Name your price: the curious language of television advertising


More and more British television advertisements are referring to prices in a way that bears little or no relationship to the way we talk about prices in everyday life.

Commercials are telling us that an armchair priced at two hundred and ninety nine pounds costs “two-nine-nine” and that a three-piece suite priced at four hundred and ninety nine pounds can be ours for “four-nine-nine”.

There are presumably two reasons why the ad agencies have sold their clients on the idea of listing digits as an 'effective' way of mentioning the price of a product. One is that it avoids having to mention high-sounding numbers like “ninety” or “a hundred”. The other is that these shorthand digital options save on costly air time: there are only three syllables in “four-nine-nine” compared with eight syllables in “four hundred and ninety nine pounds”, which takes more than twice as long to say.

But the trouble is that, to any competent speaker of English (e.g. the mass television audience), these linguistic inventions stand out as noticeable and distinctly odd in comparison with the more usual conversational way of referring to the price of things in tens, hundreds or thousands of pounds. What’s more, if you actually follow the advertisers’ preferred usage, it can lead to confusion and embarrassment, as happened on the only occasion on which I can ever remember describing a price in this rather unusual way.

After I’d spent £1,250.00 (one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds) on an antique dining table, my late mother-in-law said she’d like to pay for it as a house-warming present and asked me how much it had cost. Taken aback by such unexpected generosity, I replied (perhaps unwittingly following the advertisers’ example of trying to make a high price sound lower) by saying “twelve-fifty” – at which point, she reached into her purse and handed me £12.50 (twelve pounds and fifty pence).

I won’t dwell on how the conversation developed after that, because what really interests me about all this is the question of how ad agencies manage to get away with persuading their clients to buy into such bizarre linguistic usages without regard for what (little) we know how language actually works.

Another example of heavy investment on the basis of questionable advice from the agencies is the huge number of TV commercials in which there is no spoken reference at all to the name of the product being advertised. Even when this key information appears in a written caption on the screen, it won’t be noticed by the millions of viewers who are reading a newspaper, doing a crossword puzzle or are using the break to make a cup of tea.

The expensive pointlessness of such commercials was summed up many years ago by Professor W.M. O’Barr of Duke University, when he pointed out that the advertisers and/or their agencies don’t seem to realise that eyes have eyelids but ears don’t have ear lids – the obvious consequence of which is that, however inattentive viewers are, they will at least hear the name of the product being advertised.

The net result of all this is that we often become very familiar with expensively created artistic film footage of cars doing extraordinary things without being left with any idea about what make or model of car it is that we’re supposed to go out and buy.

Meanwhile, the ad agencies seem content to carry on ignoring research, like that by O’Barr, that could point them and their clients in much more profitable directions.

Ready-made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech

Given that Barack Obama is such a brilliant orator, it might seem a bit presumptuous to offer any suggestions for his inaugural address next month. But these lines from another presidential inaugural seem uncannily relevant for someone taking office at a time of economic crisis:

“These United States are confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions… It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of our people.

“Idle industries have cast workers into unemployment, human misery, and personal indignity … For decades we have piled deficit upon deficit, mortgaging our future and our children's future for the temporary convenience of the present. To continue this long trend is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals.

“You and I, as individuals, can, by borrowing, live beyond our means, but for only a limited period of time. Why, then, should we think that collectively, as a nation, we're not bound by that same limitation? We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding: We are going to begin to act, beginning today.

“The economic ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks, or months, but they will go away…


The speaker was Ronald Reagan at his inauguration on 20th January 1981. More than two and a half decades later, the depressing thing is that nothing much seems to have changed – including the optimism/hope of the newly elected president.

Neutrality in the Queen's Christmas speech


In an earlier blog entry (12 November 2008), I looked at the way the Queen’s speech at the state opening of parliament each year is a model of how to read out someone else’s words (i.e. the government’s legislative plans for the coming year) with complete neutrality.

Although her annual broadcast to the Commonwealth on Christmas day is supposed to be her words to people in the UK and the British Commonwealth, she has to solve a rather different problem of displaying neutrality – not between different political parties, but between different religions.

As head of the Church of England, she's obviously free, and perhaps even obliged, to be open about her own Christian faith in her Christmas message, but sections aimed at believers in other religions have become a regular feature in recent years, as is illustrated by the following three extracts:

2005
"There may be an instinct in all of us to help those in distress, but in many cases I believe this has been inspired by religious faith. Christianity is not the only religion to teach its followers to help others and to treat your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself. 

It has been clear that in the course of this year relief workers and financial support have come from members of every faith and from every corner of the world.
"

2006
"It is worth bearing in mind that all of our faith communities encourage the bridging of that divide. The wisdom and experience of the great religions point to the need to nurture and guide the young, and to encourage respect for the elderly…. The scriptures and traditions of the other faiths enshrine the same fundamental guidance. It is very easy to concentrate on the differences between the religious faiths and to forget what they have in common."

2007
"All the great religious teachings of the world press home the message that everyone has a responsibility to care for the vulnerable."

You can inspect the whole scripts of these and ones going back to 1996 by clicking on the title above. Or you can click here to see her in action last year, or here (after 3.00 p.m. UK time on 25 December) to check whether she has any more religious neutrality in store for us this year.

What did Santa say before "Ho, ho ho"?


I’ve just received an email with Christmas greetings from the White House Writers Group in Washington D.C., which contains a nice little ditty:

Santa called the other day.
"I need a speech and right away!
It should sound new, but somehow old;
A message sweet, yet still quite bold.
My words must be both short and clear
And memorable throughout the year!"
Our writers worked all through the night
To get each phrase exactly right.
Then one scribe cried, "Ah ha! I know!
Tell Santa to say just, 'Ho, ho, ho!'"


Rhetorically speaking, their use of repetition, alliteration and a three-part list can hardly be faulted.

But, having just seen Santa using these very words 3,000 miles away from Washington, I realise that this memorable line raises another intriguing question, namely, what had he been talking about just before saying “ho, ho, ho”?

The reason for asking the question comes from many years ago when I heard the late Gail Jefferson talking about her fascinating and innovative work on transcribing particles of laughter, of which “ho, ho, ho” is one of several possible vowel sounds – such as “ha, ha , ha”, “he, he, he”, “huh, huh, huh”, etc.

The gist of Jefferson’s point was that which one of these gets selected often seems to be triggered by vowel sounds that had come immediately before it. Someone might say “he was stung by a bee – he-he-he!”, “he was locked in the bar – ha-ha-ha” or “she dropped a bottle of gin on her toe – ho-ho-ho”.

I didn’t catch what Santa had been saying just before he used the line that had been supplied to him by the White House Writers Group, so there’s scope here for a pre-Christmas creative competition.

Suggestions as to what it was he'd said just before "ho-ho-ho" before midnight on 25th December, please.

You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery to discuss the financial crisis

When I show clips of top politicians in action to illustrate the power of rhetoric and imagery, people sometimes react by saying that such techniques may be all very well in political speeches but wouldn’t be much use in the kind of technical presentations they have to do.

It's alright for Barack Obama to say things like "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep", as he did in his victory speech in Chicago, but conjuring up images of journeys and hills isn't the kind of thing that professionals like economists and bankers can do.

My usual reply to such reactions is that nothing could be further from the truth - because I've yet to come across any subject where rhetoric and imagery can't be used to make a point more clearly and/or effectively.

The following transcript and video clips provide a nice illustration of how rhetorical techniques (including contrasts, a puzzle-solution format and a three-part list) and imagery can be used to discuss the ongoing financial crisis. Complicated it may be, but here we have a Nobel prize-winning economist (Joseph Stiglitz) talking about an economy going into "a tailspin", using a contrast (between two points in time and two contrasting facts) followed by a medical metaphor (“the cure is worse than the disease”).

The video then cuts to a segment from a prime-time (UK) television news broadcast (from ITN) in which the newsreader starts by using a puzzling headline that gets us wondering what the governor of the Bank of England's "most downbeat prediction yet about the economy” actually is and a solution that seems to be using an image (“the ‘nice’ decade is over”) – though actually Mr King's use of "nice" is a reference to an acronym for 'Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion', that's been used by economists to describe the sort of growth the UK has experienced since Labour came to power in 1997.

He then uses a three-part list and a metaphor (“travelling along a bumpy road”) that’s immediately picked up by a reporter, who continues the journey imagery (“en route”) and sums the problem up with a simple contrast (“high inflation and low growth”).

It’s worth comparing this with another news programme featured in a previous blog entry on 9th October 2008 ('PowerPoint Peston' - click here to view) and reflecting on which way of getting messages across is easier to follow.

TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO CLIPS:

Stiglitz:
[METAPHOR] When the largest economy in the world goes into a tailspin it's going to have global repercussions.
[A] Before the Iraq war the price of oil was twenty-five dollars a barrel.
[B] Now it’s over a hundred and ten dollars a barrel.
[METAPHOR] The cure is worse than the disease.

Newsreader:
[P] The governor of the Bank of England made his most downbeat prediction yet about the economy.
[S] What Mervyn King called 'the nice decade' is over.

King:
[1] The nice decade is behind us.
[2] The credit cycle has turned.
[3] Commodity prices are rising.

[METAPHOR] We are travelling along a bumpy road as the economy rebalances.

Reporter:
So we’re all now traveling along the governor’s bumpy road.
[A] En route, high inflation
[B] and low growth.


