Moon rhetoric from Neil Armstrong, JFK & Werner von Braun

About twelve years after the moon landing in 1969, I started writing about the power of rhetorical techniques like the contrast, and remember being vaguely amused and delighted when I realised that, of all the possible things that Neil Armstrong could have said 40 years ago, it was a simple contrast that was beamed back to earth.

[A] That's one small step for man;
[B] one giant leap for mankind.



But this historic achievement was also the fulfillment of earlier memorable rhetorical flourishes from President Kennedy, who’d committed the USA to land a man on the moon within a decade. And here he is cranking out a contrast and rounding off his message off with a three-part list:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,

[A] not because they are easy,
[B] but because they are hard,

because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is

[1] one that we are willing to accept,
[2] one we are unwilling to postpone
[3] and one we intend to win.

(The full text of the speech is HERE).



Rocket scientist though he may have been, Werner von Braun, without whose brains NASA might never have met Kennedy’s deadline, was no slouch when it came to coining memorable quotations.

When the first of the V2 rockets he’d designed for Hitler hit London, it’s been claimed that his mind was already on space – as he was quoted as saying: "The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet."

Other famous lines from von Braun include the following:

“Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.”

“Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity.”

“Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.”

“Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go -- and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.”

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”

“There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.”

“Crash programs fail because they are based on theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month.”

“It will free man from the remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.”

“For my confirmation, I didn't get a watch and my first pair of long pants, like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope. My mother thought it would make the best gift.”

For someone who helped the Nazis to develop the V2 rockets that launched so much terror and destruction on London, US citizenship wasn't such a bad gift either.

Rhetoric revival?

In case you missed Sal Pinto's comment on a recent post, he's drawn attention to the news that a new MA course in Rhetoric is about to be launched by a British University, full details of which can be inspected by following the links from HERE.

As he says, "Progress!".

The picture, by the way is of one of the 'old schools' in Oxford, not the University of Central Lancashire where the new MA will be taught.

Book plugging

If you're wondering why my books have suddenly appeared in such a prominent place at the top of the page, there are two reasons.

The first is that the Amazon rankings already show that the initial surge in sales after Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy was mentioned on the BBC website has already subsided after only a few days exposure. So instead of posting stuff about the impact on sales of BBC 'plug-a-book' shows, I thought I should be doing a bit more in the way of plugging my own books on the blog.

The second reason is that I'm only just beginning to get the hang of the rather inflexible Blogspot templates, and it's taken me this long to work out how to insert pictorial links to Amazon.

How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony

Graduation ceremonies are important landmarks for graduates, families and universities.

But seeing 125 youngsters trooping across a stage to shake hands and receive their degrees can hardly be said to be the most gripping of theatrical events, especially when there's only one of the 125 that you actually know and care about.

I’ve just been to such an event, at which it quickly became apparent that we were in for a long wait (over half an hour, as it turned out) before our candidate got anywhere near the stage. Nor were we alone, because there were about 250 other people in the audience in exactly the same position as us.

All of which raises the interesting question of how you stay awake, as one unfamiliar name after another is read out, and as one unfamiliar smiling face after another appears on stage. For me, the answer is easy, because occasionally there's an advantage in having a technical interest in how such ceremonies work,

And I have to say that this particular one worked like clockwork, and did so in two intriguing respects that probably weren’t even noticed by anyone else in the audience.

The first was the supreme efficiency with which the ‘clap on the name’ technique ensured that every candidate was applauded as they walked into the limelight, with the applause coming in on cue a fraction of a second after each name was read out.

The second piece of clockwork was that the ovation in every single case lasted for exactly 7 seconds. No one told the audience to time their clapping to fit within the standard 7-9 second span found in the vast majority of bursts of applause, but the fact is that they did - with mechanical precision.

And the fact that they did so meant that, in every case, it sounded about right – less than 7 seconds wouldn’t have sounded complimentary enough; more than 9 seconds would have sounded more enthusiastic than necessary.

The only reason I’m able to report this extraordinary 100% regularity is that I sat there timing them all, which not only kept me wide awake, but also enabled me to test a hypothesis or two.

At the start, for example, I wondered whether there might be a difference between the amount of applause awarded to men and women, younger and older graduates, members of different ethnic groups, etc. But there was no hint of any such difference, as all of them got exactly the same 7 second ration.

