An example of rhetorical virtuosity from rhetoric denier Tony Benn

Readers from outside the UK have probably never heard of Tony Benn, and quite a few here will be too young to remember just how effective an orator he was. So, having looked at his 'rhetorical denial' in the previous post I thought it might be useful to show a video illustrating his rhetorical virtuosity in action.

This particular clip comes from a Labour Party conference in the early 1980s, when he was at the height of his powers and a prime mover in his party's electorally disastrous lurch to the left after Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 (on which, see also HERE).

It shows how he was so in tune with the way the audience was reacting that a slight response to his news about that day's record stock market fall was enough to prompt him to break off from what he was going to say and launch into an impressively constructed contrast, each part of which ends with the phrase ‘the wealth of the nation’:

BENN: For a moment between debates the stock market had its biggest fall was it within living memory 30 points – and uhh that is an indication that indeed it was rather appropriate that ITN was swinging
[A] from the stock market where they’re gambling with the wealth of the nation
[B] to Brighton where we represent the people who create the wealth of the nation.

ICONIC GESTURES
The sequence also provides more examples of the way 'iconic gestures' come before the word(s) to which they relate, as discussed in earlier posts (HERE and HERE): Benn's swinging hand movements get under way quite a while before the word ‘swinging’ comes out of his mouth – whereupon his hands start moving to his left just before the words ‘stock market’ and to his right just before he say’s the word ‘Brighton’.

Then the slightest pause after ‘create’ followed by the coordinated downward movements of his head and hands are reminiscent of the precision with which an orchestral conductor brings in the whole of the chorus on time – and the audience starts applauding just before he's finished repeating ‘the wealth of the nation’.

SURFING APPLAUSE
But, as was typical of Benn, he didn’t stop there but carried on trying to ‘surf’ the applause - not that he says anything more important than "and that is also-" and "now uhh-") while the applause is still preventing his words from being heard - for more on which, see HERE andHERE).

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
One point of interest is that, as the applause gets under way, the camera switches away the from the audience to focus on Benn's former Labour cabinet colleague and arch-enemy of the day, Denis Healey, who had just narrowly defeated Mr Benn in an election for the party's deputy-leadership - but who seems to be thoroughly enjoying this particular line.

Another is the fact that a stock market fall as pitifully small as 30 points was treated as such dramatic news in those days!

Claptrap 1: The movie

This is the first in a series of posts to mark this month's 25th anniversary of a television documentary that completely changed my life and can now be watched in full below.

Before that, I’d spent nearly twenty years working in universities and doing research that was widely regarded at the time as being thoroughly 'useless' (i.e. lacking in any theoretical or practical implications whatsoever).

But a series of lucky breaks led to my getting the chance to take part in a World in Action documentary based on my book Our Masters’ Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics World in Action series frequently attracted audiences of 15 million or more viewers - though 'attracted' is probably the wrong word, because it came on immediately after the nation's most popular soap (Coronation Street): it was also before everyone had remote controls, which meant that viewers still had had to make the effort of getting out of their chairs if they wanted to switch channels.

Such was the impact of the programme that, on the following morning, my phone hardly stopped ringing, with everyone asking the same question: "can you do the same for me?" Without realising it at the time, I had embarked on an irreversible journey from the peaceful seclusion of an Oxford college to the more hectic world of freelance consultancy.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging about some of the background leading up the publication of Our Masters’ Voices and the making of the film Claptrap.

It was called ‘Claptrap’ because one of the definitions of the word in the Oxford English Dictionary is a ‘trick, device or language designed to catch applause’. I’d originally thought of using it as the title of the book, but decided against it because it would be too much of a hostage to fortune for reviewers.

Gus Macdonald, the film's producer who'd dreamt up the idea in the first place, had no such qualms about using it as the title for the programme - but by then, of course he did have the advantage of knowing that the experiment had been a success.

You can watch the film here in four consecutive episodes (and I hope you're impressed by my new Apricot computer!).

P.S. A better quality version of the film can now be watched in full HERE.