High-risk practical joke for an office Christmas party speech


If you have to make a speech that involves presenting someone with a gift, you could try something that was done at a farewell party for a colleague who was leaving.

Unknown to the audience, the speaker had two identical gift-wrapped boxes. The real present, a decanter and glasses, bought with money collected from colleagues in the room, was hidden under the table; the one on public view was a box full of broken glass.

While presenting the ‘gift’, the speaker dropped it on the floor. The clatter of broken glass prompted collective gasps of dismay – that were quickly replaced by laughter and applause when he came clean, retrieved the undamaged gift from under the table and presented it to their departing colleague.

Not all recipients, of course, would be very amused by such a prank, so think carefully about whether it’s worth the risk before deciding to go through with it (and don't blame me if it doesn't work).

End of year poll on PowerPoint presentations

If you haven't noticed it yet, there's now an end of year poll with one simple question:

How many inspiring PowerPoint presentations have you attended during 2008?

If you'd like to vote, you'll find it on the left, just below the Blog Archive.

Obama's rhetoric renews UK media interest in the 'lost art' of oratory

Judging from the number of approaches from the media I've had since the election of Barack Obama, his outstanding speaking ability seems to have made some in our media wake up to the fact that, with the notable exceptions of Tony Blair and David Cameron, there's been a shortage of good orators in recent British politics. Some radio journalists told me the other day that they couldn't think of any current members of parliament who stood out as effective speakers.

The irony is, as I've hinted in some earlier blog entries, that the media themselves have probably played a major part in this by deciding that speeches do not make 'good television' and by giving ever greater priority to interviews as the main form of political communication - a process that seems to have begun during the late 1980s and has accelerated ever since.

It's something into which I hope to do some more research. Meanwhile, the fullest discussion of these issues I've written so far was an introductory chapter in the book Great Liberal Speeches, edited by Duncan Brack and Tony Little (Politicos, London, 2001), a version of which is reproduced below.


MERE RHETORIC?

At the start of the 1987 general election, David Owen, then a co-leader of the SDP-Liberal Alliance kicked off his campaign by saying: “reason, not rhetoric will win this election.” By so doing, he not only highlighted the fact that rhetoric has not had a good press in recent decades, often being used as a term of abuse, but also that there may be no escape from it, even when a speaker is being critical of it. ‘Reason, not rhetoric’ is a contrast, and the contrast is, and remains, one of the most powerful rhetorical weapons in the armoury of anyone who wishes to get messages across in a way that strikes a chord with audiences.

After a televised experiment at the 1984 SDP Conference, in which I had been involved in helping a novice speaker to win a standing ovation, a similar example of a rhetorically formulated denial of the value of rhetorical techniques came in a radio interview. Asked what he thought about them, Ken Livingstone, then leader of the GLC, used two consecutive contrasts: “Public speakers are born, not made. People shouldn’t worry about all these techniques; they should just be themselves.” Here, then, was another example someone using rhetoric to deny its value.

There is, however, little evidence for supposing that it is somehow possible to forego the use of rhetoric and still be a persuasive and effective public speaker. Similarly, however much people may complain about the evils of soundbites, it is difficult to conceive of how it could ever be possible to eliminate them. Whether we call them soundbites, quotable quotes, slogans or aphorisms, lines that stand out from the vast mass of forgettable sentences have always been with us, from the Bible, through literature and politics, to television advertising. The fact that many of them are splendid illustrations of rhetorical technique does not necessarily mean that they are, or should be, regarded with suspicion.

For example, Christianity tends not to be rejected on the grounds that there was something devious about Jesus making such effective use of anecdotes to get key messages across, or because, as a three-part list, the Trinity is ‘mere rhetoric.’ Shakespeare is not denounced for having composed contrasts like ‘I come to bury Caesar; not to praise him’, or three part lists like “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” We do not argue that revolutionaries were somehow duped because they fought under the banners of three-part lists like “liberté, egalité, fraternité”, or “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Our view of Churchill is undiminished by his use of lines like “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” Nor do we think any the less of Martin Luther King for the fact that almost every sentence in his I have a Dream speech uses imagery or rhetoric.

What we have, then, is a curious situation in which rhetoric from the past comes to be revered and stored in dictionaries of quotations or books like this, whereas rhetoric from the present is likely to be dismissed as yet another soundbite. In his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches, Brian MacArthur makes the point that “every generation judges contemporary speakers unfavourably against the giants of the past.” It may also be that, with a few notable exceptions, it is only with the passage of time and the wisdom of hindsight that good speeches achieve recognition as great speeches. There is, however, another possible reason for this ambivalence about the value of rhetoric, for it seems that we are more willing to be impressed if we think that someone is a ‘gifted’ speaker, naturally endowed with an ability to get the message across effectively, than if we think that they have been schooled, coached, or otherwise assisted by speech writers and coaches. If persuasive skill is ‘natural’, it is commendable and perhaps even charismatic, but if it has been schooled, there is something suspect or devious about it.

Such a view first came to my attention in a letter from one of the twenty publishers who rejected the manuscript of my book Our Masters’ Voices (1984), which reported on research into the main rhetorical techniques that trigger applause in political speeches. The reason given for rejection was that ‘people are cynical enough about politicians already, without publishing this kind of stuff.’ This came as quite a surprise, as the aim of the study had been to observe and describe some of the key factors involved in political speech making, rather than to criticise politicians for being so unscrupulous as use a small range of well-proven verbal techniques to get their points across. However, the publisher’s view that there was something essentially manipulative or artificially contrived about effective political communication was echoed in some of the other reactions to the book and televised experiment that accompanied its publication.

Equipped with a script that bristled with contrasts, three-part lists and rhetorical questions, Ann Brennan’s speech to the 1984 SDP Conference generated so much applause that she only managed to deliver about two thirds of it before running out of time. During the standing ovation that followed, the late Sir Robin Day, who was doing the BBC live commentary, described it as “the most refreshing speech at the conference so far.” However, once it became known that she had received help in writing and delivering the speech, opinions suddenly changed. I was written off as an Oxford don who is “some kind of expert in how people wave their hands about when speaking.” Words like ‘stunt’, ‘hoax’ and ‘put-up job’ sprang to the lips of commentators, as they went around the conference hall trying to collect statements of disapproval from delegates. One reporter looked visibly disappointed when he elicited the reply: “I think we were applauding the sentiment and the message. And, in any case, if you can be coached to get a standing ovation, I’d like to take the course of training.”

The ‘hoax’ line of criticism was at its height at the point where the commentators thought that the speaker was merely a stooge, who had been used by us to perpetrate a practical joke on conference. It began to decline once it emerged that she was a fully paid up SDP member and local activist, and that the message she had put to the party was her own strongly held belief -- namely that if it was going to get anywhere, the SDP would have to broaden its appeal to attract working class voters like herself. In other words, had we invented the message and used her as a mouthpiece, the ‘hoax’ claim might have stuck. But, at a time when it was well-known that the then Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, had help from teams of professional speech writers, television producers and conference impresarios, it was difficult to claim there was anything particularly wrong about a complete beginner being given some help to get her message across as effectively as possible.

Some examples from the speaking career of Paddy Ashdown further underline the dubiousness of rating ‘gifted’ speakers as being somehow more genuine than ‘coached’ speakers. In the early stages of collecting videotaped data for the original research project, one of the speakers at the 1981 Liberal Assembly attracted our attention as a speaker with potential. Speaking at high speed, and dressed in a blue sweater and open-necked shirt, the then prospective parliamentary candidate for Yeovil was getting a lot of positive responses from the audience. One line that stood out was a three-part list, incorporating imagery and repetition: “The armed truce that passes as peace for us has been bought in other people’s blood, on other people’s territory and at a price of other people’s misery.” By the time the applause got under way, he was already into his next sentence, at which point he broke off and looked up from his text, visibly surprised by the power of his own rhetoric. At that early point in his political career, then, it could be said that he was showing signs of being ‘a natural.’

Whether or not he was one of the naturally gifted few, this is not how he rated himself. Otherwise, he would presumably not have turned to people like me for advice on speech-writing and delivery. What is clear, however, is that audiences responded no less favourably to the ‘schooled’ Ashdown than they had done to the ‘unschooled’ Ashdown. But the question in the present context is: should they have done? Should lines composed by someone else with a brief to translate his ideas into rhetorically more striking forms have been treated as suspect or devious? For example, the basic message he wanted to convey to the 1988 merger debate was that “we need to stop squabbling between ourselves and frittering away the achievements of the SDP-Liberal Alliance”. It was actually delivered as a contrast, incorporating biblical imagery and a degree of repetition: “We need to stop sounding like the Tower of Babel, and start building a tower of strength.” On winning the leadership of the Social and Liberal Democrats later in 1988, his basic concern was that, “after nine months of messing about since the 1987 election, there’s a danger that the public is forgetting we exist, let alone might be worth taking seriously.” This became a simple contrast with repetition of the key word: “We have to show people that we’re not just back in business, but really mean business.”

As with the case of Ann Brennan, if lines such as these were conveying messages that had been imposed on, rather than derived from, the speaker, there would be a case for saying that there is something devious or unscrupulous about deploying rhetoric in this way. But the case begins to fall away if the lines express the ideas of the speaker, and if he or she is comfortable with delivering the revised form of words.

