Einstein 'chalk & talk' competition reminder

In case you missed the original announcement of the Einstein 'Chalk & talk' competition, there are only a few days to go before the closing date.

Twitter has been sending some excellent entries in my direction, and judging is going to be more difficult than I'd expected.

All you have to do is to click the link from HERE, which will take you to a website where you can write what you like on Einstein's blackboard - and then send your entry to me.

Rude remarks about PowerPoint are permitted, but won't necessarily ensure that you win the prize.

Claptrap 2: Eureka!

(This is the second in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voices and the televising of Claptrap, which you can watch HERE).

Such is the nature of the social sciences that 'eureka' moments are very few and far between. That’s why I count myself lucky to have had one, and there was only one of them, in the last 40 years.

WHY STUDY CLAPPING?
After starting to collect tape-recordings of political speeches during the 1979 UK general election, I started looking at bursts of applause about a year after that. It was prompted by a ‘methodological’ problem in the research I was doing into courtroom language.

We had plenty of tapes of court hearings, but the absence of any audible responses from jurors during the proceedings meant there was no way of knowing which parts of what was being said were having a positive impact on the audience that really matters.

The reason why applause in political speeches seemed a promising place to start was because it provides instant and unambiguous evidence that listeners are (a) awake and paying close attention and (b) approve strongly enough of what’s just been said to show their approval of it (by clapping hands, cheering, etc.).

Collecting the data was also extremely cheap and easy, requiring no more effort than recording speeches from radio and television in the comfort of your own home.

ORDERLINESS BENEATH THE SURFACE?
If I had even the slightest hunch that it might be worth the effort, it was largely thanks to Gail Jefferson, one of the founders of conversation analysis, who’d already come up with some remarkable observations about the organisation of laughter in everyday conversation.

After all, if something that seems, on the face of, it to be as disorganised as laughing can exhibit such unexpected regularities, there was at least a possibility that there might be something regular about clapping too.

Apart from being willing to look for orderliness in the least obvious places, another crucial lesson I learnt from Gail Jefferson was that by far the best way of observing the details of talk is to transcribe the tapes yourself (as she always did).

So the time-consuming part of the research consisted of finding a burst of applause, winding the tape back a minute or two and then transcribing it, then going on to the next burst of applause, winding the tape back and transcribing it, etc., etc., etc.

EUREKA!
The eureka moment came fairly quickly. I can’t remember exactly how many transcripts I’d done before noticing that the applause wasn’t just happening at random, but was occurring immediately after a small number of very simple verbal formats (e.g. contrasts, 3-part lists, etc.). But I do know that the main regularities had started to fall into place well before I’d got to the fiftieth example.

At about the same time, I got a phone call from the organisers of a sociology of language conference in Cambridge: one of the scheduled speakers had dropped out, and could I stand in for him? I agreed to do so on condition that they advertised my paper as ‘title to be announced’. Yes, I did have another courtroom language paper in the pipeline that would have fitted the bill, but I’d already started wondering whether it was time to try out the clapping data on a wider audience.

TIME TO GO PUBLIC?
When the conference flyers went out, the phone rang again. This time, it was John Heritage, my most regular partner in crime when he was still at Warwick University and I was still in Oxford.

Coming straight to the point, he demanded to know: “What’s all this nonsense about ‘title to be announced’?”

“I’m thinking of doing something on – er – clapping.”

“What?” he demanded, “Everyone thinks we’re mad enough already without you going around doing something as off the wall as that.”

There was no point in trying to tell the full story on the phone, but I was pretty keen to get an opinion from someone else before deciding whether or not to take the plunge. So we arranged to meet the next day when I’d be able to play him the tapes and show him the transcripts.

Which device I began with I can’t remember. But I do remember the gasps and startled expressions on his face as I kept saying “here’s another” and pressing the ‘play’ button, over and over again.

By the time I asked him if he thought it would be too much of a risk to air such stuff at the conference , he was more than a little encouraging: “That’s not just a paper you've got there; it could be the first of quite a few.”

It turned out he was right. Within a couple of years, I’d started writing a book and he was running a much larger scale follow-up study funded by the Social Science Research Council – and you can hear him talking to Ann Brennan about some of his findings in Part 2 of the Claptrap film.

Long before that, however, news of this first conference presentation, for which 'Title to be announced' had become 'Some Techniques for Inviting Applause', spread much wider than expected - as will be seen from the next post in this series.