• CLAPTRAP 2: Eureka
• CLAPTRAP 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre

• CLAPTRAP 4: How to get a book published

• CLAPTRAP 5: In the right places at the right times

Obama on Kennedy got more applause than 'normal'

I mentioned in an earlier post an observation, first reported in my book Our Masters’ Voices, about there being a standard or ‘normal’ burst of applause that, in many different settings and across several different cultures, lasts for about 8 seconds. Less than 7 seconds and it sounds feeble; more than 9 seconds and it sounds more enthusiastic than usual.

The most powerful piece of cross-cultural evidence came from a group of Iranian students who had collected some tapes of speeches by Ayotollah Khomeni after the Shah had been deposed. Applause had been banned as a 'decadent Western practice' and replaced by chanting ("Death to the Americans..." "Down with imerialists..." etc.) .

The students reported that the chanting occurred immediately after Khomeni had used exactly the same rhetorical techniques as the ones that trigger applause in the West and, even more interestingly, regularly faded out after 8 plus or minus 1 second.

The last time I remember the congregation applauding a eulogy was after Lord Spencer finished speaking at the funeral of his sister, Princess Diana.

But it happened again on Saturday after President Obama’s eulogy at the funeral of Edward Kennedy, where the clapping went on for 35 seconds or just over four times longer than a standard burst of applause.

In this clip, you can check out for yourself what 'longer than normal' sounds like to you:

Obama: Echoes of Berlin in Cairo

Speaking in Berlin in 1963, President Kennedy showed how a few words in the local language is a sure fire way of winning approval (in the form of applause) from a foreign audience (clip 1 below). 

Today, speaking in Cairo, President Obama did the same with a few words in Arabic (clip 2 below), and also showed how a quotation from the local religious holy book can be just as effective (clip 3). 

And he came close to recycling a line from the speech he himself had made in Berlin last year (clips 4 & 5). 

Far from implying criticism of him for doing this, I find it very encouraging to hear him sounding as though he is serious about putting into practice an approach to foreign policy that he was only able to make promises about before he became president. 

But whether or not we should read anything significant into the replacement of  the word 'trust' with the word 'respect'  is a question on which I'd need an opinion from an expert on diplomatic semantics.

Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor received five times more applause than ‘normal’

Soon after I started studying applause in political speeches, it emerged that there is a ‘normal’ burst of applause that lasts for about eight (plus or minus one) seconds (see Our Masters' Voices, 1984).

Less than this and it sounds half-hearted; more than this and it sounds more enthusiastic than usual – with the result that the media are more likely to select lines that get longer bursts for headlines in newspapers or sound bites on news programmes.

Nor is this norm only to be found in political speeches, but is also to be heard in award ceremonies, at conferences when speakers are introduced or when the identity of guests on television talk shows is revealed.

A few years ago, I went to a concert by Donovan, a pop star contemporary of the Beatles. In the first half, all his performances of familiar hits from the 1960s attracted 15-20 seconds of applause (i.e. considerably more than usual), whereas none of the applause for his numbers from his latest album in the second half fell outside the standard 7-9 second range – polite enough, but nowhere near as enthusiastic as the responses to songs that the audience had known for years.

If you want to check out what the difference sounds like for yourself, compare the following two clips from President Obama's introduction to his nominee for the vacancy on the Supreme Court. In the first one, Judge Sotomayor gets a 'standard' eight-second burst of applause after saying that she loves her family; in the second one, the applause for the President's introduction to her goes on for five times longer than that.

As such, it suggests that the audience was very well pleased with the announcement. But to find out it was a more enthusiastic response than usual, we’d have to compare it with some clips of presidents introducing previous nominations for the post of Supreme Court judge.

Disputing the meaning of applause

In an interview broadcast yesterday about a meeting with his constituents in Bracknell, Andrew MacKay made much of the fact that three quarters of the clapping was in favour of him and only a quarter was against him (see HERE).

Given that my research into political speeches started by using applause as a gross measure of approval, I always find it fascinating when its presence or absence becomes an issue in a media interview.

The MacKay sequence reminded me of a gem from my collection in which Peter Snow tackled Francis Pym for not applauding vigorously enough during a Tory Party Conference speech by the then Chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe – in an effort to use it as evidence of a split on economic policy in the cabinet:

Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time

It wasn't just some of David Dimbleby's questions that got applauded on last night's Question Time (see previous post). Some of the questions also won bursts of applause, which was hardly surprising in the case of those who used the rhetorical techniques that are most likely to trigger a positive audience response.