Nearly two decades of research and training in the field of public speaking and presentation skills have taught me that some people do indeed have a ‘natural’ facility to use rhetoric, imagery, anecdotes and all the other ingredients of effective speech-making, but that they are in a minority. The vast majority of us dread public speaking, and there must be many who are deeply frustrated by the fact that they feel passionately about something, yet lack the technical skills to communicate it effectively. So when Ken Livingstone said that “public speakers are born, not made” and that “people should not worry about technique, but just be themselves”, he was, in effect, saying: “Leave persuasive power in the hands of those of us who happen to have had the good fortune to speak this way naturally.” A more democratic and less elitist view is that it is much fairer to liberate the techniques that the gifted use naturally and without realising it, and to make them available for anyone to use.

To dismiss or denigrate rhetoric is to ignore the fact that its structures and devices provide an infinitely adaptable tool-kit for packaging messages in a simple and striking way that audiences can grasp immediately. Without it, persuasive discourse and debate become much more difficult, probably to the point of impossibility. To complain about it is to complain about the way the spoken language works, and about language forms that have been with us since before the invention of writing. And the claim that people who have learnt to use it are somehow less genuine than the naturally gifted is like complaining that anyone without perfect pitch, or an ability to play a musical instrument by ear, is not a genuine musician.

However suspicious some critics may be of all things rhetorical, the fact remains that there is still a demand, and perhaps even a need, for impressive displays of rhetoric. At least three examples stand out from the recent past: Ronald Reagan’s speech after the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986, Tony Blair’s comments immediately after the death of the Princess of Wales, and the address by her brother, Lord Spencer, at her funeral in Westminster Abbey. Their impact was not diminished either by their use of rhetoric, or by questions about whose hand lay behind some of the lines. What mattered was that they caught the national moods in response to tragic news. Something else they had in common is that they were short enough to be shown in their entirety on television. In other words, they worked with mass audiences via a medium that increasingly operates on the assumption that, except in special cases like these, speeches make bad television.

Between 1968 and 1988, the length of excerpts from speeches shown on American television news programmes during presidential campaigns fell from an average of 42 seconds in 1968 to 9 seconds in 1988. In the UK, during the 1979 general election campaign, BBC 2 showed a nightly half-hour programme of excerpts from the day’s speeches. It was not continued during the 1983 election, and, by 1997, viewers were much more likely to see shots of politicians speaking in the background, with the all important foreground being dominated by a TV reporter summarising what the speaker was saying.

As broadcast excerpts from speeches become shorter and rarer, our chances of hearing and evaluating what politicians are saying directly from their own mouths are increasingly restricted to long set-piece interviews, phone-ins and short responses in the course of endless walkabouts and photo opportunities. This reflects a view, apparently shared by broadcasters and politicians alike, that, in the television age, a more informal conversational approach to communication is more effective than traditional oratory. It was also a view endorsed, mainly on the basis of observations of Ronald Reagan, in the concluding chapter of Our Masters’ Voices, and which may now be worth revisiting.

The reason for supposing that a low-key, conversational style of delivery is likely to play well with television audiences is much the same as the reason why a low-key style of acting works better on film and television than on a live stage. In a theatre or conference hall, the speaker is communicating across a very long distance, compared with speakers in a conversation, who are typically no more than a metre or two apart. Without a degree of exaggeration of intonation, emphasis, pausing, movement and gesture, a speaker is likely to come across as static, flat and monotonous. When it comes to transferring this to the television screen, the problem is that the zoom lens produces a close-up image of verbal and non-verbal behaviours that are designed for long distance communication, and transmits it into millions of living rooms. In other words, a way of speaking appropriate for a large audience in a formal setting is seen and heard by small audiences of two or three viewers in a very informal setting. To people sitting a conversational distance away from their screens, often engaging in conversation with others in the room, traditional theatrical styles of delivery, when seen and heard at close quarters, are likely to come across as excessively manic or over-dramatic. Indeed, this may well have been one of the reasons why former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, one of the finest live orators of his generation, never managed to achieve high personal ratings with the mass audience beyond the conference hall.

However, if Ronald Reagan, and more recently Bill Clinton, successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of a more folksy style of delivery, the point which does not yet seem to have been taken on board by some recent and contemporary British politicians is that the case for conversational style has more to do with adapting the delivery, than with adapting the way the words and scripts are put together. Reagan, in particular, demonstrated repeatedly that powerfully constructed rhetorical scripts can be effectively delivered in a chatty, low-key conversational tone of voice. He certainly did not forego the use of tightly structured scripts in favour of the much more discursive, less structured, often ungrammatical ramblings that we associate with the language of conversation. In fact, had he been judged on his comparatively rare unscripted performances, it is highly unlikely that he would have achieved recognition as the ‘great communicator.’

Meanwhile, there are some British politicians (and/or their advisors), who seem to have concluded that the words, as well as the delivery of them, should be chatty and conversational. Two such examples from the tradition represented in this volume are David Owen, former leader of the SDP, and Charles Kennedy, current leader of the Liberal Democrats, both of whom have made conversationally delivered speeches from conversationally constructed scripts. The problem with such an approach is that it is likely to have negative consequences both for the audience listening to the speech in the hall and for the way the media covers the event. Low levels of rhetorical content will generate low rates of applause from the audience in the conference hall. The media is then likely to interpret and report on this as a less than enthusiastic response from the party faithful. At the same time, the shortage of rhetorically structured quotable quotes makes it more difficult for reporters and editors to select soundbites for playing or reporting on news programmes. In the absence of these, there is then a danger that the media coverage will devote more time to discussing the style of delivery, and whether or not it worked, than to reporting on the actual political messages the speaker was hoping to get across.

If politicians are still learning how to make speeches that can inspire both the audience immediately in front of them, and the one watching television in their homes, it is perhaps time that the broadcasters themselves gave some thought to the impact on audiences of their preference for showing countless extended interviews with politicians during elections, rather than more or longer excerpts from speeches. These quasi-conversational confrontations between top politicians and top interviewers may be easy to organise and convenient to schedule. However, whether they make better television than excerpts from speeches is debatable. Their quasi-conversational nature limits the time available to develop any particular point to seconds rather than minutes. Like the conversationally worded speech, memorable lines or displays of passion or enthusiasm from the speaker are few and far between.

Once in this conversational cockpit, many politicians proceed, with breathtaking regularity, to flout one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely that questions should be followed by answers. Treating questions as prompts to say anything they like, or opportunities for yet another evasion of an issue, have become part of the routine repertoire that is inflicted daily on viewers and listeners. If politicians seriously believe that viewers and listeners lack the intelligence to see at a glance when they are being evasive, they can hardly complain when people conclude that they are patronising or arrogant. If they think that audiences will be impressed or inspired by the tortuous circumlocutions in which so much of their evasiveness is expressed, they should not be surprised when people conclude that they are out of touch with the way real people tick. We hear that politicians are becoming worried about their low esteem in the eyes of the public, and about growing voter apathy. Perhaps they should consider whether one factor might be that the way they speak in interviews is at best bland or boring, and at worst evasive and downright irritating.

Yet the broadcasting establishment still seems to be committed to the view that interviews, however sterile and tedious they may be, make better television than excerpts from well crafted passionately delivered speeches. If they ever get round to reassessing their policy, one piece of evidence to which their attention should be drawn is the fact that editors and publishers of books do not seem to find televised interviews interesting, inspiring or provocative enough to merit the publication of collections of Great Interviews, whether Liberal or of any other kind. Rhetoric and oratory may well have had a bad press in recent years, but readers of this book will surely be thankful that it consists of speeches rather than transcripts of interviews. They can therefore look forward to reading carefully developed arguments in language robust enough to have survived the immediate moment of delivery to become a form of historical literature. Without the application of both reason and rhetoric, these speeches would not only never have been noticed in the first place, but would have been forgotten and more or less unreadable.

Gordon Brown's gaffe shows what Gail Jefferson meant by a 'sound formed error'

Yesterday, I was phoned by a BBC radio station and asked to comment on Gordon Brown’s gaffe about how he had ‘saved the world’ when he’d apparently meant to say ‘saved the banks’. As this was the first I’d heard of it, they allowed me an hour or two to have a look at it before phoning back to do the interview.

News of this high profile slip of the tongue reminded me of a fascinating paper on the ‘Poetics of Ordinary Talk’* that I’d heard Gail Jefferson, one of the founders of conversation analysis, give at a conference in Boston in 1977. It included a discussion of what she called ‘sound formed errors’, by which she meant cases where a speaker’s choice of a ‘wrong’ word seems to be triggered by sounds in the words that came just before it.

In one of her examples, the first syllable of ‘Wednesday’ was abandoned and corrected to ‘Thursday’:

“I will be up that way Wed – uh –Thursday.”

Gail’s suggestion was that, as the mistaken initial selection of ‘Wednesday’ came just after there had been two ‘wuh’ noises in quick succession, it could have been the repetitive sounds that triggered the error.

This made me wonder whether there had been any ‘wuh’ sounds in what Gordon Brown had said just before saying “world” when he’d meant to say “banks”. So it was with considerable surprise and delight that I spotted no less than four of them in the sentence leading up to the error that's caused him so much embarrassment.

GORDON BROWN: “The first point of recapitalisation was to save banks that would otherwise have collapsed and we’ve not only saved the world – erh - saved the banks.”

Unfortunately you won’t be able to watch this on most of the clips on news websites and YouTube, as they’ve been edited to start at the point where he says “.. and we’ve not only…” - but you can see the full sentence below (with Italian sub-titles).