OTHER POSTS IN THE CLAPTRAP SERIES

• CLAPTRAP 1: Claptrap - the movie
• 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

EARLIER BLOG POSTS ON APPLAUSE INCLUDE:
• Obama on Kennedy got more applause than ‘normal’
• Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
• How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony
• Disputing the meaning of applause
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time
• Applause for Dimbleby’s questions on BBC Question Time
• Obama’s rhetoric identifies with Martin Luther King but appeals to a wider audience
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best

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

TRAILER: Claptrap - the movie

This month, it's a quarter of a century since Granada Television broadcast Claptrap, a World in Action documentary that showed how a woman with no previous experience of public speaking was coached to win a standing ovation at a political party conference.

Between now and the 25th anniversary on 23rd September, I'll be doing some nostalgic blogging on the background to the book Our Masters' Voices, on which the programme was based, the making of the programme itself and what happened after that.

As a trailer to the main film that will be kicking off the Claptrap season, you can watch a short clip from Ann Brennan's speech HERE.

Is this blog 'LibDem' or 'non-aligned'?

Yesterday's news about being voted the 56th Liberal Democrat blog has really go me wondering whether I've been more partisan than I'd realised - given that I do try, most of the time, to be reasonably objective.

I'm also quite happy that it's listed as 'non-aligned' in the Total Politics magazine's types of political blogs.

Having checked through the 2% of previous posts that actually do mention the LibDems, I don't think any of them are particularly partisan. I hope readers will agree, but it's obviously up to you to judge for yourselves (those in italics include video illustrations):

On Vince Cable

• ConVincing Cable
• How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and rhetorical technique
• ‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the most effective order

On Paddy Ashdown

• When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric

In general

• Why haven’t the LibDems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?
• A day when LibDems cheered at being told they read a broadsheet newspaper

Blog award from Total Politics

It's quite something for a blog to receive an award voted for by readers of Total Politics magazine and Iain Dale's Diary, and I'd like to thank everyone who helped to get me to 56th in the top 75 Lib Dem blogs.

However, I do admit to being very surprised and more than a little embarrassed to see it appearing anywhere at all in the Lib-Dem list, because it's (correctly) not included in the Total Politics list of Lib Dem blogs, but is (also correctly) included in their list of 'non-aligned' blogs.

I can only assume that the votes must have come from people old enough to remember the days when I was involved as a speech advisor/writer/coach to former Lib Dem leader Paddy Ashdown - and who think (incorrectly) that I carried on in a similar capacity with all the leaders since then.

For the record, none of his successors as leader of the party has thought that they needed any help from me. But, as this blog does indeed do its best to be 'non-aligned' (most of the time), I couldn't possibly comment on whether or not I think Messrs Kennedy, Campbell and Clegg have been correct in their judgement on this particular matter.

BLOG INDEX: Sept 2008-August 2009

This is a list of everything posted since the blog started in September 2008.

It's updated at the end of each month, and you can access direct links to each post by clicking HERE or from the monthly lists on the left.

AUGUST 2009 

• Obama on Kennedy got more applause than ‘normal’
• Tabloid tirade about Ted Kennedy from the Daily Mail
• PowerPoint on BBC Radio Scotland
• Joe Biden's moving tribute to Edward Kennedy
• The Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum
• Einstein 'chalk & talk competition
• On the death of Edward Kennedy: 'the dream shall never die'
• What's 'news' about Gordon Brown not answering a question?
• Meheribian's moans about the myth
• Verdict after four weeks on Twitter
• The 'detective story' principle and puzzle-solution formats
• Showing what you mean: more from Professor Sir Lawrence Bragg
• A Nobel prize winner's views on slides versus 'chalk & talk'
• PowerPoint an the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) Glimmers of hope
• PowerPoint an the demise of Chalk & Talk: (3) The lost art
• PowerPoint an the demise of Chalk & Talk: (1) The beginning of the end
• Body language news from Germany
• Dreaming of sex costs the nation £7.8 billion a year: the cost of boring presentations
• No smoke without ire
• Mrs Clinton's gem for interview collectors
• Observing England's cricket team in the face of defeat
• Guardian ahead of record?
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• To be or not to be: a question for individuals or the state?
• BBC plug-a-book sho slot for aging new left author