Such negative results can sometimes be disappointing, but not if the process of coming up with them keeps you awake and attentive from the beginning to the end of what might otherwise have been a rather tedious experience (apart from our 30 second reason for being there).

There were, however, two exceptions that did get an outstanding 15 seconds of applause (outstanding because it’s twice as long as normal). One was for the collected assembly of graduates themselves, and the other was for their teachers – which is also exactly as it should be.

(Further details about the 'clap on the name' technique and the 7-9 second standard burst of applause can, of course, be found in my books).

BBC plug-a-book shows: how and why is so much offered to so few?

There are quite a number of plug-a-book shows on BBC Radio 4 (e.g. Start the Week, Midweek, Thinking Allowed, etc.), which is, I suppose, what you’d expect from the country's leading talk radio channel. Several times a week, a few lucky authors are invited by the likes of Andrew Marr, Libby Purves and Laurie Taylor to spend ten minutes saying whatever they like about their latest book.

Since yesterday, I’ve been twittering and blogging about how even a short interview on a fairly obscure part of the BBC website can work short-term wonders on book sales.

Before it was mentioned on the BBC website, my book Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy was languishing at around 245,000th on Amazon (UK).

Two hours later, it had shot up 220,000 places to 25,000th; two hours after that it rose to its highest place ever at 1,841 and pushed Lend Me Your Ears into second place in their ‘Public Speaking’ best-sellers list.

Impressive though this may seem, it pales into insignificance compared with what can happen after a few minutes on Radio 4. A couple of years ago, I was interviewed about speechwriting on Saturday Live by Fi Glover. When I mentioned Lend Me Your Ears, she told me I wasn’t supposed to be plugging my book, to which I replied that I thought this was the whole point of Radio 4.

Three hours later, I had a look to see if there’d been any move from its placing at about 4,000th, where it had been for a week or two on Amazon. To my astonishment, it had risen to 2nd – not 2nd in books on public speaking, but it had made it to the 2nd bestselling book in Amazon’s entire UK list. And there It stayed there for about half a day before beginning to slide down the rankings.

But the net result was that my publishers had to reprint it three days after the broadcast, and sold about 1,000 copies in the next seven days.

So there’s no doubt at all that the BBC, despite the fact that it’s not a commercial broadcaster and doesn’t officially advertise anything, does in fact advertise books. What's more, they must know what an impact their plug-a-book shows can have on sales, and the question on which I think we could do with a bit more transparency is, quite simply this: how do they go about selecting which of the thousands of possible authors get the tiny number of such important slots?

It would be nice to think that they operate with the kind of studied neutrality you might expect from a public service broadcaster. But at least two things make me wonder just how detached they really are.

The first goes back 25 years, when I was involved in coaching a woman who had never made a speech before to make a speech at the SDP annual conference in 1984. The fact that she got a standing ovation became a news story, but bookings for one or both of us to appear on various BBC radio and television programmes were suddenly cancelled when they realised that the training had been organised by, and was to be televised a couple of weeks later by, one of their commercial rivals, Granada Television.

The second reason for wondering about their detachment comes from the past two or three weeks. In one Radio 4 book review programme, the main inteviewee was a novelist who, before starting to write novels, had been a presenter on a BBC Television arts programme. At about the same time, Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime featured nightly readings from a novel by someone who used to run a London advertising agency, whose clients included one of our three main political parties.

Whether or not these two authors are better at writing novels than they were in their previous jobs, or whether they are any better than all the others who also publish novels each year, I have no idea. But I can’t help wondering whether they are part of a London social network that includes radio producers who find it easier to put people they know on their shows than the hundreds of other worthy candidates who never get a look in when it comes to such valuable exposure.

It’s well known that bookshops like Waterstones charge publishers huge sums of money to have their books displayed on tables near the entrance to their stores, a practice that doesn’t seem very far removed from the Payola scandals in the music industry all those years ago.

I’m not suggesting something similar is going on at the BBC. But at a time when the corporation is showing signs of becoming a bit more open about and accountable for their executives’ salaries and expense accounts, I don’t think it would do any harm to have some kind of investigation, or at least a good deal more transparency, on the question how candidates actually get selected for their plug-a-book programmes.

And, if it sounds as though I'm biting a hand that feeds me, I should make it clear that it doesn't happen as often as I'd like it to, and, on the rare occasions that it does, the rations don't last for very long.