is literally true.   But only in the King James Version.   Put it in Hebrew, and the number drops to 40%.   So says Robert Lehrman, speechwriter to Al Gore, author of The Political Speechwriter's Companion  and one-time student of Kurt Vonnegut (whom he somewhat resembles).  You might think you know what your audience knows, understands and believes; but you might be surprised.   

Marion Chapsal, also on the open mike, offered a culinary allegory of the decline of French rhetoric.   What’s the difference between mille feuilles and trifle?  The one is elegant, rational, pyramidal, Cartesian  (and, I suspect, Ramist).   In short, French.   The other is messy, intuitive, shapeless, pragmatic and adaptable.   In a word, unFrench.   The images suggest, for her, the need to breathe passion back into French presenting.

Wiping the saliva from our lips, we moved on.

What about the writer's relationship with their speaker?  Richard Mullender encouraged us to negotiate as if they were hostage takers.  

You know how to listen?  Not according to Dick.  

There is no point in attempting to capture the brilliance of his workshop.   Read his book.  Better still, book him.

Clark Judge has been speechwriter for Reagan and both Bushes.   He now runs the White House Writers’ Group.   His ethos was perfect.   “You,” he said in opening, “are all my speechwriters.”  

He discussed the rhetorical style of recent presidents in terms of music.   Reagan: symphonic.   Bush Snr: rock ‘n’ roll (simple, driving rhythms).   Clinton had two styles: on policy, he was jazz; on the stump, he was Cajun.   The younger Bush was country music: rigid structures and evangelical lyricism.   And Obama:  think Miles when discussing policy, and gospel on the stump.   

(We often link rhetoric to poetry.  The links to music are surely just as strong.  Clark reminded us that there are useful seams to be mined here.)

I mentioned two innovations.  The second was the presence of students, from both schools and universities. It was great to see them.  Next time, they should take the floor.  At the open mike, perhaps.

Talk about it

The Roar of the Lion: the untold story of Churchill's World War II speeches

Richard Toye

Oxford, 2013

ISBN 978 0 19 964252 6

£25.00

20 August 1940.  Winston Churchill visits No.11 Group Fighter Command with his military secretary, General Hastings Ismay.  Throughout the afternoon, the RAF is battling the waves of German fighters crossing the Channel.  At one point, every squadron has taken to the air, with no reserves remaining.  According to Ismay:

I felt sick with fear.  As the evening closed in the fighting died down, and we left by car for Chequers.  Churchill’s first words to me were: ‘Don’t speak to me.  I have never been so moved.’  After about five minutes he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’

What was going on in Churchill’s brain during those five minutes?  Richard Toye’s absorbing and vividly narrated book, The Roar of the Lion, offers some tantalizing clues.

On the one hand, we see a man of high emotion.  There’s no reason to disbelieve that initial remark to Ismay.  Toye doesn’t mention Black Dog, but we do see other instances of his behaviour that suggested to others signs of mental turmoil.  On the other, Toye also reveals that the words he finally utters in the car were not entirely inspired.  Churchill had used a very similar construction at least three times before: in 1899, in 1906 and in 1907. 

As a young man, influenced in part by the barnstorming rhetoric of his father and the Democrat Bourke Cockran, Churchill had educated himself in the power of language.  (He had, famously, done poorly at Harrow.)  At the turn of the century, in his early twenties, he had drafted The Scaffolding of Rhetoric, an article designed to get him noticed by the heavyweight periodicals.  Unpublished during his lifetime, it’s very much a young man’s piece: overwrought, passionate, recklessly revealing. 

The direct, though not the admitted, object which the orator has in view is to allay the commonplace influences and critical faculties of his audience, by presenting to their imaginations a series of vivid impressions which are replaced before they can be too closely examined and vanish before they can be assailed.

Throughout his political career, as he defected from the Tories to the Liberals and back, as he railed equally against the dangers of Nazism and against reform in India, Churchill used his speeches, not only to influence, but also to survive – politically and, perhaps, psychologically.

By the 1930s, as Toye points out, the effect was wearing thin.  “To MPs who had, as it were, heard it all before, his speaking style seemed not majestically impressive but overblown and hackneyed.” 

But his constant interventions in the Commons over India seem to have jolted his rhetoric into a new register.  In a letter to his wife, he writes that he is now speaking “with garrulous unpremeditated flow.  They seem delighted.” 

Churchill carries this new rhetoric into the war with him.  He has reinvigorated his Victorian Ciceronianism by injecting the plain English championed during the 1930s by Greene, Hemingway, Orwell, and others.  His speeches, according to Harold Nicholson, now combine “great flights of oratory with sudden swoops into the intimate and conversational.  Of all his devices it is the one that never fails.”  The synthesis will allow him to speak, more or less successfully, both in the Commons and over the airwaves.  (One of Toye’s most intriguing discussions is about Churchill’s discomfort with radio.) 

