Think twice before you read or write

Late last night, Google Alerts took me to an article by Danny Finkelstein that was about to appear in The Times today about the point in David Cameron's speech last week where he surfed applause and which I'd written about a couple of times last week HERE and HERE.

Reading it at dead of night on a computer screen and in this morning's cool light of day in the actual (rather than virtual) newspaper yielded quite different reactions.

At first sight, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. But this morning, the questions that came to mind then look like an unhealthy cocktail of paranoia and megalomania (and I'd only had two nightcaps, honest).

As I know that some of my garbled twittering got a few people wondering what I was on about, a word or two of clarification may help to solve the mystery.

Here are the questions that troubled me last night, followed by my answers after reading the same article in a hard copy of the newspaper earlier today:

1. Should I be pleased to be referred to as a 'guru' by such an eminent journalist and glad that the speech that had changed my life had changed his life too (Claptrap 1)?

Ans: Yes.

2. As one who writes books and runs courses on the subject, should I be annoyed that he makes it sound as though speechwriting is such an easy and straightforward craft?

Ans: No.

3. Did his casual use of the phrase 'surfing applause', as if everyone knows what it is, and his focus on the poverty point in Cameron's speech mean that he'd been following my blog and was now recycling some of it without much in the way of attribution?

Ans: Don't know.

4. Was he saying or implying that Ann Brennan didn't mean what she said in her speech and/or that I had claimed that Cameron hadn't meant what he said?

Ans: No.

5. And why hadn't he mentioned any of my books on all this, or at least supplied a link to my blog?

Ans: Because he's a journalist and doesn't have to.

Memo to self:

Be wary of jumping to conclusions on the basis of reading articles on computer screens late at night.

Remember that computers and the internet have made it far easier to write and post things without anything like the amount of care and reflection that was necessary to get anything out to a wider audience in days gone by.

Memo to journalists:

Remember that, with 115,000+ books being published each year, it matters a very great deal to authors to have their books mentioned in the media occasionally, and that you have the power to open and close an important door to public awareness (or lack of it) of particular titles.

Regular readers will know that I've blogged on this before in relation to BBC plug-a-book shows. Today, the mere mention of my name in The Times has already prompted enough people to type it into Google to double the number of visits to my blog (and there are still about 5 hours to go until midnight).

Today has also seen Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy and Lend Me Your Ears rise to their highest positions in the Amazon UK bestsellers rankings since the last time they got a mention on the BBC website.

So I am grateful to Mr Finkelstein and The Times for today's small mercies - but not half as grateful as I would have been if one of the book titles had appeared in print and/or if there'd been a link to this blog from their online edition.

And that, I suppose, is what really explains the initial irritations that struck me in the early hours of this morning.

POSTSCRIPT (Thursday)

I take it all back! Danny Finkelstein has done me proud - and predictably, for 3 reasons, the third of which also comes in three parts:

1. Mention of the name seems to be enough, as indicated in the comment below from Mr Anonymous (plus various emails and phone calls I've received today.

2. Blog visits yesterday were three times more than on Monday.

3. Danny Finkelstein has done me proud with two posts on his Times Online blog this afternoon in which he

• mentions and links to one of my books and this blog,
• shows the YouTube video of Ann Brennan's speech at the 1984 SDP conference and
• ends with a hilarious story about how Roy Jenkins reacted to one of the best lines in the speech.

2009 Conference season summary

Quite a number of new visitors, to whom welcome, arrived here during the party conference season, which inspired, if that's not too strong a word, the following 27 posts.

You can link directly to them by clicking the title. The ones in italics include video clips or links to a video illustrating the particular point under discussion.

• The TUC, where ‘fings aint wot they used to be’

• Why is Mr Brown bothering to speak at the TUC?

• Gordon Brown tries out a 4-part list at the TUC

• Not the LibDem Conference –BBC website news

• Clegg’s conference speech: ‘definitely OK, absolutely fine, without any doubt not bad’

• Methinks Labour doth protest/spin too much

• Gordon Brown goes walkabout (again)

• Why doesn’t anyone warn politicians about becoming autocue automatons?

• If Mandelson has to struggle to win applause, what are the Labour Party faithful saying?

• Was it Mandelson’s self-deprecating humour that won the day for him

• Brown surfs applause (briefly) before reverting to type

• Gordon Brown: The way he told them

• Gordon Brown on the morning after the night before

• What do Harriet Harman and Sybil Fawlty have in common?

• Reading between the lines of ‘Labour Vision’

• Boris Johnson’s funny bits

• Surely it’s time someone coached Cameron to use a teleprompter

• What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop

• The barmy Tory backdrop disappears & reappears

• Does YouTube oppose the Tories and support UKIP?

• George Osborne + Chris Grayling = Geoffrey Howe

• Tory PR on the eve of Cameron’s speech: gaffe pr master stroke?

• I was wrong about Cameron looking at screens

• Cameron’s conference sound bite: ‘compassionate conservatism’

• Cameron’s conference speech high spot: standing ovation for ‘surfing applause’

• Surfing applause was Cameron’s high spot too

• Contrasting reactions to Cameron’s ‘poverty moment’

Words really do matter: Majorspeak revisited

A recent post by Martin Shovel on the Creativity Works blog uses the Wordle website to support an interesting argument that David Cameron is a better speaker than Gordon Brown because he used fewer words of Latin origin in his conference speech than the prime minister did in his.

This reminded me of something I'd written in Lend Me Your Ears in the section comparing written and spoken language (pp. 79-80):

Using words that are hardly ever heard in everyday speech will also make it more difficult for an audience to understand the point you’re trying to get across. For example, the two columns in the example below contain sentences that convey the same message, but the lines on the left and right use different words. Just how much difference the alternative wording makes to the degree of formality and comprehensibility becomes very apparent as soon as you try reading the two versions aloud.

Formal/written We shall endeavour to commence the enhancement programme forthwith in order to ensure that there is sufficient time to facilitate the dissemination of the relevant contractual documentation to purchasers ahead of the renovations being brought to completion.

Informal/spoken We shall try to begin the repairs immediately so that there’s enough time to send the contracts to buyers before the work is finished.

Apart from making it difficult to understand, the use of words of Latin origin helps to create what I sometimes refer to as a 'cloak of formality' that can make you sound much more stilted and 'unnatural' than you'd intended.

MAJORSPEAK

On this, the way former prime minister John Major spoke used to be a constant source of fascination to me and I once wrote a paper entitled 'Majorspeak' in a book on the 1992 general election. I also touched on some of his eccentricities in a television interview with Martha Kearney before his last conference speech before going to the polls in 1997.

In the following clip, look out for words like 'wayside inn' and 'whomsoever', not to mention the claim that he used to 'erect' a soapbox in Brixton market to talk about 'political matters of the day' - to which the good citizens of the aforementioned borough would respond with 'badinage'.

More recently, if I remember it correctly from when Sir John read his book on cricket on Radio 4's Book of the Week show, the opening line was "On the morrow of my election defeat, I bade farewell to Downing Street and proceeded to the Oval."