The fact that there were so many 'wuh' sounds before the error was a real gift to me because I could now say something in the interview that might be a bit different from the various speculations coming from other commentators since the gaffe had hit the airwaves.

I also said something else in the interview, but I can’t remember whether it was in the original Jefferson paper, had came up in the discussion after it or was something I’d noticed or been told about some time since 1977. This is the idea that ‘sound formed errors’ and ‘triggered puns’ (also featured in her paper) are more likely to happen when a speaker is tired, because that’s when the brain is most likely to take handy short cuts like selecting words that sound like others nearby.

This led me to suggest that Gordon Brown’s error might have happened because he was more tired than usual, a comment I now regret – as it enabled the interviewer to get away from what I thought was quite an interesting subject and go down the track they’d presumably been hoping their ‘expert’ would take them along in the first place.

“So can we conclude from this” asked the interviewer, “that the stresses of the job are getting too much for him?”

Er, no. I just said that he might have been tired.

But I do think it qualifies as a prime example of exactly what Gail meant by ‘sound formed errors’ – and how they can sometimes get you into trouble you could have well done without.

(* Gail Jefferson, ‘On the Poetics of Ordinary Talk’, Text and Performance Quarterly, 1996, 16(1), 1-61 - you can download the paper by clicking here or on the title above).).

A welcome visit from Peking

I'm pleased to report that there's been a visit to the Blog from Peking - yes "Peking, Beijing, China" is how the local Chinese service provider refers to the place. This suggests that the Chinese themselves are apparently as relaxed about calling the city "Peking" as the Indians are about calling Mumbai "Bombay" (see my entry What's in a place name on 1st December).

Wikipedia casts some light on why this might be so. Not only was 'Peking" chosen as suitable by those who translated Chinese writing into Roman letters, but it's also closer to the way it's pronounced in some Chinese dialects, as can be seen from the following (anoraks can inspect the fuller story by clicking here):

"Peking is the name of the city according to Chinese Postal Map Romanization ... The term Peking originated with French missionaries four hundred years ago and corresponds to an older pronunciation predating a subsequent sound change in Mandarin from [kʲ] to [tɕ][15] ([tɕ] is represented in pinyin as j, as in Beijing). It is still used in many languages ... The pronunciation "Peking" is also closer to the Fujianese dialect of Amoy or Min Nan spoken in the city of Xiamen, a port where European traders first landed in the 16th century, while "Beijing" more closely approximates the Mandarin dialect's pronunciation."

However, I'm still none the wiser about when and why the British media started to change the way they spell and pronounce varous place names and would be interested to hear if anyone could clarify the issue for me.

I can see why, following independence and/or revolution, it might be appropriate to recognise a new status quo by calling "Salisbury, Rhodesia" "Harare, Zimbabwe", or "Saigon, South Vietnam" "Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam". But even here there's no consistency, as our media still refuses to call "Burma" "Myanmar", as decreed by that country's rulers, which is presumably an overtly political decision by media that purport to be 'politically correct', but doesn't happen to approve of this particular junta.

On the other more trivial issue mentioned in my earlier blog entry, Wikipedia mentions a breed of dogs called "Pekingese", "Peke" or "Pekinese", as well as a few more obscure names. So at least we don't have to worry about trying to get our English tongues around words like "Beijingeses" or "Beijes".

The Office Christmas Party Speech: roads to failure and success

One of the advantages of being self-employed is that I’m normally spared from the annual rigours of the office Christmas party. Sometimes, however, you simply can’t escape from being dragged along to one as the spouse or partner of an employee.

Once when this happened to me, the boss came up to me during the pre-dinner aperitifs, apparently to ask my advice. “Ahh -” he said, “you’re supposed to be an expert on public speaking, so how about a few tips for my speech.”

At such short notice, all I could suggest was that he should make no more than three points, and stick to drinking water throughout the meal - making the obvious point that alcohol interferes with the very part of the brain that produces speech.

I also pointed out that, by the time he got up to speak, everyone else would be at different stages of intoxicaion and he would have the advantage of being one of the few people in the room with a clear head. “Then, once you’ve made your speech,” I said generously, “feel free to hit the bottle as much as you like.”

He made it pretty clear that he didn’t think much of my advice by promptly ordering another gin and tonic and telling me that his wife had already agreed to drive him home. During the dinner, he drank one glass of wine after another, glancing at me occasionally with what looked suspiciously like a defiant grin.

Then, when the time came for him to speak, this normally articulate and entertaining communicator slurred his words, and rambled on for what everyone agreed afterwards was far too long. It was difficult to tell one point from another, let alone how many he was making - other than that there were far more than the three I’d recommended.

The safest way of avoiding such embarrassment is obviously not to make a speech at all. But people at office parties do expect someone to say something, even if it’s only to wish them a happy Christmas. And there are always going to be people there to be welcomed and/or thanked.

So, if you’re the one on whom this burden falls, here are seven steps to see you safely through it.

Seven Steps to Success

1. Plan what you want to say in advance, jot some headings down on cards and don’t be afraid to be seen using them on the day. Apart from giving you the added confidence that comes from knowing that you won’t forget what to say, it will make you look conscientious and professional for having gone to the trouble of preparing a few words speciallyfor the occasion.

2. Drink as little alcohol as possible, and preferably none at all, before making the speech.

3. Welcome and thank everyone for coming, with a special welcome to spouses, partners and any other guests from outside the office.

4. Thank everyone involved in organising the event, preparing food, booking venue, etc.

5. If appropriate, mention any significant or amusing things that have happened since the last Christmas party, and perhaps speculate on what lies ahead in the coming year.

6. Wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy new year -- and make sure you sound as though you mean it.

7. Be brief: five minutes is probably the absolute limit. After all, hardly anyone ever complains about a speech being too short, and the biggest compliment you can be paid is when people say they wish you’d gone on longer

The Queen's Speech, 2008

If you read my observations on The Queen's Speech:an exception that proves the ruler (12th November blog entry) and would be interested in seeing her latest performance, click on the title above to watch her delivering this year's speech, or here if you'd like to read the full script.

Rhetoric, oratory and Barack Obama's 'The Speech' (2004)

About eighteen months ago, David Bernstein of the Chicago Magazine phoned me. They were, he said, preparing a major article on the keynote speech given at the 2004 Democratic Convention by Barack Obama. As an Englishman with only an occasional interest In American politics, my immediate reaction was “Who?”

After telling me a bit about Obama and why there was so much interest in him, especially in Chicago, David explained that he was calling to ask if I could offer any 'expert' comments on the senator’s rhetoric and style of oratory.

Within five minutes of putting the phone down, I’d downloaded a video and a full transcript of the speech from the internet – a spectacular advance on 25 years ago when I first started recording political speeches, and had to wait with finger on the ‘record’ button of the Betamax (!) before having to spend hours transcribing the text myself.

By the time I'd finished watching it, my immediate reaction was "Wow!", not least because it’s so rare to come across such an outstanding performance from a ‘new’ speaker whom you’ve never heard of before. Yet here were echoes of Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan all rolled into one.

And Ronald Reagan was probably the last American example of someone being launched from political obscurity on to the national stage by a single speech when he spoke in support of Barry Goldwater at the Republican Convention in 1964.

After that first viewing of Obama in action, my notes on things worth looking at in more detail read as follows:

Language
Frequent and effective use of:
• Rhetorical techniques
• 3 part lists
• Metaphors
• Repetition
• Especially good on anecdotes
• Pressing right buttons for Democrats and patriots

Delivery
• Good pace
• Good voice
• Not too theatrical for the mass television audience (c.f. Reagan)
• Good at reading but sounding as though he’s not reading (c.f. Reagan)
• Good at 'surfing' applause (c.f. MLK)

The piece in the Chicago Magazine provides a fascinating insight into the background of how the speech was written, who was involved and what was going on at the convention, and it’s the most interesting and informative article I’ve read on the subject.

Published in June 2007, the summary at the top of David Bernstein's article says:

When Barack Obama launched into his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he was still an obscure state senator from Illinois. By the time he finished 17 minutes later, he had captured the nation's attention and opened the way for a run at the presidency. A behind-the-scenes look at the politicking, plotting, and preparation that went into Obama's breakthrough moment.

If you haven’t read it, you can do so by clicking here or on the title above.

"There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there's an audience"

The other day, my wife went to a meeting that had been advertised as a social event, but which turned out to include a number of unscheduled PowerPoint presentations. On the way out, she said to the friend she was with that she would not have bothered to go if she’d known that they were going to have to listen to three speakers reading from PowerPoint slides.

A stranger overheard her complaint, turned round and sounded as though he was looking for an argument. “There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint” he asserted, but then added the profound words “until, that is, there’s an audience.”

And he does have a point. I’ve now asked hundreds of people how many PowerPoint presentations they’ve been to that were inspiring or memorable. It’s a question that typically produces a deathly silence. Most people struggle to think of a single instance, and the biggest number anyone has ever managed to come up with is two.

Further investigation into these rare exceptions usually reveals two important facts: (1) the slides were mostly pictures illustrating what the speaker was talking about, and (2) there weren’t very many of them.

However, the idea that slides are essential to the modern business presentation has become so entrenched that you sometimes have to be careful about questioning the dominant orthodoxy – and not just when you happen to be on your way out of a presentation. When I wrote about the (many) problems they create for audiences in Lend Me Your Ears, my publisher’s lawyers tried to get me to tone down some of my comments in case Microsoft, purveyors of PowerPoint to the world, decided to sue.