But Churchill learnt another lesson in the wilderness years.  In that same letter to his wife, he suggests that the art of public speaking “all consists in my (mature) judgement of selecting three or four absolutely sound arguments and putting these in the most conversational manner possible.”  This was a revelation to him.  “There is apparently nothing in the literary effect I have sought for forty years!”

During that pregnant silence in the car with Ismay, then, we can imagine Churchill wrestling unruly passion against the need to articulate the plainest possible expression of the military reality.  Somewhere in that struggle, he drags up a couple of past rhetorical successes and presses them into service.  And the moment of inspiration follows.

But then, in uttering the sentence, Churchill is not merely reacting to the moment.  He’s also trying out his words on his audience. 

It’s a typical ploy.  Like any great performer, he can simultaneously feel the weight of the sad time and observe the effect on others as he expresses it.  That doublethink is essential to any rhetorical method.   And Churchill’s listeners sometimes came perilously close to seeing through it.

The book’s central thesis, in fact, concerns how Churchill’s speeches were judged by his many audiences.  Toye uses material both from the Ministry of Information and from Mass-Observation: a remarkable project that’s only now, thanks to the work of James Hinton, becoming clearly understood.  This material – including polls, reports and diaries – “is extraordinarily rich and variegated, and reveals the complexity of responses to Churchill, including surprising levels of criticism and dissent.”

It’s hard to imagine the pressures the man was working under.  He needed to satisfy what one diarist calls ‘the turbulent people’ of the United Kingdom: a people as hungry for information as for inspiration; sometimes cheered by Churchill’s truculence, often frustrated by his bluster.  But he was speaking also to global audiences: to the Empire and to the wavering Americans; to the enemy; to the movements of resistance in Europe.  He was battling a hostile press, especially on the left, and his own party, which continued to suspect his motives.  And he was running the war.  He was in his late sixties.  He contracted pneumonia at least twice, and seems at one point to have suffered a minor heart attack.

By 1942, after the disastrous fall of Singapore, Mass-Observation was reporting a sense among the public that Churchill might not be up to the job.  “The breaking of the oratorical spell is thus a shock as well as a disappointment.”  In the Commons, however, on 23 April, he seemed to find a way forward. The MP ‘Chips’ Cannon reported: “No humour or tact, little oratory, no mea culpa stuff, but straightforward, brilliant and colourful, a factual resumé of the situation.”   Something extraordinary was happening: “as the catalogue of catastrophe continued,” writes Toye, “MPs began to cheer up.”  The sheer mass of fact and argument seemed to ground the speech in an ethical appeal that steadied a fractious House and increased MPs’ confidence.

For Toye, Churchill’s ability to explain, narrate and argue his case before parliament and the people matters more than the few remembered phrases or the occasional miscalculation.  He never gave up speaking.  “Hitler and Mussolini, when things started to go wrong for them, retreated into silence,” he writes; “for them, this was a luxury; it was also a chronic weakness of the political systems they operated.”  Churchill had no such luxury.  He was operating in a political system that forced him to justify his actions.  He used rhetoric to inspire his electorate, cajole his allies and deceive his enemies; but he used it also to submit himself to the democratic power that kept him in office, and for which, ultimately, everyone was fighting. 

Toye’s conclusion is itself powerful and inspirational.  It closes a book that offers a remarkable insight, not only into these most famous of political speeches, but also the complex, conflicted society that responded to them.

ESN Conference September 2013: Why write speeches?

 

And so to the main business of the European Speechwriter Network conference, on Friday 20 September.  (Notes on the pre-conference proceedings are here.)  Here are my selected highlights.

Denise Graveline, our capable Chair, set the tone.  (Check out Denise's website, doing its bit to redress the gender imbalance that has damaged the world of public speaking for - how long?)

English – the conference language on this occasion – is not one language but many.  (Cue customary jokes about American and English.)  When we say “I’m speaking your language,” we don’t just mean “I’m speaking your native language,” but “I agree with you.  I see things your way.”  Language generates both meaning and filters of meaning.  Never more so than in the TED age, when audiences are both diverse and – often – remote.  Technology, humour, public opinion: so many filters can alter a speaker’s meaning. 

(The theme was echoed later by Max Atkinson, who reminded us how much English is spoken by non-native speakers to audiences of non-native speakers.  How do the filters work?)

 

Rune Kier Nielsen energized us with his advice on how to exploit the new filters of social media.  Drawing on his work in Brazil and with ethnic minorities in Copenhagen, and inspired by his young daughter’s love of fairy stories, Rune offered us the seven dwarves of social media and their essential rules.