In this first example, the question includes a contrast between ‘their own money’ and ‘our country’ that triggers a burst of applause before Dimbleby or anyone else has time to say anything:



The speaker in this next one deploys three rhetorical techniques in quick succession: a rhetorical question, a three-part list and a contrast.

And, as so often happens when someone combines more than one technique at a time, the applause here exceeds the standard 8 pus or minus 1 second 'normal' burst of applause (by about 2 seconds), thereby underlining the response as a more enthusiastic one than usual:

It was quite explicit. It has to be wholly necessary to do the job as an MP.

[Q] What could be more plainer than that?

[1] They don’t need scatter cushions,
[2] bottles of gin,
[3] plocks.

[A] It’s not the system that’s wrong.
[B] It’s the people - the MPs themselves. [APPLAUSE]



For more about rhetorical techniques and how to use them to get your own messages across, see any of my books (listed in the left-hand margin).

Applause for Dimbleby's questions on BBC Question Time

Two very unusual things happen in these two clips from last night's Question Time on BBC1.

The first is that that David Dimbleby feels liberated enough to phrase his questions in a way that might, in a one-to-one interview with no audience, come across as excessively cheeky and perhaps even biased against Labour (Margaret Becket) and the Liberal Democrats (Ming Campbell).

The second is that the audience comes in and applauds what Dimbleby says before the politicians have had time to start their answers - and are therefore under much more pressure than they would have been if they were being interviewed in a studio with no audience there showing how much they approve of the interviewer's question.

Does Daniel Hannan’s attack on Brown tell us what makes a speech memorable?

When I first started doing research into political speeches in the early 1980s, I concentrated on sequences that prompted applause – as it seemed a fairly obvious and unequivocal barometer for measuring audience approval. What attracted most attention about the results was the observation that most bursts of applause are triggered by a small number of simple rhetorical techniques (Our Masters’ Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics, 1984).

But the book also included some observations about the content of the messages that get applauded in political speeches, the main finding being that 84% of the bursts of applause occurred after a boastful statement about the speaker’s own party or an insult/attack on an opposing party – or some combination of the two (OMV, p. 45).

When I was actively involved with the Liberal Democrats during the Ashdown years, we had some interesting arguments, thanks to their rather pious tradition of trying to stand aside from ‘Yah-boo’ politics – which would make it sound inconsistent if they were to use too much in the way of knocking copy.

But my point was (and still is) that to abstain from the insult/attack option means signing up to a self-denying ordinance that deprives you of one of the main techniques for generating audience approval - and the success of Vince Cable's suggestion that Gordon Brown had changed from Stalin to Mr Bean suggests that there is at least one member of the current leadership team willing to deploy an insult now and then.

So the first thing that struck me about Daniel Hannan’s speech was that almost every sentence conveyed an insult or attack – not just directed at Labour in general, but highly personalised ones aimed at the leader of the Labour Party in particular.

Add to this the fact that it was in front of MEPs in Strasbourg and in the presence of Mr Brown, a distinguished guest who had just made a speech, and the context becomes comparable with that of a cheeky schoolboy standing up at speech day and telling the headmaster exactly what he and others thought of him in full view of all the other pupils, teachers and parents.

If Mr Hannon’s repetitive use of the insult/attack option, packaged with some neat rhetoric and appropriate imagery (on which, see HERE), may have set the speech up to attract more attention than usual, it’s obviously not the only reason for its success.

Since writing Our Masters’ Voices, I’ve been asked many times: what makes a truly memorable speech? However intellectually and financially rewarding it would be to have a definitive answer, I can't claim to have got there yet. But I do have the beginnings of a theory.

Effective use of rhetoric and imagery to package the key messages is important, but it doesn’t really provide anything like a compete answer, not least because the same techniques are to be found in all famous speeches.

So I started trying to get together sample of speeches that qualified as such to see if they had anything in common. After asking scores of people which speeches they considered ‘memorable’, what surprised me was the frequency with which they mentioned the same four speeches (remember that I was doing this 25 years ago):

Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of change’ in the South African parliament in 1960
John F Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ in front of the Berlin wall in 1963
Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963
Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ in Birmingham, 1968

So what, if anything, did these particular speeches have in common that made them stand out as more memorable than most?