I refused to change a word, on the grounds that I wasn’t saying anything that couldn’t be confirmed by even the most casual research into audience reactions to slide-dependent presentations – and you have a defence in English law, if you can show that what you are saying is true,

In any case, it’s not actually Microsoft’s fault that slide dependency has become the industry-standard model of presentation. There may be some fairly dubious assumptions built into PowerPoint (e.g. the first set of templates offered to users positively encourages them to produce lists of written words), but the global epidemic of presentational paralysis that we’re up against was actually spawned much earlier by the misuse of overhead projectors – aided and abetted by a technological ‘advance’ in photo-copying technology.

I say the ‘misuse of overhead projectors’ because they were originally invented to solve a problem with writing and drawing on black boards and white boards (which has gone down well with audiences for generations) in large auditoriums, where people can’t always see what’s being written on the board.

That’s why a key component of the first overhead projectors was a winding roll of acetate that enabled speakers to write and draw on it as they went along, and project their handiwork on to a big screen that everyone could see.

All was well for a while, but the rot set in during the 1970s (before anyone had thought of PCs, let alone PowerPoint) thanks to the invention of photo-copying machines that could print just as well on acetate as earlier models had done on paper.

The main casualty was the ancient (and very effective) art of ‘chalk and talk’, through which many of us learnt much of what we learnt at school and university. It was replaced by the use of ready-made slides, consisting mainly of lists of written headings and sentences that were actually the speaker’s notes.

So widespread and comprehensive did this practice become that overhead projector manufacturers were soon able to cut their production costs by discontinuing the winding rolls of acetate, and it wasn’t long before machines that would only accept ready-made slides became the norm.

The advent of computer programs like PowerPoint may have made slides easier for audiences to read than in the days of acetates, but how many of us, when we’re sitting in an audience, really want to read and listen at the same time? And how many of us, when speaking to an audience really want to supply our listeners with a continuing source of distraction?

As the stranger said to my wife the other day, “There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there's an audience.”

(A fuller discussion of the pluses – and yes, there are some pluses – and minuses of programs like PowerPoint can be found in my books, Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations, London: Vermilion, 2004 & New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy, London: Vermilion, 2008).

What's in a place name?

I should warn you that there's a hidden counter on this blog that tells me, among other things, which country each visitor comes from.

Recently, quite a few have come from India, from where some, according to data from India, come from a place called 'Bombay', not from 'Mumbai', as the BBC and other news programmes have been calling it all this week. 

I find this very reassuring, as the British media has taken to telling us that there is something politically incorrect about calling cities by the names we've always known them by -- or, to be more precise, cities that are a long way away from Europe.

So this year's Olympic Games were not held in Peking but in 'Beijing' (though we have yet to be notified as to whether we're now supposed to call Pekingese dogs 'Beijingese' dogs).

But there are plenty of cities in Europe that are called something different by people from other countries in Europe. I've never heard any Brits complaining about the fact that the French say 'Londres' when we call it London.

And do Austrians complain when we call their capital city 'Vienna' rather than Wien, do the Czechs complain when we call theirs 'Prague' rather than Praha or the Italians when we talk about 'Rome', 'Florence', and 'Venice' instead of Roma, Firenze and Venezia?

We also say 'Moscow' when the Russians say 'Moscva', 'Gothenberg' when the Swedes say 'Göteborg' (and pronounce it 'Yerterborrier') and 'Copenhagen' when the Danes say 'Kobenhavn'.

None of this seems to cause anyone any problem at all, and even the media have so far made no attempts to correct the way we all refer to these cities. 

So, if the Indians themselves are quite relaxed about referring to Mumbai as 'Bombay', why on earth do our broadcasters and newspapers keep telling us to call it 'Mumbai'?

Content-free sermon by Alan Bennett

A couple of years after the release of The Best of Sellers (see previous entry) came the revue Beyond the Fringe, which launched the careers of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller.

One of the many high spots in the show was Alan Bennett's sermon preached from the text "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man" - a nice contrast, followed up by some fine examples of repetition, rhetorical questions, similes and anecdotes - but more or less completely devoid of content.

When I was at school, a group of us persuaded the chaplain, or padré, as Bennett would have called him, to listen to it. Perhaps predictably, he didn't seem to think it was at all funny and couldn't see any connection between it and the sermons he and visiting preachers were inflicting on us at the compulsory services we had to attend every Sunday.

See if it reminds you of any sermons you've heard - and, if you want to see the full text and other gems from the show, click the title above to access details of the book on Amazon.

50 years since Peter Sellers recorded his memorable political speech

After mentioning a content-free political speech by the late Peter Sellers in an earlier blog entry, I’ve just discovered that you can listen to the original track from The Best of Sellers (1958) on YouTube - which you can access by clicking HERE or on the title above.

Rhetorical questions and audience involvement

It may seem fairly obvious that, if you say something that gets an audience wondering or anticipating what’s coming next, you’re likely to increase their attentiveness and involvement. But it’s not always quite so easy to find an example that provides a clear demonstration of how posing a puzzle or a rhetorical question actually works.

Sometimes, television editors come to the rescue, as happened in the following clip from the speech by Tory leader David Cameron at his party conference in 2006.

As he pauses at the end of his rhetorical question, the camera cuts away to the audience, where you can see a woman on the left of the screen nodding in agreement with his anticipated answer. And you don’t have to be particularly good at lip reading to see that she is also saying “yes” – about two seconds before Cameron’s own “yes” triggers the more generalised display of agreement (applause).

As a footnote, it’s also worth observing that there are people like this woman, who respond more visibly than others, in most audiences – and very encouraging they are too, whatever type of speech or presentation you happen to be making. They are one of the reasons why maintaining eye contact is so important for speakers, because, once you’ve identified who these people are, you have a very useful and continuing barometer of how well (or badly) you’re doing.


Talking the economy up

As newspaper sketch-writers have noticed, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is not the world's most inspiring speaker.

Here's an example from the Daily Telegraph's Andrew Grimson in February of this year:

"Mr Darling used the tactic which has stood him in such good stead whenever he has faced a difficulty in his ministerial career. He tried to bore us into submission."

And here's The Guardian's Simon Hoggart in similar vein after Mr Darling's budget speech in March:

"Is Alistair Darling the most boring chancellor ever? Put it this way: he sent Geoffrey Howe to sleep ... The former chancellor, now Lord Howe, was the proud holder of that ancient title, the ultimate mega-snooze ... a man whose first throat-clearing could empty a packed room.

"Yesterday he took his place in the gallery across from the whipper-snapper bidding to depose him. Mr Darling had barely started chuntering in his soft Scottish monotone about 'stability', 'challenges of the future', 'flexibility and resilience', when Lord Howe's head slumped dramatically forward. For almost the entire speech he slept in peace."


On the evidence of Mr Darling's pre-budget report to the House of Commons earlier this afternoon, his style of speaking may be just the thing to reassure and inspire confidence the markets. By the time he'd finished, the FTSE 100 index of leading shares recorded its biggest ever percentage day's rise of 9.84%.

What the Chancellor said may, of course, have been as important as how he said it. Either way, Gordon Brown will no doubt be delighted and hoping that it will also prompt the biggest ever percentage rise in his opinion poll ratings.

Talking the economy down

Television news programmes these days give the impression that camera crews are being sent around the country with a brief to film anything they can, so long as it shows the economy in as negative a light as possible.

The most misleading and dishonest example I’ve seen so far was film of a shopping centre on the BBC Ten o’clock News. “There are plenty of shoppers here ..” the commentary told us authoritatively and with a hint of optimism that only lasted as far as the but clause in the same sentence “but not many of them are carrying carrier bags.”

The question is: did the reporter have any evidence about how many shoppers were there and what percentage of them were carrying new purchases around with them in carrier bags at the same time on the same day in the same shopping centre a year ago, when there weren’t any worries about the economy?

If so, he didn't bother to mention it – but why let matters of fact and truth get in the way of making up a story to meet the mood of the times (not to mention the demands of your editor)?

Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?

The fact that the three-part list is such a commonly used rhetorical technique often raises the question of what it is about the number 3 that’s so special. It’s sometimes suggested that there must be something magical or mystical about it. But there is, I think, a much more rational explanation.

Its most likely source is the commonest form of human communication, namely everyday conversation. In the research literature of conversation analysis, there is the idea of there being an implicit or tacit ‘economy rule’ that works along the lines of “say things as briefly as you can unless you have a good reason for doing otherwise”.

So when we complain that someone is ‘long-winded’, ‘likes the sound of his own voice’ or ‘is always hogging the conversation’, we are in effect noticing and complaining that he’s breaking the economy rule. And the fact that there are actually words in the English language, and probably in other languages too, for referring to such rule-breaking behaviour (e.g. ‘verbose’ and ‘garrulous’) means that it’s something that happens (and is complained about) quite often.

We also know something about how three-part lists work in everyday conversation, thanks to a fascinating paper by one of the pioneers of conversation analysis, the late Gail Jefferson. Among other things, her detailed empirical studies showed how frequently they occur in conversation and how they are often treated by others as indicating that the person who produced the three-part list has finished and that someone else can now start speaking without fear of being accused of interrupting.*

As for why so many lists come in threes, the most likely explanation is that 3 conforms to the economy rule, because the arrival of a third item is the first point at which a possible connection implied by the first two is confirmed, and has the effect of turning a ‘possible list’ into a ‘definite' or 'complete enough' list’ of similar things.