In summary:

Share what you find.  Share your research, using LinkedIn groups and others.  And use those groups also for inspiration.
Get to know the others.  Follow the opinion makers and hashtags, the debates and the conversations.  Poll functions can be ‘ideation platforms' to help you develop your ideas.  Challenge and form opinion on YouTube.  Let your audience become participants.  We’re talking co-creation.
Light the path for the one in front.  Being a speechwriter means analysing the speaker as much as the audience.  Use social media to guide and promote your speakers; link their speeches to websites and groups.  Make them visible.
Shout to be heard.  We can piggyback on others’ success.  We can find popular blogs on our subject, link the speech to it and ask our network to share.
Remember your talks.  Storify collates all the social media in one place.  Pinterest does the same thing for visuals.  They’re good for inspiration, too.
Follow your word around.  “One feather is worth five chickens.”  (Did I hear that right?  Danish proverb, I think.  I didn’t get to ask.  Google has so far not helped me.)  Speechwriters don’t have to be outnumbered by others in cyberspace.  Use Tweetreach.
Share to succeed.  If your speaker is a woman, share her speech on Denise’s site.  Use Vital Speeches of the Day. (Of which more below.)  And nothing, but nothing, will increase your credibility with your speaker than telling them that they’re on a site with Obama, Elizabeth I and the Pope. 

My big takeaway: every tweet must have content.  Tweets should lead somewhere.  No content?  Stay silent.

Jonathan Parish reminded us of the problems of translation and the horrors of sending speech texts through multiple layers of authorization.  Parish works for NATO, which has a 300-page glossary of acronyms.  Speechwriters in this organization need to translate wonkery into plain language, but they also need to recognize the effects of eight (or more) layers of intervention on their lovingly crafted tricolons.  In his words: "Each of us has the hide of a rhinoceros." 

Mia Doornaert offered us a privileged insight into her work as a speechwriter at the highest level of politics.  Three moments stand out for me. 

First:  her view on the status of speechwriters.   In Anglo-Saxon countries, she suggests, we are seen as craftsfolk, professional wordsmiths.  In Latin countries, a speechwriter has the status somewhat of a mercenary.  Speakers using others’ words are seen as dishonest.

Second: her disdain for ‘mail-order catalogue speeches’, with no clear line and no message.  “A good speech,” she says, “generates headlines automatically.”  She admired the minister who told her: “I don’t want just to speak; I want to say something.”

And third, her closing quotation, from Bill Bernbach (and thank you, Mia, for allowing me to copy it down):

 

The truth isn’t the truth until people believe you.  And they can’t believe you if they don’t know what you’re saying.  And they can’t know what you’re saying if they don’t listen to you.  And they wont listen to you if you’re not interesting.  And you won’t be interesting unless you say things imaginatively, originally, freshly.

 

Amélie Crosson-Gooderham, Senior Analyst and Writer at the Bank of Canada, feels noticeably at ease working in a multi-lingual environment.  “For me,” she says, “Babel is a very comfortable place.”  Her advice on how to write for non-native speakers was wise. 

As with any audience, your intention and language should be clear.  The narrative arc and the signposts matter just as much, if not more. 

Preparation also matters more.  Speakers will need to rehearse the difficult words and phrases, when to 'breathe, stop and sip'.  The text will benefit from more visuals, especially on slides.  Use paintings to make your point metaphorically. (Linguistic metaphors might be more problematic).  The writer needs to coach their speaker.  Practise with them; attend the event; take notes and give feedback.

Richard Toye showed us that audience reaction can be complex, even when the language is shared.  Churchill’s wartime speeches (discussed in Professor Toye's new book, The Roar of the Lion) were not the universally inspiring events of post-war myth.  Interestingly, the moments when he offered his audience detailed, depressing accounts of setbacks and defeats actually increased his authority (his ethos) when the war’s momentum turned in the allies’ favour; the good news became more credible. 

Professor Toye suggested that, if there is any lesson from Churchill for today's speechwriters, it is that the famous soundbites were actually less important at the time than his detailed arguments and explanations.

And David Murray brought matters to a satisfying conclusion.  Murray runs Vital Speeches of the Day, an essential resource for any speechwriter.  He began by asking the most important question of all.

Why are we here? 

After all, a speech is about the least efficient way to deliver information – or arguments or explanations, for that matter.  Why do we gather to listen to speeches?  Why do we seem to crave them?  What are we seeking?

His answers: community, charm, courage.  (Yeah. I know.  That's my triad, not his.)

