On the death of Edward Kennedy: “the dream shall never die”

Speeches by all three of the Kennedy brothers are to be found in the top 100 American speeches listed on the website American Rhetoric.

For me, one of the most memorable ones by Edward Kennedy was delivered shortly after I had started studying political speeches in 1980: his address to the Democratic National Convention, now ranked at 76th in the top 100.

To mark his death, here are the final few sentences, which, somewhat unusually, end with a 4 part list that has been much quoted since:

And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith.

May it be said of our Party in 1980 that we found our faith again.

And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now:

I am a part of all that I have met

To [Tho] much is taken, much abides

That which we are, we are --

One equal temper of heroic hearts

Strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Later post on Biden's tribute.

MORE ON 3 PART LISTS & OTHER RHETORICAL TECHNIQUES
• Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?
• Lists of 3 and other rhetorical devices in Obama’s victory speech
• Tom Peters: high on rhetoric but low on content?
• When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric
• David Cameron’s attack on the budget used some well-crafted rhetoric
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time

P.S. FOR OTHERS SCEPTICAL ABOUT OR NEW TO TWITTER:
In the 'Pros' listed the other day, I included the fact that announcing new blog posts on Twitter can increase the number of visitors to the blog.

It also turns out that there's a more indirect way of this happening via Twitter. Since the death of Edward Kennedy, a lot of people have been typing 'thedreamshallneverdie' into Twitter search - as a result of which, some have found and visited this page.

What's 'news' about Gordon Brown not answering a question?

The silly season doesn’t get much sillier than when the leading story on all of tonight’s leading news programmes on radio and television was the apparently astonishing fact that that Gordon Brown had not answered a question about his position on the release of the Lockerbie bomber during today's Downing Street press conference.

It raises the question of whether all our top journalists have been asleep since Brown first emerged as a leading Labour politician more than a decade and a half ago.

Otherwise, they would surely have noticed that he has never knowingly answered any question ever put to him - and that more of the same hardly counts as 'news' (for more on which, see HERE).

Mehrabian's moans about the myth

The debate about the Merhrabian myth has been going on for a few weeks now, and Olivia Mitchell deserves congratulating for prompting so much discussion – and, if you want to know where I stand on the issue, you can catch up on some of my earlier posts about it from the links below.

If you missed the interview on BBC Radio 4, where Dr Mehrabian is to be heard bemoaning the way his statistics have been misinterpreted, it should still be available HERE (23 minutes into the tape).

He took a very similar line to that in an e-mail exchange I had with him seven years ago when I was writing the chapter ‘Physical Facts and Fiction’ for my book ‘Lend Me Your Ears’ and the relevant section went as follows:

In some cases, there is a huge gulf between the originators of the research and their disciples, both in the amount of confidence shown in such ‘facts,’ and in the extent to which they hold them to be generally applicable. This is certainly true of the 93% claim, which first reached a wider public with the publication of the book Silent messages: Implicit communication of emotions and attitudes by Dr Albert Mehrabian, a social psychologist at the University of California, in 1981. But, as he pointed out to me in an e-mail, the research on which it was based dates from more than a decade before that, and was actually concerned with feelings and attitudes:

“This work of mine has received considerable attention in the literature. It was reported originally by Mehrabian & Weiner (1967) and Mehrabian & Ferris (1967). Silent Messages contains a detailed discussion of my findings on inconsistent and consistent messages of feelings and attitudes.
Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking.”
(Albert Mehrabian , personal communication, e-mail, 16 October 2002).

A key point to note here is that Dr Mehrabian’s original percentages refer to different types of ‘liking’, and not to communication in all its forms. And, as one of the originators of these numbers, he writes with far more caution about their general applicability than is ever shown by the popularisers of his work:

“Please note that this and other equations regarding differential importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e. like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable.” (Albert Mehrabian, personal communication, e-mail, 16 October 2002).

Unlike Dr Mehrabian, those who recycle these percentages with such confidence have few qualms about generalising way beyond anything he ever intended. Their cavalier disregard for the details of his research is also a matter of some concern to him, as he indicated in the reply to an e-mail in which I asked him what he thought about his findings being so widely used to mislead people about the relative importance of verbal and non-verbal communication:

“I am obviously uncomfortable about misquotes of my work. From the very beginning, I have tried to give people the correct limitations of my findings. Unfortunately, the field of self-styled ‘corporate image consultants’ or ‘leadership consultants’ has numerous practitioners with very little psychological expertise.” (Albert Mehrabian , personal communication, e-mail, 31 October 2002).

(From Max Atkinson's Lend Me Your Ears, pp. 343-345).

Related posts on body language and non-verbal behaviour:

• Body language and non-verbal communication
• Another body language & non-verbal communication cartoon
• Non-verbal communication
• Body language, non-verbal communication and the myth about folded arms and defensiveness
• Margaret Thatcher, body language and non-verbal communication
• Non-verbal communication and height
• Presidential heights
• Impersonators as masterful analysts of non-verbal communication
• Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma’s dark glasses
• Hair today, win tomorrow: baldness and charisma?
• Body language and non-verbal communication video

Verdict after four weeks on Twitter

I didn’t join Twitter lightly, as I wasn’t at all convinced that it would be worth the time and effort. But if I didn’t have a go, I’d never know.

So what, after the first four weeks Tweeting and reading Tweets, is the verdict so far?

