The LibDems have a new 3 part list!

I am grateful to Mark Pack for drawing my attention to this new slogan - for which I was not directly responsible, even though the third item is longer than each of the first two!

For those of you who, unlike me, didn't have their eyes tested yesterday, the list is as follows:

• Stronger Economy.
• Fairer Society.
• Opportunity for Everyone.

As for why a longest third item is a good idea, all is (at least partially) explained in my books.

As for the main message about the growth of wind power, I fear that my brother and his wife will not approve - for reasons best known to Christopher Booker...

The gloomiest day of the year - yet again!

Repeat of a post from 24th October 2009:

If you find the darker afternoons that start tomorrow a depressing and pointless exercise, you might be interested in an article in The Times a few days ago (HERE for the full story from last year).

Apart from relieving the gloom, not putting the clocks back tonight would reduce electricity consumption by 1-2% and save NHS expenditure on dealing with accidents and emergencies:

“During an experiment 40 years ago, when British Summer Time was used all year for three years, there was an average of 2,500 fewer deaths and serious injuries each year. Opposition from Scotland contributed to the decision to return to putting the clocks back in winter.”

If putting the clocks back is such a big deal for the Scots, why don’t we let them do it on their own, especially now they have their own parliament in Edinburgh?

A different time zone in Scotland might be marginally inconvenient for the rest of us, but no more so than it already is when trying to plan meetings in other EC countries.

Time for a bigger slit on Poppy collection boxes - yet again - to mark the anniversary of WW1

 

It is now nearly 5 years since I first notified the British Legion about how they could collect even more cash than usual - and yet more in this centenary year of the outbreak of WW1 - but they have still failed to take any notice of my sound advice. See here. 

If you agree, how about mentioning it to them, if only because they appear to be a bit hard of hearing?

NEW BOOK: dreaming of selling a million!

SEEN & HEARD

Conversations and commentary on contemporary communication

Whenever I've written a book, I always dream of it selling by the million. In fact, I doubt whether anyone would ever write a book at all if they knew how few people would ever actually read it.

In this respect, I count myself as very lucky indeed, as Lend Me Your Ears: all you need to know about making speeches and presentations has become an 'international bestseller'. My earlier Our Masters' Voices: the language and body language of Politics didn't do too badly either and is still available 30 years later. My more academic books also got noticed by appropriate audiences in sociology, psychology and linguistics

But in none of these cases had the internet developed anywhere near to where it is today - with e-books, Kindle and yes, hard copies too!

This blog has, according to Ayd Instone, publisher of my latest book, so far been made up of slightly fewer words than Tolstoy's War and Peace and slightly more than Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens.

But after editing it down to a similar length to that of Lend Me Your Ears it becomes a more manageable length and gives readers the advantage of not having to gaze at a screen for hours on end.

Needless to say, I'm still dreaming of selling a million, hoping that you loyal blog readers will help to pave the way and that some of you will write 5 star reviews on Amazon...

Promotion or demotion at Sky News?

I've blogged previously about Adam Boulton's tendency to 'um', 'er', pause and otherwise hesitate far more than is to be expected from the Politics Editor of a major 24 hr news channel - not to mention other blogs elsewhere on the hazards faced by speakers who rely too much on teleprompters.

But Adam's problem seems to have been solved more or less completely in recent days - by the simple device of turning him into a news reader rather than an interviewee who answers questions put to him by one of the more regular news readers - who rarely serve as news reporters out in the field.

Whether being transformed from being a news reader rather than a news reporter/editor is a promotion or demotion for Mr Boulton I do not know. 

Perhaps he or one of his colleagues at Sky News knows the answer and will let us know in due course whether it's a temporary measure or it's been done to prevent viewers from having to suffer from listening to the continuous 'umming' and 'erring' of the political editor.

There are of course 3 components (!).

1.       Preparation (including structure, script, attention to detail about the audience)

2.       Delivery (says what it is on the cans)

3.       Impact (audience reaction, newspaper headlines, social media buzz)

Hence:

                                                Ed Miliband                                                                                                   David Cameron

Preparation                                  2                                                                                                                           7                             

Delivery                                          4                                                                                                                           7

Impact                                            4 (maybe higher given it ended in tears!!)                                           6

Max Index                           10                                                                                          20                    

Mr Miliband's style of delivery gets into the headlines

I've blogged before about politicians - including President Obama and Ed Miliband -  using teleprompters, reading from scripts, speaking without scripts, pretending not to have a script, modelling management guru walkabouts, etc.

In his leader's speech yesterday, Mr Miliband excelled himself by forgetting some crucial lines from the script he had tried to remember. Although his last two efforts to memorise scripts more or less verbatim were hailed by the media as great successes, the last thing you want is for journalists and their editors to concentrate on how you said something rather than what you actually said (or didn't say).

And here lies one of the hazards of 24 hour news and the reporting of speeches before they are actually spoken. If Mr Miliband had not circulated the text of his supposedly scriptless text-free speech, he might have got away with it. But he did not and has had to spend the day reading reports of what he had not said, appearing in broadcast news interviews trying to explain his omissions away, etc.

If I were asked, my advice would be to say that there's little to be gained from trying to memorise long speeches - unless you happen to be David Cameron performing in a 10 minute beauty parade for the Tory party leadership...