Audiences want to feel safe; they want to feel that they are united and enlivened. Hatred will unite them; hatred of incompetence, he hastened to add, quoting Mencken.  But shared goals will also bind an audience together, as will a sense that the speaker cares passionately about the cause. 

Murray quoted Kafka:

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

As with books, he suggests, so with speeches.

The most common complaint that he hears from speechwriters?  That speakers want to share facts, when audiences want inspiration.

Perhaps Murray’s right.  Correction:  of course Murray's right.  Why give a speech simply to give the audience information?  Why make a speech at all?  As Amélie Crosson-Gooderham had reminded us earlier in the day: to create awareness, build community and inspire action.  Those are the reasons that matter.

An inspiring note on which to end an inspiring day.

(Find more conference photos here.)

 

Framing for wonks (and others)

Photo by mnadi

A very good blogpost by Athene Donald set me thinking the other day, about writing policy papers, position papers, committee papers, and other kinds of persuasive document.  She was responding to this article by Stian Westlake on the Guardian Political Science blog.

Both pieces concentrate on matters stylistic.  Athene Donald quotes three key suggestions from Westlake’s piece.

• Neither glibness nor prolixity make for useful advice.

(I think it should be ‘makes’ – but let that pass.)

• Clarity, brevity and a sense of narrative are all important parts of good advice.

“It takes an eagle eye,” comments Professor Donald wisely, “to remove unnecessary circumlocutions and hesitancies.”

• Good advice is not just a matter of providing information, or summarising research. It also involves making a judgment about the balance of facts, helping frame the issue, and communicating in a way that the person you’re counselling will understand and act on.

To which she adds:  “Scientists aren’t always familiar with the idea of framing, or at least that is my personal experience.”

An important point is lurking here, which needs to be dragged out for scrutiny.

Westlake quotes Alan Clark, who once wrote a paper advocating deep cuts in military spending. Clark crows:

...not only was my paper first in, it was only five pages long. All this stuff [civil servants are] sending up now is ten, twenty pages per memo. On-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand balls. No one will bother, and in any case all will be read in the context of my argument.  Julian told me that the Treasury had commented that mine was 'the first decently written paper' they had seen for thirty years.

 

Ignore, if you can, the schoolboyish glee.  Clark’s success, I suggest, wasn’t principally due to style.  Clark got his way, as Westlake notes nearby, “by force of argument and cunning.”

Scientists are often frustrated by the irrationality of non-scientists.  Creationists ignore the overwhelming success of evolution as an explanatory theory.  Climate change sceptics scoff at sophisticated meteorological analysis.  Nigerian citizens refuse to inoculate their children against polio because they believe, against all the evidence, that the vaccine causes infertility.

Why do people resist good arguments so often and so persistently?

Because argument doesn’t operate by reason alone.  At least, most arguments don’t.  To succeed, an argument has to be framed to fit the assumptions, values and beliefs of the audience. 

Frames are the mental models through which we perceive and make sense of the world.  Some frames seem to be genetically imprinted; most are learned and reinforced through experience.  The choices we make, the decisions we take, and the arguments we believe, are determined by the frames we use. 

The idea of framing has been around for some decades.  The great rhetorician Kenneth Burke talked about ‘terministic screens’; Gregory Bateson and Ervin Goffmann developed the idea further in the 1970s.  More recently, framing has become seriously trendy through the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann on ‘cognitive biases’.

In the field of informal logic, framing serves to establish what Stephen Toulmin calls an argument’s warrant.  A warrant is a generally held assumption, value or belief that justifies (or warrants) the word ‘because’ as a link between claim and reason.  We’ll be convinced by an argument if, and only if, we accept the warrant underlying it. 

Imagine a nutritionist making this case to a five-year-old.

Eat your vegetables because they’re good for you.

What chance of success here?  The warrant is the unstated assumption that ‘we should eat what’s good for us’.  Show me a five-year-old who holds that truth to be self-evident.  They don’t buy it.  The argument is unwarranted.  Failure of helpless nutritionist.

Of course, there are other methods of persuasion.  We could use force, social proof (‘your best friend Sam eats his vegetables’), or any of Robert Cialdini’s other patterns of influence. 

We could hire Brian Cox or Dara Ó Briain to do the job; but that’s not reason.  That’s charisma: a version of what Aristotle called ethos.

Now look at what Alan Clark was doing.  As Timothy Johnson points out in his comment to Westlake’s piece, Clark was preaching to the converted: trying to convince the Treasury to make spending cuts.  Perfect framing.  When does the Treasury ever not want to make spending cuts?  That warrant – ‘spending cuts are goooooooooood’ – pretty well acts as the Treasury’s motto.

Hardly deep; but definitely cunning.