Pros:

1. I’ve come across some useful links to interesting people, blogs and websites that I’d probably never have heard about without Twitter.

2. Some links to blog posts, websites, etc. do turn out to be well worth reading.

3. Announcing new blog posts of my own on Twitter increases the number of visitors to this blog.

4. A side effect of (3) is that there’s also been an increase in the number of other blogs that are now including links to this one.

5. Since joining, there’s been some improvement in the ranking of my books on the Amazon bestsellers lists.

6. I find Tweets useful for occasional short rants or questions that aren’t worth a longer post here.

Cons:

1. I find the stream of consciousness stuff extremely irritating and self-indulgent – i.e. I’m baffled as to why so many people think that anyone else (and especially total strangers like me) could possibly be interested in mundane personal waffle about their daily lives, such as going jogging, what they had for breakfast/lunch/dinner and/or whether they’ve taken their children/grandchildren to the seaside or bought them an ice cream while they were there.

2. Nor do I understand why so many quotations and management platitudes get posted on Twitter - when there are plenty of other sources, both on websites and in books (remember them?).

But, as the Pros so clearly outnumber the Cons, I’ll be carrying on with it for a while longer.

The 'detective story' principle and puzzle-solution formats

The last two posts have featured comments on using slides and visual aids by the late Sir Lawrence Bragg.

But he also had a good understanding of the effectiveness of story-telling and leading audiences to the solution of a puzzle in presentations:

'There is a most important principle which I think of as the 'detective story' principle. It is a matter of order. How dull a detective story would be if the writer told you who did it in the first chapter and then gave you the clues.

'Yet how many lectures do exactly this. One wishes to give the audience the aesthetic pleasure of seeing how puzzling phenomena become crystal clear when one has the clue and thinks about them in the right way. So make sure the audience is first puzzled.

'A friend of mine, a barrister, told me, that, when presenting a case to a judge, if he could appear to be fumbling toward a solution and could entice the judge to say "But, Mr. X, isn't the point you are trying to make this or that?" he had as good as won the case.

'One wants to get the audience into this frame of mind, when they are coaxed to guess for themselves what the answer is. Again I fear I am saying the trite and obvious, but I can assure you I have often sat and groaned at hearing a lecturer murder the most exciting story just by putting things in the wrong order.'

(From Advice to Lecturers: An anthology taken from the writings of Michael Faraday & Lawrence Bragg, London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1974, ISBN 07201 04467).

Although Bragg was dealing here with the overall structure of a lecture or presentation, much shorter puzzle-solution formats are also one of the main rhetorical techniques discussed and recommended in my books, and I posted some video clips of them triggering applause HERE.

Showing what you mean: more from Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg

The previous post featured a comparison between the use of slides and drawing on a board by the late Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg, who continued the Royal Society's Christmas lectures for children that Michael Faraday (left) had started in the nineteenth century. Here's a related gem from Bragg'*:

'To the layman the difference between the description of an experiment and the actual witnessing of it is as great as the difference between looking at a foreign country on the map and visiting it; we grasp its geography in a far more vivid way when we have been to the place.

'One is struck again and again by the immense superiority, as judged by the effect on the audience, of a series of experiments and demonstrations explained by a talk over a lecture illustrated by slides. The Christmas Lectures to young people at the Royal Institution afford a good instance.

'It is surprising how often people in all walks of life own that their interest in science was first aroused by attending one of these courses when they were young, and in recalling their impressions they almost invariably say not 'we were told' but ‘we were shown’ this or that’ (Bragg’s own emphasis).

(*Advice to Lecturers: An anthology taken from the writings of Michael Faraday & Lawrence Bragg, London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1974, ISBN 07201 04467).

A Nobel prize winner’s view on slides versus ‘chalk and talk’

One of the best things I’ve ever read on presenting complicated technical material to audiences is an anthology published by the Royal Institution that was taken from the writings of Michael Faraday (19th century pioneer of magnetism and electricity) and Lawrence Bragg (20th century Nobel prize winner).

Both of them were famous for their ability to take audiences, whether lay or professional, to the frontiers of science.

Writing decades before the invention of PowerPoint, Bragg had this to say about slides and ‘chalk and talk’ (which isn't a million miles away from some of the points in my last three posts on the subject):


'Lecturers love slides, and in a game of associations the word 'lecture' would almost always evoke the reply 'slide'. But I think we ought to apply to slides the same test, 'What will the audience remember?'

'Some information can only be conveyed as slides, photographs, or records of actual events, such as the movement of a recording instrument, for instance, a seismograph. But slides of graphs or tables of figures are in general out of place in a lecture, or, at any rate, should be used most sparingly, just because the audience has not time to absorb them.

'If the lecturer wishes to illustrate a point with a graph, it is much better to draw it, or perhaps clamp the component parts on a magnetic board or employ some device of that kind.

'I remember well the first time I was impressed by this latter device, during a lecture on airflow through turbine blades. The lecturer altered the angle of incidence and the air arrows by shifting the parts on the board.

'It is again a question of tempo – the audience can follow at about the rate one can draw (my emphasis); one is forced to be simple, and the slight expertise of the drawing holds attention. One must constantly think of what will be retained in the audience’s memory, not of what can be crammed into the lecture.'

(From Advice to Lecturers: An anthology taken from the writings of Michael Faraday & Lawrence Bragg, London: The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1974, ISBN 07201 04467),