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).
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'?
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