According to political communication researcher Jim Kuyper, frames operate in four ways:

• they define problems;
• they diagnose causes;
• they make moral judgments; and
• they suggest remedies.

When we’re constructing an argument, then, we could usefully ask four questions about our audience.

• How do they define the problem?
• What do they think the cause is?
• What’s their moral view of the problem?
• What kind of remedy are they looking for?

We then have to frame our argument to address the answers to those four questions.

Now, I can see that this might be a horrifying suggestion for many scientists.  After all:

• How do they define the problem?  As a hypothesis.
• What do they think the cause is? Whatever the research tells them; and the causes may be complex and various.
• What’s their moral view of the problem? Whatever can’t be falsified is likely to be true.
• What kind of remedy are they looking for? One that respects the complexity of the truth uncovered by the research.

That’s the frame through which (I hope) they view reality.  Which is fine if their audience for their argument frames in the same way.  But if they don’t – as many politicians, journalists, activists, members of faith communities or ordinary folk so often don’t – then the argument will fail.

Framing, it seems to me, is a powerful tool for constructing more effective arguments.  Anyone arguing across intellectual, social or political boundaries will find it helpful.  Not just policy wonks.

(Thanks also to Timothy Johnson for pointing us to this article, which takes the conversation still further...)

Capax imperii...

The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson

Edited by Harry Mount

Bloomsbury 2013

ISBN 978 1408 1835 26

£9.99

On my beside table, I currently have a copy of Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon.  It’s one of a fast-proliferating breed of book: designed to look more like books than books, with extra thick pages, big type and textured covers.  Sort of hyper-real books.Not-quite books. Waterstone’s counter yesterday was awash with them. 

Boris Johnson reminds me of this kind of book.  He’s a not-quite politician.

When he was appointed shadow Arts Minister in May 2004, his response was:  "look the point is...er, what is the point?  It is a tough job but somebody has got to do it."  Anacoluthon and erotema - interrupting the syntax of the sentence with a rhetorical question - are carefully placed in the service of a precisely calibrated impression of what Boris has proudly called imbecilio. 

"Boris," says Harry Mount, in an introduction to this book that's considerably more interesting and insightful than I was expecting, "is in fact a brilliant calibrator."  He can shift his register precisely as the kairos demands. 

In particular, his "magical gift for surreal, amusing apology" works "like a sort of bulletproof armour."  When Eddie Mair called him "a nasty piece of work" earlier this year, Boris drew the venom with relative ease.  "If a BBC presenter can't attack a nasty Tory politician," he suggested the next day, "what's the world coming to?"

Clever.  Tory politicians are nasty; BBC presenters are inherently anti-conservative; 'twas ever thus and 'twill ever be thus.  By holding up a mirror to our own prejudices, Johnson implies a level of honesty that actually increases his credibility.   He knows that the only politician the public will now believe is a parody of a politician. 

He uses his lack of ethos to magnify his ethos.

There's no doubting, then, the man's rhetorical flair.  (Open this book at any page.)  "That facility," claims Mount, "is largely to do with having studied classics."  He has the classicist's command of language, playing off Latinate against Anglo-Saxon just as he plays off class against class.  And his schooling allowed him to rehearse to perfection a role based on the archetypes of privilege, public school and ivory-tower academia:  "Billy Bunter meets Bertie Wooster meets Professor Brainstorm."  It's a "well-practised, mock-bumbling, Latin-loving routine that never fails him in “that crucial Johnsonian mission – to get him off the hook.”

For some, the image is a disguise.  Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP, believes that “there’s a smooth machine under the buffoonery.  It’s not an exaggeration,” he claims, “to call him a genius.” (What is it, then, I wonder?)

Ian Hislop’s comment on Boris is more ambiguous.  When people ask Hislop, “Is Boris a very clever man pretending to be an idiot?’, Hislop simply replies: ‘No.’

What Eton and Balliol failed, apparently, to instil in our man is any "capacity for long, concentrated periods of work" (Mount's words).  When he missed a First, they say he went alone to the cinema and cried.  When he was writing for the Daily Telegraph, he consistently failed to file his copy on time. When Mount asked one of Boris's old classics tutors about his chances of making it to Number 10, the man replied:

"Capax imperii nisi imperasset."

 

This is Tacitus on the Emperor Galba:  "He was up the job of emperor, as long as he never became emperor."

 

 

Johnson's practised incompetence may allow him, very effectively, to hide what Jonathan Coe has called “his doggedly neo-liberal and pro-City agenda”. (I'm seriously indebted to Coe's recent article in the LRB.)  Whether it also gives him cover for his lack of political competence is another matter.