For example, if my first two words are ‘Rose’ and ‘Lily’, I could be starting a list of flowers' names or a list of women’s names – but you won’t know for sure which of these it is until I add a third one.

If my third word is ‘Joanna', it becomes a list women’s names; if it’s ‘foxglove’, it becomes a list of flowers' names (and, if it had been ‘Botham’, cricket fans will hear it as a list of cricketer’s names - Lily and Lillie, the famous Australian fast bowler, may be spelt differently, but they sound exactly the same).

The arrival of the third item in a list is therefore the first and earliest point at which a possible list can become an unequivocal and unambiguous list of similar items, and you don’t need a fourth, fifth or sixth word to establish this. So, if you’re following the economy rule, you wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) add any more after the third one.

This is not to say, of course, that we can never use longer lists in conversation without risking complaints. Sometimes we want to convey a sense of ‘muchness’, as when we want to emphasise that something was much better or much worse than normal. “He went on and on and on” may be a fairly common way of complaining that someone was being ‘long-winded’, but “He went on and on and on and on and on” is to make a more serious criticism by depicting the violation of the economy rule as having been far more extreme than usual.

*Gail Jefferson (1990) 'List-construction as a task and a resource'. In: George Psathas, eds. Interaction Competence. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America: 63-92,

Tom Peters: High on rhetoric but low on content?

Although I’ve never seen Tom Peters in action, I’ve heard from people who have that he’s a pretty impressive performer. I also know something about the speaking techniques of ‘management gurus’ from an interesting book called Management Speak: The Live Oratory of Management Gurus (London, Routledge, 2005) by David Greatbatch and Timothy Clark.

But until I came across this short video on YouTube (below), I hadn’t realised just how much and how frequently Mr Peters uses the main rhetorical techniques of contrast, three-part list and puzzle-solution (a device that gets the audience wondering what the solution is going to be, or poses a question before revealing the answer).

How much can you use these techniques?
As you'll see from the transcript below the video, he packages almost everything he says by using one or other of these devices.

It also bears on two intriguing questions that I’m often asked, but to which I have no definitive answer. One is how much of a speech or presentation can be constructed using these devices? On the evidence of this clip, taken on its own, it looks as though the answer is ‘pretty well all of it’.

Content-free presentations?
The second question is whether it's possible, by over-using them, to could produce an 'effective presentation' that's completely lacking in content. One of the best examples I ever heard of anupme coming close to this was the late Peter Sellers, who delivered a parody of a political speech that ended with the immortal line “.. and in conclusion, let me say just this.”

Another was Alan Bennett's sermon on the text "My brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man from Beyond the Fringe.

I’ve now watched this clip several times and have to admit that, however impressive his mastery of rhetoric and citation of rhetorically constructed quotations might be, I’m still not sure what exactly it is that Mr Peters is trying to tell us. Maybe one of the other 54,252 who have so far seen it on YouTube could enlighten me.



TRANSCRIPT:
Starts by posing a puzzle that will turn out to be the first one in a sequence of three puzzle-solution fomats in a row:

[P]→ The number one problem with enterprises small or large is: [PAUSE]

The Solution to the puzzle then comes in the form of a somple contrast:

[A]→ too much talk.
[B]→ too little do.


Second (double) puzzle (‘what could this ‘remarkable institution’ and ‘ultimate oxymoron be’?):

[P]→ Now as you know we have this one remarkable institution in the United States, the ultimate oxymoron.

And the solutions (the ‘oxymoron’ is a profitable airline and the institution is South West):

[S]→ A profitable airline. It’s called South West.

Third puzzle (‘what are these words of hers going to be?’):

[P]→ Herb Kelleher the chief executive officer of South West and I agree on the essence of a strategic plan and I love these words of hers:

The solution quotes a puzzle-solution from her (‘what could the strategic plan be?’), solution - ‘doing things’:

[S]→ [P]→ “We have a ‘strategic’ plan.
[S]→ It’s called doing things.”


Then a contrast to underline how important he thinks it is:

[A]→ And literally, as I said, it was number one on my reading list twenty two years ago.
[B]→ It’s number one on my list today.


Followed by an alliterative three-part list (though it’s not very clear how it relates to what went before and what’s coming next):

[1]→ Fail.
[2]→ Forward.
[3]→ Fast.


Then another three part list:

[1]→ No screw-ups
[2]→ No learning.
[3]→ It’s as simple as that.


And two contrasts:

[A]→ No fast screw-ups
[B]→ No fast learning

[A]→ No big screw-ups
[B]→ No big learning


Three sentences set up a puzzle (what could the one favorite slide be out of so many be?):

[P]→ [1]→ Now in my major slide deck at my website there are some twelve hundred slides.
[2]→ By definition one has got to be my favorite.
[3]→ And this next one is my favorite of the twelve hundred, even though I’m using it relatively early in the presentation.

And, to keep the suspense up a bit longer, he extends the puzzle before revealing the solution:

[P]→ Comes from a Sydney Australia exec., and an extremely successful one at that, who said that he owed most of his business success to a simple six word philosophy:

The solution is a contrast, in which each of the three words in the first part contrasts with each of the three words in the second part (reward/punish – excellent/mediocre – failures/successes):

[S]→ [A]→ Reward excellent failures.
[B]→ Punish mediocre successes.


Hardly surprising that he thinks that a contrast with each of the three consecutive words in the first part are followed by three directly opposite words in the second part is a ‘great quote’. And to make the point, his assessment is the first part of another contrast, the second part of which is the first part of yet another contrast:

[A]→ Now I think this is a great quote

[B]→ [A]→ But my goal relative to you is not to have you say “nice quote, Tom”,

[B]→ but to take it literally seriously.

Bobby Kennedy nearly got it right about Obama

The other day, I came across a video on YouTube (see below for the main point, or click on the title for a fuller version of the TV program) claiming that Bobby Kennedy had made an accurate prophesy about how long it would be before an African American became President.

The presenter was, perhaps, a little over eager in trying to make it sound as though Kennedy was right on the button when he said that “a Negro could be President in 40 years”, as the date on the Washington Post story is actually 1961, which was 48 years before 20th January 2009 when Mr Obama actually becomes President.

Extraordinary though Kennedy’s words must have sounded at the time, he has to be admired both for his optimism in a period of such turbulence in the struggle for civil rights and for the near-accuracy of his prediction.

Younger readers should not, by the way, read anything sinister into Kennedy's use of the word ‘Negro’, because it was also used during the same era and without any qualms by Martin Luther King Jr. and more or less everyone else.

‘African American’ may be the ‘politically correct’ description at the moment, but it is only the latest in a series of attempts to eliminate the word ‘Negro’ from everyday usage in the American version of the English language, earlier attempts at which include ‘black’ and ‘persons of colour’.

‘Reliable sources' on where Obama’s 'Yes we can' came from?

On 8th November, the following appeared in the Guardian by Allegra Stratton, who had phoned me the previous day:

Strangest of all, there is a British political scientist who claims he has proof that the actual inspiration for the slogan is Bob the Builder (theme tune: "Can We Fix It?" Answer: "Yes We Can"). Max Atkinson, expert on political rhetoric and author of Lend Me Your Ears, said: "What's so mad about that? I have it on the authority of two very reliable sources."

Er, no. What I actually said when Ms Stratton phoned me about Yes we can and Bob the Builder was that I’d come across two other people who'd made the same connection and that, if true, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine how Mr Obama might have come across it or why he might have had a good reason to use it.

But word must have got around the Guardian offices, because my two allegedly "reliable sources" reappeard on 12th November in another article in the same paper by Alice Wignall:

At least one expert in political rhetoric is convinced: at the weekend, British speechwriter Max Atkinson said that "two very reliable sources" had confirmed that Bob inspired the slogan.

And at least one journalist working for the Sunday Sun in Newcastle must be a Guardian reader, as the same story was recycled again in today's edition:

Max Atkinson, former speech writer for Paddy Ashdown, said that “two very reliable sources” had confirmed to him that Bob was the inspiration for the slogan.

So, to put the record straight, I never said that I had either "proof" or "two reliable sources who had "confirmed" the possible link they were so obsessed with.

To the journalists, who turned this molehill of a comment (“two other people who’d made the same connection”) into a bit of a mountain (“two very reliable sources" and/or "proof"), and anyone else who might have read their misleading articles, all I would say is that I'm not particularly interested in where Mr Obama got the line from.

Much more interesting is the way he used it to prompt audience responses in some of his speeches and how both it and the responses are significantly different from the choruses that regularly peppered the speeches of Martin Luther-King.

And, if you want to keep an eye on what others might be writing about you, I'd recommend signing up with Google Alerts - without which none of these rather annoying articles would have come to my attention.

Will there be any ‘rhetorical denial’ from the Obama camp?

Effective speakers don’t always like to see their technical ability being noticed and analysed by others.

I first became aware of this back in 1984, when I published a book on the rhetorical techniques used by politicians to trigger applause in speeches (Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics).

It included a chapter on charisma, part of which used the rhetorical ability of Tony Benn, then at the forefront of the Labour Party’s lurch towards the far left, as an example of how technical skill at oratory can get politicians into prominent positions. Apparently, he didn’t like this at all, and went around telling people that audiences didn’t applaud him because of how he said things but because they agreed so much with what he was saying.