The best I’ve been able to come up with is that, in each case, the speaker managed to hit the jackpot by saying something that struck just the right chord with just the right audience in just the right place at just the right moment in history – which means that it’s more or less impossible to predict ‘memorability’ with any certainty in advance of any particular speech - though I did wonder whether this was what Barack Obama had in mind when he tried unsuccessfully to speak at the Brandenburg Gate when visiting Berlin last year – given the previous Berlin successes of Kennedy in 1961 and Ronald Reagan’s ‘Tear down this wall’ in 1987.

Much the same can be said of three more recent specimens of the commonest answers to the same question about memorable speeches:

Ronald Reagan’s ‘Challenger’ speech after the shuttle disaster in 1986
Tony Blair’s ‘People’s Princess’ speech on the death of Princess Diana in 1997
Lord Spencer’s eulogy at the funeral of Princess Diana (his sister) in 1997

At this point, I should make it clear that I am not suggesting that Daniel Hannan’s speech in Strasbourg the other day will ever get anywhere close to the long-term ‘memorability’ of the above examples. But I do think that, when it comes to explaining its sudden succes, the same factors -- right chord/right audience/right place/right time – may help to answer the question appearing on blogs and in the media, namely why has it taken off in the way that it has?

Right chord: challenging one of the favoured solutions to the current economic crisis
Right audience: including a prime minister and people around the world who are also unconvinced by such solutions
Right place: in the European Parliament where there is disagreement between countries about the alternative solutions
Right Time: Just before the G20 meeting about agreeing a global solution to the economic crisis

What brought me back to this question after so many years was reading through some of the 5,573 comments (at the time of writing) about the speech on YouTube.

You don’t have to read many of them to see that the right chord, the right audience, the right place and/or the right time are recurring themes from those who liked the speech well enough to want to put their own comments on the record.

Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages

A point I made a couple of days ago was that bursts of applause can be used to identify which points in a speech an audience liked best.

If there are about 150 sentences, of which only six (4%) stood out enough to get a whole-hearted display of approval that lasted more than a few seconds – as happened on Tuesday – it’s worth looking at them in a bit more detail to see what really turned the audience on.

On looking through them again, what I found interesting and surprising was that three of the six messages rated by the crowd as worthy of a decent round of applause were actually quite contentious or uncomfortable ones:

1. The USA is up against a lot of serious problems that can’t be fixed easily or instantly, though the new administration will eventually fix them.

2. A lot of work needs to be done to remake America – where the use of the word ‘remake’ implies that there’s something so wrong with the country that it actually needs remaking.

3. The USA will be friends with any countries wanting to live in peace and dignity and is ready to provide leadership again – where ‘again’ is presumably an admission that its foreign policy hasn't been making a very good job of it recently.

To foreign ears, the encouraging thing about all this is not just that the new president is willing to acknowledge that all is not well on a number of important fronts, but that the large numbers of Americans in the crowd were willing to applaud him for subscribing to such uncomfortable positions.

At the very least, these sentiments are a far cry from the over-stated claims about the unique greatness of the country that I was complaining about the other day – and which have put in another appearance in an article in the Washington Post by Robert Ehrlich, Jr., former governor of Maryland, who writes of the need to 'pray for ‘the greatest democracy in the history of the world.’

(The rhetorical techniques that prompted the crowd to applaud these uncomfortable messages can be seen in the previous post – under sections 1, 3 & 4).

Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best

When I first started studying bursts of applause in political speeches thirty years ago, some people couldn’t see the point; others thought I was mad.

But I did have a rational reason for doing it – because the absence of any instant positive response from jurors in the tape-recorded court hearings I was studying made it impossible to get empirical evidence about what might be having a positive impact on the twelve most important members of the audience in court.

In trying to solve this ‘methodological’ problem, I was drawn to applause in speeches as a promising place to start, as it provides fairly concrete evidence that an audience is (a) awake and paying close attention and (b) approves of what’s just been said strongly enough to join in a collective physical demonstration of their approval (by clapping hands, cheering, etc.).