For the moment, we can hold off the question about his ability to rise to the demands of high office.  What matters is why people vote for him.  His wit gains him support because it taps into a very British contempt for anything outstanding.  "Boris," claims Mount, "manages to pull off the trick of being ambitious and successful, at the same time as implicitly mocking ambition and success.  You end up forgiving him his ambition, and not begrudging him his success, because the whole act is so funny and endearing."

Ah.  Endearing.

So Boris scores because he has incorporated satire's mockery of political hubris and incompetence into his own act and utterly emasculated it.  Johnson knows that he has nothing to fear from the public’s laughter, because the public’s ridicule for politicians has become undiscriminating.  He knows, to paraphrase Coe, that the best way to deal with satire is to create it yourself.  Mount quotes Stuart Reid, Boris's deputy editor at the Spectator:  “people of all social classes and most political persuasions will vote for him, precisely because he reduces everything to a joke.” 

Wit and wisdom for our time.

Telling it like it is

Rhetoric: A Very Short Introduction

Richard Toye

Oxford, 2013

£7.99

ISBN 978 0 19 965136 8

At the heart of Richard Toye’s excellent new book is “the problem of meaning and intention.” 

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion.  How can speakers be confident that the audience will be persuaded?  (Think of Blair at the Women’s Institute conference in 2000.)  Can we decide what, exactly, a speaker means?  “This is what seems to fascinate us,” he writes, “although pinning it down is infuriatingly difficult.” 

 

Difficult, partly, because we can’t argue without using rhetoric.  When Kennedy famously said: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, he wasn’t just employing antimetabole for fun; the repetition of words in reverse order actually formulates the idea.  “Rhetoric,” says Toye, “is not merely the means by which ideas are expressed, it is also the means by which they are generated.”  

 

This is one of his major themes.  Another is that rhetorical meaning is generated socially.  Too much discussion of rhetoric stalls at geeky chat about figures of speech.  Toye deepens the conversation.  Rhetoric isn’t solely about style; its reception depends on the norms of the society in which it’s delivered.

We’re invited to analyse St Francis’ sermon to the birds.  Did he really think that he could talk to the birds? Did the people who circulated the sermon think that he could?  Or were they trying to convince the audience that he could?  And if so, why?  How do we know that what we’re reading even remotely resembles what he said?  These questions both enrich our understanding of the text, and demonstrate the impossibility of deriving a final, authoritative meaning.

Rhetoric both reveals and conceals.  It’s this epistemological slipperiness that Plato found so offensive.  Aristotle, in response, sought to codify rhetoric into a set of rules, instigating a project pursued with varying levels of enthusiasm ever since.  Toye outlines the story in a superb potted history.

He’s particularly good on the great 20^th figures, who redefined the terms of the debate:  Richards, Ong, Austin, Burke.

 

By the 1950s, some intellectuals on the Aristotelian wing became convinced that “science would eventually be able to foretell with precision how human minds would be persuaded.”  Such an approach “now looks,” writes Toye, “too mechanistic and not a little frightening.”  Too mechanistic because rhetoric’s effects are “inherently unpredictable”; frightening because, on some level, rhetoric does seem to operate mechanistically.  While the Mad Men were developing Edward Bernays’ advertising  techniques, Alfred Hitchcock was honing his rhetorical skills – both verbal and visual – to unprecedented levels of coercive mastery.

 

 

Toye uses Hitchcock’s 1935 English 39 Steps, in contrast, to demonstrate rhetoric’s playful ambiguity.  Richard Hannay’s improvised hustings speech – “I’ve known what it is to feel lonely and helpless” – gains layers of meaning from his situation: impersonating a parliamentary candidate when, in fact, he’s on the run from sinister agents of a foreign power and playing for time.  Rhetorical analysis identifies “the social meanings of particular statements or symbols in given contexts.” High-flown and complicated?  Well, Hitch’s audience has no trouble doing it.

 

Toye favours political rhetoric over others – unsurprisingly, given his position as Professor of Modern History at Exeter University.  He gives valuable insights into the shift, during the 19th century, from 'laudatory' rhetoric, praising the politician's character, to 'hortatory' rhetoric, linking voters  emotionally to policies - "the model of rhetoric that informs modern programmatic politics".  And he gives a strong account of the concepts of the  'rhetorical presidency' and the 'anti-intellectual presidency' in modern American politics.  Other forms of rhetoric are somewhat sidelined; but Toye shows that rhetoric, of whatever kind, is never politically neutral; rhetorical analysis therefore provides insights into how a society generates its governing ideas, and “the way it talks about the way those things ought to be talked about.” 