Years later, both of us appeared on the same television programme, for which I had recorded a piece illustrating the main rhetorical techniques with video clips from political speeches. When asked what he thought of this, Mr Benn replied “Well, it’s rubbish” and went on to elaborate as follows:

“I suppose you can analyse great speeches, but it’s a bit like analysing a great painting in terms of the chemical composition of the pigments on the canvas.”

If I’d been given a chance to respond, I’d have said “Yes, and how many other people could have come up with such a powerful simile (with alliteration bringing the image to a close) to make their point?”

At the start of the 1987 general election in Britain, David Owen, who was leader of the SDP (which had broken away from the Labour Party largely because the Bennite tendency had taken it so far to the left), announced that “Reason, not rhetoric will win this campaign.” So here he was using an alliterative contrast, one of the most important of all rhetorical techniques, to tell us that there wouldn’t be any rhetoric from the SDP.

This tendency of good communicators who use rhetoric effectively to deny that they are using it at all goes back at least as far as Shakespeare. Having started his Forum speech in Julius Caesar with a memorable 3-part list with third item longest (Friends, Romans and countrymen) and two powerful contrasts (I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred within their bones), Mark Antony later uses another contrast to inform the audience that he, unlike Brutus, is no good at public speaking (I am no orator as Brutus it, but just a plain simple man), even though this is the most famous speech in one of the most famous plays in English literature.

Now that so many commentators, including me, are waxing lyrical about Mr Obama’s technical mastery of rhetoric, imagery and alliteration, it will be interesting to see if any of his aides start trying to tell us that his success in communicating with mass audiences has had more to do with what he says than how he says it.

The Queen's Speech: an exception that proves the ruler


Here's something at the other end of the scale from previous blogs about Barack Obama's brilliance at oratory.

At the State Opening of Parliament on 3rd December, the Queen, as she does every year, will be reading out her government's legislative plans for the months ahead. Most commentators will be listening to the Speech to find out what Gordon Brown is going to be putting on the statute book in 2009.

How not to speak inspiringly
But you can also listen to it as a model of how not to give an inspiring speech.

Public speaking at its best depends both on the language used to package the key messages and the way it is delivered. Using rhetoric, maintaining eye contact with the audience, pausing regularly and in particular places, stressing certain words and changing intonation are all essential ingredients in the cocktail for conveying passion and inspiring an audience. This is why it is so easy to ‘dehumanise’ the speech of Daleks and other talking robots by the simple device of stripping out any hint of intonational variation and have them speak in a flat, regular and monotonous tone of voice.

When it comes to sounding unenthusiastic and uninterested in inspiring an audience, the Queen’s Speech is an example with few serious competitors. She has no qualms about being seen to be wearing spectacles, which underline the fact that she is reading carefully from the script she holds so obviously in front of her. Nor is she in the least bit inhibited about fixing her eyes on the text rather than the audience. Then, as she enunciates the sentences, her tone is so disinterested as to make it abundantly clear that she is merely reciting words written by someone else and about which she has no personal feelings or opinions whatsoever.

This is, of course, how it has to be in a constitutional monarchy, where the head of state has to be publicly seen and heard as obsessively neutral about the policies of whatever political party happens to have ended up in power. The Queen knows, just as everyone else knows, that showing enthusiasm, or lack of it, about the law-making plans of her government would lead to a serious crisis that would be more than her job is worth. So, even when announcing plans to ban hunting with hounds, she managed not to convey the slightest hint of disappointment or irritation that a favorite pastime of her immediate family was about to be outlawed.

The Queen’s Speech is therefore an interesting exception to the normal rules of effective public speaking, and her whole approach to is a fine example of how to deal with those rare occasions when you have to conceal what you really feel about the things you are talking about. Another master of this was Mr McGregor, an official spokesman for the foreign office during the Falklands war, who made regular appearances of on television reading out progress reports in a flat, deadpan monotone – presumably because a vital part of his job was to give nothing away that might have encouraged or discouraged viewers, whether British or Argentinian, about how things were going in the South Atlantic.

How to prevent a civil war
A much more surprising case was Nelson Mandela’s first speech after being released from prison in 1990. Here was a highly effective communicator, whose words at his trial 27 years earlier are to be found in most books of great speeches, and who had had the best part of three decades to prepare an inspiring and memorable text. But it was not to be. As if modeling his performance on the Queen’s Speech, he buried his head in the script and spoke in a flat measured tone that came across as completely lacking in the kind of passion everyone was expecting from someone who had suffered so much and was held in such high regard by his audience.

Having waited for years for this historic event, anticipating something on a par with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, I remember being disappointed and surprised by what I saw and heard from the balcony of City Hall in Cape Town. It was only later that it dawned on me that this was another case where rousing rhetoric would have been completely counter-productive. The political situation in South Africa was poised on a knife-edge and his release from prison had only happened at all because the apartheid regime was crumbling. It was a moment when anything more inspiring from Mandela might have come across as a call to arms and could easily have prompted an immediate uprising or civil war. But the political understanding with the minority white government was that the African National Congress would keep the lid on things for long enough to enable a settlement to be negotiated. As when the Queen opens parliament, Mr Mandela knew exactly what he was doing, how to do it and that he could not have done otherwise.

Displaying neutrality
So as well as listening to the content of the Queen’s Speech on 3rd December, it is also worth close inspection as an object lesson on how to address an audience if you’re ever in a position of having to convey complete neutrality and detachment. Or, if you’d rather rise to the much more usual challenge of trying to inspire your audience, pay close attention to the way she delivers it -- and then do exactly the opposite.

(Click here or on title to see her in action at the State Opening of Parliament in 2006).

Max Atkinson is author of Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy: Seven Essential Steps to Success ( 2008), and Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations (2004) and was a speechwriter and coach to Paddy Ashdown (website: www.speaking.co.uk).

Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech

The Independent on Sunday asked me to annotate Barack Obama’s victory speech last week, the results of which were published on 9th November. It hasn't been posted on their website, probably because the layout with red circles around lines from the speech linked to the notes caused problems in creating a readable web page.

The newspaper’s introduction to the piece is reprinted below, followed by the full text of the speech with my notes in italics between paragraphs (which are slightly fuller than those in the published version).

THE ART OF ORATORY

Barack Obama’s speech in Chicago following his victory in the US election was a fine example of the rhetorical brilliance that helped him defeat Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

Although he has a team of three speechweriters. Led by the 27-year old wunderkind Jon Favreau, Obama likes to write the bulk of his speeches himself.

It’s commonly thought that effective orators are blessed with a mysterious gift, but all successful speakers use the same simple techniques, and have been doing so at least since they were first taught by the ancient Greeks. What makes outstanding speakers stand out is the frequency with which they use them. At its simplest, the more use made of these techniques, the more impressed audiences will be.

The main rhetorical techniques include: Contrasts: e.g. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him (Mark Antony), three-part lists: e.g. Education, education and education. (Tony Blair) and
combinations of contrasts and lists: e.g by contrasting a third item with the first two: We shall negotiate for it, sacrifice for it but never surrender for it. (Ronald Reagan).

Add to these devices like alliteration, repetition, imagery and anecdotes, and you have the basic building blocks of the language of public speaking.

“It’s not often that a single speech launches a politician from obscurity on to the national stage,” says public-speaking expert Dr Max Atkinson, “Ronald Reagan achieved it when he spoke in support of Barry Goldwater at the Republican Convention in 1964, and Obama achieved it with his keynote address to the Democratic Convention four years ago. Already he ranks highly in the league of all-time greats like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. He is particularly fond of contrasts, three-part lists and various combinations of the two. He also knows how to use imagery both to increase impact and to make his points evoke associations with great communicators of the past like Lincoln, King and Reagan. But one of the most interesting things about all this is that, even when you can see that Mr Obama is using the same simple techniques that every other inspiring speaker uses, the power and impact of his language remain undiminished."


(P.S. A question I'm often asked by people attending my courses and/or who've read one of my books is: "how frequently can you can get away with using rhetorical techniques and imagery?" This speech in an impressive example of how they can be used to get across almost every single point you want to make -- and, in this case, had the effect of moving many who heard it, both live in Chicago and around the world, to tears).

THE SPEECH

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

Kicks off by evoking the American Dream, implicitly linking to Martin Luther King’s 'I have a dream speech – by addressing 3 groups of people out there.

It's the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voices could be that difference.

This is the first of 3 groups of people for whom “it’s the answer”. High turnout depicted by images of voters in queues, etc.

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, (first groups depicted by series of contrasts) Hispanic, Asian, Native American (group of 3), gay, straight, disabled and not disabled (two more contrasting groups) - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America .

3rd item contrasts with the first two; and this ‘not red states-not blue states-but United States’ line harks back to Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, that first brought him to wider public notice, where he used it to introduce the ‘politics of hope’ theme that has become one of his trademarks.

It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

‘Hope’ theme again, plus image of bending an arc towards a better future.

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

Contrast between ‘what’s been coming’ and ‘what’s now come’ – and it’s come at 3 moments (‘this day’, ‘this election’, ‘this moment’).

A little bit earlier this evening I received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine. We are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader.

McCain has done 3 worthy things (‘fought a campaign’, ‘fought for the country’, ‘endured sacrifices’).

I congratulate him, I congratulate Governor Palin, for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.

I want to thank my partner in this journey, a man who campaigned from his heart and spoke for the men and women he grew up with on the streets of Scranton and rode with on that train home to Delaware, the vice-president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden.