The main finding – that most bursts of applause are triggered by a small number of simple rhetorical techniques – not only surprised me, but also launched me on a new career (further details on which can be found in the books listed on the left of this page and/or my main website.).

More than a quarter of a century later, I still sometimes find it instructive to focus on the lines that were applauded in a particular speech to see which messages turned the audience on the most.

So the lines that prompted bursts of applause during President Obama’s inaugural speech yesterday are reproduced below, along with some notes about the rhetorical techniques that were involved. Video clips of the first six examples can be seen below.

[For anyone unfamiliar with them, 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.]


1. The first burst of Applause came after the second of two three-part lists – in which the third item contrasts with the first two. Note also that the final item exploits the puzzle-solution format by getting the audience wondering what they’re going to have to know before providing tehm with the solution to the puzzle.

"Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real.
They are serious
and they are many.

They will not be met easily
or in a short span of time.
But know this, America — they will be met." [APPLAUSE]

SO THE AUDIENCE LIKED being told that the country is up against some serious problems that will be hard to solve and his assurance that they will be overcome.

(This was the first of four examples in the speech of his using the imperative form ('know this'), which is arguably a rather less high-sounding version of the repetitive ‘let’ form of imperative favoured by Kennedy for directing his inaugural remarks to specific audiences in 1961:

KENNEDY: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty...

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.
Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms—and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.
Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.
Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of Isaiah—to "undo the heavy burdens ... and to let the oppressed go free.")


2. The second burst of applause also came after two three-part lists, each of which had a third item that was longer than the first two:

"The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit;
to choose our better history;
to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation:

the God-given promise that all are equal,
all are free
and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness." [APPLAUSE]

SO THE AUDIENCE LIKED hearing his reaffirmation of the American dream.


3. Another three-part list with longest item coming third:

"Starting today,
we must pick ourselves up,
dust ourselves off,
and begin again the work of remaking America." [APPLAUSE]

SO THE AUDIENCE LIKED his recognition that there’s work to be done in order to remake America (and, by implication, that America is in need of 'remaking').


4. Another example of the ‘know’ form of imperative, addressed this time to foreign audiences (identified by imagery contrasting ‘grandest capitals’ with the "small village" in Kenya where his father was born):

".. to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more." [APPLAUSE]

SO THE AUDIENCE LIKED liked the idea of restoring America’s reputation for positive leadership in the world (and, by implication, that it's in need of restoring).


5. Use of one three-part list to set up a puzzle (‘what is it that he's going to say now?’) that's solved by another three-part list that gets applauded.

"We will not apologize for our way of life,
nor will we waver in its defense,
and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that

our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken;
you cannot outlast us,
and we will defeat you." [APPLAUSE]

SO THE AUDIENCE LIKED hearing his commitment to defend the American way of life and defeat terrorism.


6. Contrast between negative status of a father being discriminated against 60 years ago and his son becoming president today:

"This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed — why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath." [APPLAUSE]

SO THE AUDIENCE LIKED being invited to celebrate the election of an African-American as president as evidence that the central part of Martin Luther King’s dream has come true.


UNEXPECTED FLUTTERS OF APPLAUSE

There were a few other instances where a slight flutter of applause didn’t build into a fully fledged burst, and where Obama didn’t seem to have been expecting applause.

In the following, it came in just after the second of two contrasts, the first of which contrasted the first item with the second two in the list.

Evidence that he wasn’t expecting it came from the fact that he can be seen abandoning an in-breath and a pointing gesture before waiting for the flutter of applause to subside.

"The success of our economy has always depended
not just on the size of our gross domestic product,
but on the reach of our prosperity;
on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart –

not out of charity,
but because it is the surest route to our common good." [FLUTTER OF APPLAUSE]


In this final example, the short burst of applause came in response to another ‘know this’ imperative that ended with a contrast between ‘build’ and ‘destroy’.

The start of the applause interrupted President Obama just after he’d embarked on another “to those .." - which he cut short and then repeated as the applause was fading away (for more on ‘surfing applause’, see earlier post in September 2008).

"To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy." [FLUTTER OF APPLAUSE]