Rhetoric matters.  To explicate this shaggy beast in 35,000 words is no small challenge, and Toye succeeds with a consistently light touch.  (I’d like a few more pointers to some of the scholars he quotes.)  He even provides a ‘basic toolkit’ of rhetorical techniques.  He wants to empower us; but he also warns us about the limits of such empowerment.  Above all, he says, understanding rhetoric “helps people to assess the validity of arguments and to avoid being misled by plausible but flawed appeals.  It can also provide tools that will help counter them.”

Spot on.

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.

Aristotle's Three Musketeers: ethos, logos, pathos

These are some notes based on my session at the International Speechwriting Conference, held in London on 16 May 2013.

Download Three modes of appeal

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.

Download Three modes of appeal

PRAISE: bringing your ideas to life

This is quite a long post.  But I've broken it into six manageable chunks, as you'll see.  Scroll your way through:  you'll soon see how it's organized, and you'll find what you're looking for.

The best presentations live in the minds of their audience. Many of us, however, have to present on dry, abstract topics. We know we have to bring such subjects to life; but how to do it?

Slides? 

Maybe.

But computer-generated slides have been sold as aids to make the presenter's life easier. And that's not the objective here.

The objective is to make the audience's life easier.

And the way to do that is to stimulate their imaginations. Directly. Immediately. Intimately. 

With the words we use.

Here's a checklist of techniques to help you bring your ideas to life. Remember it with the simple acronym:

PRAISE

That's:

Proverbs

Resonators

Attention-grabbers

Influencers

Stories

Emotions

Proverbs

How do we best deliver our take-home message? As a proverb.

Proverbs express abstract ideas in concrete terms. They generalize from a particular image, making it applicable in a wide range of situations. So, as well as being memorable, they can become platforms for novel thinking.   

A message expressed proverbially expresses a new idea as a variation on known experience.

Proverbs are often phrased memorably. Rhythm, alliteration, assonance and other forms of poetic language can help our message stick more effectively in the audience‘s mind.

Make your message/proverb action-centred. Reduce the options for action in your audience‘s mind. Uncertainty about what to do causes decision paralysis and inaction.

P is also for paradox.

A paradox is a true statement that embodies a contradiction.

For example:

Spend more to make more.

Whoever loses his life, shall find it.

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Make your take-home message a paradoxical proverb; then use the presentation to resolve the paradox.

 

Resonators

Proverbs often use resonators: concrete images that involve action or sensory information.

Concrete images resonate in the imagination by evoking memories (think of the phrase 'that rings a bell'.)   

But if concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction when we present?   

Because abstract thinking marks us out as the expert.

But abstract thinking requires from your audience a level of commitment and cognitive ‘bandwidth' that they may not be willing to offer.

Make an idea concrete and you will stimulate your audience‘s imagination. Once intrigued and engaged, they'll be more willing to think in abstract terms.

Invoking action 

If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.    (Isaac Newton)

Art is a form of lying in order to tell the truth.    (Pablo Picasso)

Now the trumpet summons us again.        (J F Kennedy)

It is more blessed to give than to receive.    (Acts 20:35)

That‘s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.    (Neil Armstrong)

You turn if you want to; the lady‘s not for turning.    (Margaret Thatcher)

The evil that men do lives after them;/ The good is oft interred with their bones.    (Shakespeare)

Stimulating the senses

Fish, to taste right, must swim 3 times - in water, in butter and in wine. (Polish proverb)

The best smell in the world is that of the man you love. (Jennifer Aniston)

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office. (Barack Obama)

 

Attention-grabbers

Your first, last and only real objective as a presenter is to keep the audience's attention.

What attracts our attention?

Surprise.

Getting attention at the start

How can you surprise your audience at the start of your presentation?

Do something unexpected. Tell a story; make a controversial statement; ask a question.

Maintaining attention

Of course, surprise doesn‘t last. For our audience to continue to pay attention, we must continually generate new interest and new curiosity.

The simplest way to regain attention is by making a gesture. An effective speech builds regular ‘gestures’ into the text.

Structurally, this might mean building transitions into the speech. Obvious examples of transitions would be changing a slide on your screen, or manipulating a slide in some way. We can also gesture with the spoken material. Many of the gestural devices are like similar devices in music.

Vary the rhythm between sections. Just a piece of music varies fast and slow movements, vary the pace from section to section. Follow a section dense in information with another that is ‘information-light’.

Vary the “orchestration”. Use different colours: different types of discourse. Explain in one section; then switch to a story.

Use the element of surprise. Take an unexpected turn. This is the equivalent of changing key in music, or of modulating from major to minor.

Integrate your themes. If you have a key theme that you want the audience to remember, return to it frequently – sometimes in different ‘keys’ or ‘registers’. Musicians call this ‘recapitulation’.