Biden has also done 3 things (‘campaigned’, ‘spoken’, ‘ridden on a train’). The train imagery personalises his praise for Biden, who started commuting daily from Delaware to Washington in 1972, after his two young sons had survived a road crash in which his wife and their daughter died.

And I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last 16 years, the rock of our family, the love of my life, the nation's next first lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both more than you can imagine, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House.

Note that the invitations to the audience to applaud Biden and Michelle are perfectly executed – the person is identified, praised and finally named. Naming the person earlier tends to confuse audiences as to when and if they are supposed to applaud. Mention of the puppy for the children depicts him as a thoroughly ‘normal’, kindly father and family man.

And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure. To my sister Maya, my sister Auma, all my other brothers and sisters - thank you so much for all the support you have given me. I am grateful to them.

This sentence can be heard as an implicit reminder that he’s a practising Christian who believes in life after death, followed by more ‘I’m a family man’ references.

To my campaign manager David Plouffe, the unsung hero of this campaign, who built the best political campaign in the history of the United States of America. My chief strategist David Axelrod, who has been a partner with me every step of the way, and to the best campaign team ever assembled in the history of politics - you made this happen, and I am forever grateful for what you've sacrificed to get it done.

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.

Puzzle-solution.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn't start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington - it began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston.

This is the first of 3 points about his campaign (‘started modestly’, ‘built by working men’, ‘grew strength from young people’). Then this first point uses a combined contrast and 3 part list, in which Washington is contrasted with 3 ordinary provincial cities. Adding to the impact of this contrast between Washington and the 3 other places are simple images that contrast the corridors of power in one (‘halls of Washington’) with everyday places in the others (‘backyards', 'living rooms' and 'front porches’).

It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

Second point about campaign is that it was built by 3 types of drains on personal cash.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation's apathy; who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep; it grew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on the doors of perfect strangers; from the millions of Americans who volunteered, and organised, and proved that more than two centuries later, a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

Third point is that it grew strength from 3 groups of people (‘the young’, ‘not-so-young people’, and ‘millions of Americans’). Sacrifice depicted by images of young people leaving homes and supporters braving contrasting climatic conditions -- summed up as a proof that Abraham Lincoln’s most famous line, also a 3 part list, still applies. He could have said it hasn’t disappeared, vanished or died, but ‘perished’ has the advantage of adding another alliterative word.

This is your victory.

I know you didn't do this just to win an election and I know you didn't do it for me. You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.

Two reasons ‘why you didn’t do it’ are contrasted with third reason ‘why you did’.

For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime - two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

3 challenges ahead, and the third one is longer than the first two. This is a feature of some of the most famous 3 part lists of all time, such as ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ and ‘father, son and holy ghost’. ‘Tomorrow’ obviously doesn’t mean ‘Thursday’ and is a simple metaphor for the future. Hazards to the planet can be described in many different ways, but ‘peril’ has the ‘poetic’ advantage of alliteration.

Even as we stand here tonight, we know there are brave Americans waking up in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan to risk their lives for us.

‘Deserts’ and ‘mountains’ imagery to highlight the tough conditions American soldiers are facing.

There are mothers and fathers who will lie awake after their children fall asleep and wonder how they'll make the mortgage, or pay their doctor's bills, or save enough for their child's college education. There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.

Contrast between brave Americans waking up to face difficulties in foreign places and American parents unable to sleep because of difficulties at home – of which there happen to be 3 (paying ‘mortgages’, ‘medical expenses’ and ‘college fees’).

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep.

This simple image of the long road and steep climb was quite widely featured in the media as the main soundbite from the speech. It is also the first of 3 challenges that lie ahead (‘it’s going to take time’, ‘there’ll be opposition’ and ‘we need to remake the nation’).

We may not get there in one year or even in one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there

The mountain-climbing imagery, followed by “we as a people will get there” evokes the last speech made by Martin Luther King on the night before he was assassinated: “I’ve been up to the mountain, I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land.”


There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as president, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.

And above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for 221 years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

3 alliterative building images, involving repetition of words, to characterize how this has always been done. It’s also another example where the third one is the longest of the three.

What began 21 months ago in the depths of winter cannot end on this autumn night.

Contrast between winter and autumn.

This victory alone is not the change we seek - it is only the chance for us to make that change.

Alliterative contrast between the victory not being the ‘change’ but the ‘chance to make the change’.

And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.

3 reasons why it can’t happen, and alliteration with four words beginning with ‘S’ (and more ‘S-’ words at the start of the next sentence).

So let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it's that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers - in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people.

Contrast between ‘ourselves’ and ‘each other’, followed by contrast between Wall Street and Main Street, where street names are simple metaphors depicting the worlds of high finance and ordinary everyday shopping.

Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Lets not fall back into 3 errors (‘partisanship’, ‘pettiness’ and ‘immaturity’). He could just as well said ‘harmed’ or ‘damaged’ politics, but ‘poisoned’ has the advantage of alliteration with other ‘P’ words close by.

Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity.

The Republican Party had 3 founding values, and Lincoln surfaces again, with a reminder that he, like Obama, started out in Illinois state politics.

Those are values that we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours: "We are not enemies, but friends… though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection."

Another quote from Lincoln, which starts with a contrast between ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’.

And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too.

Combination in which the second part of the contrast is a 3 part list (‘you may not have voted for me’, ‘but 3 things link us together’).

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces (alliteration) to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared (contrast), and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

Addressed to 3 groups of people (‘foreigners’, ‘political leaders’ and the ‘developing world'), with alliteration and image of people in ‘huddled in corners’. The mood and imagery here is reminiscent of the way Kennedy addressed different parts of the world in his inaugural address in 1960: “To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe …” The image of a 'new dawn of American leadership' also has echoes of another line in Kennedy's inaugural: "The torch has passed to a new generation of Americans .."

To those who would tear the world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you.

And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.

Alliterative image of a ‘beacon burning’ echoes one of the first few lines of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech: “This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.” Then we have another contrast in which the third one, ‘power of our ideals’, contrasts with the first two. The first three of these are commonly cited a American ideals, but ‘hope’ resurfaces again, having been a central theme for Obama since he published his book ‘the Audacity of Hope’.

For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Genius of America has 3 components, ‘hope’ again and ‘tomorrow’ again used as metaphor for the future.

This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But one that's on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. She's a lot like the millions of others who stood in line to make their voice heard in this election except for one thing - Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old.

Starts an extended anecdote to highlight a century of change, setting it up by contrasting this one with the many other stories that could be told. This woman just happens to come from the same place as Martin Luther King (Atlanta). And the fact that she’s 106 enables him to talk about events from the past century, as MLK did at the start of ‘I have a dream’. His reference point was the emancipation proclamation, in relation to which he produced a series of sentences starting with “One hundred years later..” (“But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…etc.”).

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons - because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin.

Transport imagery to highlight technological change, and it now turns out that she is black as well as female and very old – which sets it up for him to say more about Martin Luther King’s central themes of emancipation and discrimination.

And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America - the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.

His thoughts about her are expressed in 3 contrasts (‘heartache and hope’, ‘struggle and progress’, we can’t versus we can). The repetitive sequence of ‘Yes we can’ that eventually results in the audience joining in as a chorus, harks back to Obama’s speech after losing the New Hampshire primary, where he did exactly the same thing. The audience participation can be heard as a secular version of the regular crowd interjections (“Yeah Lord”, “Holy, Holy Holy”, “Amen”, etc in Martin Luther King’s speeches. “Yes we can” has no religious connotations and carries no risk of making Jews and members of other religions feel excluded.

At a time when women's voices were silenced and their hopes dismissed, she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot. Yes, we can.

First two negative things in the history of women's emancipation that she saw contrasted with a victory in which they achieved 3 things.

When there was despair in the dust bowl and depression across the land, she saw a nation conquer fear itself with a New Deal, new jobs and a new sense of common purpose. Yes, we can.

Alliterative image referring to how a previous bad time in economic history was overcome by 3 new things.

When the bombs fell on our harbour and tyranny threatened the world, she was there to witness a generation rise to greatness and a democracy was saved. Yes, we can.

Two nasty things about war contrasted with 'salvation'

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "we shall overcome". Yes, we can.

3 negative images of racial discrimination contrasted with a positive reference to Martin Luther King (again).

A man touched down on the Moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes, we can.

3 images of advances she witnessed, followed by her being able to use modern technology to vote and a contrast between ‘best of times’ and ‘darkest of hours’.

America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.

3 part list with third item longest and contrasting with the first two.

So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

Two rhetorical questions to lead into the peroration.

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment.

This focus on ‘our moment’, and ‘our time’, developed further in the next sentence, again echoes Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, in which his reference to “the fierce urgency of now” prefaced three sentences starting with “Now is the time…”

This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes, we can.

The Image of opening ‘doors of opportunity’ brings us back to the American dream theme, harking back to the opening line of the speech. This simultaneously lets the audience know that he’s nearly finished, continues to echo the spirit of Martin Luther King and gives a sense of overall structural unity.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

Max Atkinson is author of Lend Me Your Ears: All You Need to Know about Making Speeches and Presentations (London, Vermilion, 2004 & New York, Oxford University Press, 2005), and Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy: Seven Essential Steps to Success (London, Vermilion, 2008), available from Amazon UK and Amazon USA by clicking links from here.