End with a rousing ‘coda’. Make sure the audience is in no doubt when to applaud!

Stimulating curiosity

We pay attention to whatever makes us curious. Stimulate your audience‘s curiosity and you will engage their attention.

We can engage curiosity by systematically opening up gaps in their knowledge, and then filling those gaps.

Posing a mystery to be solved creates interest and holds attention. Mysteries are powerful because they create a need for closure. The ‘Aha!’ experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the ‘Huh?’ experience.

So: pose questions and don't answer them. Start a story and don't finish it. Create mystery and let it hang in the air.

And do remember to satisfy the audience's curiosity before you finish.

 

Influencers

Aristotle said that we can influence people artistically and non-artistically. Artistic influence is the influence we wield as a presenter. Non-artistic influence is the external influence we use: evidence, information, quotations from others and so on.

Making yourself credible

We believe people we find credible. You can build credibility with your audience by projecting a persona that they find attractive, and a stance that they consider acceptable.  

Your persona is the version of your personality that you display to your audience. What persona do you want to project? How could you project it?

Stance is your attitude to your material, to your audience, and to yourself. It’s the way you believe what you believe.

Stance relates closely to topic. Your topic is where you stand in relation to your subject; your stance is the way you stand.

Stance also relates closely to the audience. It displays your orientation towards the audience and your assumptions about them. Your audience decides what your stance is. Your task is to make sure that the audience reads the stance you want them to read. So you need to know something about how your audience is reading you, and adapt accordingly.

You can shift your stance during a presentation. Indeed, you may need to, if you want to avoid alienating your audience. But shifting your stance too strongly, or too often, will create the image of an inconsistent persona: very troubling to an audience because unpredictable and therefore dangerous.

What stance do you want to project? Here are some ideas.     

Devil’s Advocate

Mediator

Gadfly

Licensed Fool

Expert

Leader

Team Player

Mad Scientist

Wise Relative

Investigator

Friend

Dreamer

Grumpy Old Man

Making your material credible

Sources of credibility include:

• authoritative information 
• detail
• statistics
• exceptional examples

External authority can lend credibility to information; a wealth of statistics and dense data may not.  Exceptional examples will work better than typical ones.  But the most credible external information comes in the form of -

Stories

Stories allow your audience to relate to your ideas more directly by locating the ideas in a context they recognize.

We create a simulation of the stories we hear. When we hear a story, our minds move from scene to scene: we are inside the story.

Mental simulations are not quite as good as the real thing; but they are the next best thing. For example, mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Hearing stories can prepare us to respond more quickly and effectively. If you can place that situation in the past rather than in the future, it will be more credible – because your audience will believe that what could happen has actually happened.

Mental simulations also help us manage emotions. ‘Mirror neurons’ fire when we imagine or witness someone doing something; these mirror neurons create the same mental sensation as if we were performing the action ourselves.

Stories have other benefits, too.

They last longer than other forms of information.

They get passed around.

They are more credible than facts, statistics or data.

They help to define an audience's identity.

They cross cultural boundaries.

They can enhance the speaker's delivery.

And of course, stories have the great benefit of being entertaining.

If they're well told.

Here's a simple structure that will work for any story. Think of it as SPQR.

SITUATION

“Once upon a time…” What is the first thing you can say about the matter that you and your audience will agree is true?  The starting point is completely uncontroversial.

PROBLEM

What happened to alter the situation?  Perhaps something went wrong.  Maybe improvements are necessary.  Often the problem is that the audience is ignorant of something.

QUESTION

What question does the problem trigger in the audience’s mind? 

RESPONSE

The answer to that question should be the same as the point you are making.

Emotions

We act on emotion. That's why they're called emotions: they provoke motion. (They ‘move’ us – sometimes literally.)

We are wired to feel emotions for people, not for abstractions. Emotional connection to other people spurs action; thinking analytically reduces feelings.

So: your task - especially at the end of a presentation - is to stimulate the emotion that's appropriate to the action you want the audience to take.

Self-interest is the simplest source of emotional interest; we make people care by appealing to things that matter to them. And most people matter to themselves.

But self-interest isn‘t the whole story. Emotions help us to fulfil fundamental needs.

We all have a need for these things.

Security

Attention

A sense of autonomy and control

Emotional connections to others

Membership of a community

Friendship, fun, love, intimacy

A sense of status in social situations

A sense of competence and achievement

Meaning and purpose:

• people who need us 
• activities that stretch us (flow; peak experiences that focus our attention; being ‘in the zone‘ ) 
• a connection to a bigger picture

If you can say or do something that addresses one of these needs in your audience, you'll probably evoke a useful emotional response.

Six ways to bring your ideas to life.  PRAISE.

Try them out.