JULY 2009 

• Televised interviews and political communication
• Thatcher had more teleprompter troubles than Obama
• Jargon & gobbledygook refresher course
• How many numbers can you get into a minute?
• Will The Times be investigating Lord Rees-Mogg’s House of Lords expenses?
• Why is the MoD involved in planning Harry Patch’s funeral?
• Clarke has more to say about Brown than a few weeks ago
• Book plugging news
• Why doesn’t Amazon have a Spanish site?
• Media debilitated by swine flu news pandemic
• More standup comedy from Gordon Brown
• Standing ovation for Gordon Brown after anecdotes about Reagan, Cicero and Demosthenes
• Gordon Brown’s tough decisions and/or rehearsal for defeat
• White paint, red lights and fuel conservation
• Are you ahead of reading this post?
• Nudging in a more enlightened direction
• Moon rhetoric from Neil Armstrong, JFK & Werner von Braun
• Rhetoric revival?
• Book plugging
• How to stay awake during a repetitive ceremony
• BBC plug-a-book shows: how and why is so much offered to so few?
• Puzzle-Solution formats
• BBC rediscovers the 'Lost Art of Oratory' (again)
• Welcome to visitors from the BBC website
• D-Day memorabilia from Normandy to Lüneburg
• More on body language & non-verbal behavior
• Guinea pigs
• Non-verbal communication
• A commentator likely to keep his job
• Non-verbal communication and height
• Welcome to visitors from the BBC website
• How to use video to study body language, verbal & non-verbal communication
• Is the 'Daily Telegraph' borrowing from blogs?
• More bad news for Gordon Brown
• Translation and fantasies of global domination
• Pious and expensive twaddle from strong man Straw
• There’s no such thing as a boring subject

JUNE 2009 

• Monty Python, conversation and turn-taking

• Margaret Thatcher, body language and non-verbal communication

• NLP: No Linguistic Proof

• Body language and non-verbal communication video

• The 250 posts landmark
• Another body language & non-verbal communication cartoon

• 'Check against delivery'

• Body language, non-verbal communication and the myth about folded arms & defensiveness

• Another expenses dilemma

• The urgent need for EU directives on tea-making and lunch times

• Expenses?
• Imagery worthy of Obama in speech by the Governor of the Bank of England

• News on BBC radio is sometimes very good indeed

• Dudley Moore’s ‘Little Miss Muffet’ by Benjamin Britten

• BBC Television News slideshow Quiz

• No flies on Obama!

• ‘Sound-formed errors’ and humour

• BBC Television News informs, educates and entertains without slides!

• Politician answers a question: an exception that proves the rule
• Combining rhetoric and imagery to get your point across

• Did the MP's manure come by appointment?

• Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them

• Banksy officially on show in Bristol

• Is the media no longer interested in what goes on in parliament?

• “Labour’s not for turning” – Peter Hain

• Presidential heights

• Why it suited Brown and Blair to take House of Lords reform no further

• Monty Python’s Election Night Special

• Euro-election coverage: was the BBC’s graphical overkill a violation of its charter?

• Lord Mandelspin strikes again

• Brown does a better job than Obama at the 65th anniversary of D-Day

• How Caroline Flint gave the game away about expecting a post in the cabinet

• Gordon Brown’s honesty about the death of New Labour

• D-Day 65th Anniversary (2): a reminder for Sarkozy and a challenge for Obama

• D-Day 65th Anniversary: (1) A British soldier returns to Gold Beach

• The end of free speech?

• Obama: Echoes of Berlin in Cairo

• Inspiring speech for polling day by Peter Sellers

• Pre-delicate hitches from the White House

• Body language and non-verbal communication

• 'Pre-delicate hitches' from Brown as he avoids answering a question about the Queen

• The end of the beginning

• How NOT to use PowerPoint

• Why has Gordon Brown become a regular on the Today programme?

MAY 2009
• Ronald Reagan's moving tribute on the 40th anniversary of D Day
• Driving a car can make you look younger than you really are
• Planning to say 'um' and 'uh'
• The ‘delicacy’ of Mrs Clinton’s ‘consequences’ for North Korea
• Clinton on North Korea: "There are consequences to such actions"
• Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Oscar acceptance speech
• Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor received five times more applause than ‘normal’
• Two tips for David Cameron after today’s speech on political change
• Bishops' attendance rates and allowances in the House of Lords
• Climbing out of the manure?
• Since when were Archbishops experts on democracy?
• Disputing the meaning of applause
• House of Lords expenses: Lord Rees-Mogg on gravy trains
• House of Lords expenses
• Goodbye from Mr Speaker
• What a fine Speaker!
• What a poor speaker!
• Sky Sports swindle
• Is the MPs' expenses scandal a hidden legacy of Thatcherism?
• Rhetoric wins applause for questioners on BBC Question Time
• Applause for Dimbleby's questions on BBC Question Time
• The liveliest Question Time ever?
• Why it's so easy for politicians not to answer interviewers' questions - and what should be done about it
• MPs expenses claims merely reflect British attitudes towards home ownership
• Well, well Wells!
• A prime minister who openly refused to answer an interviewer’s questions
• UK Speechwriters' Guild
• Gordon Brown's interview technique: the tip of a tedious iceberg
• Eye contact, public speaking and the case of President Zuma
• Chicago!
• Weatherization
• Notes from a large continent
• Are there more longer words in American English than in British English?
• Virgin mile-high poetry

APRIL 2009
• The Turnip Prize
• What’s the difference between a flu 'pandemic' and a flu 'epidemic'?
• Oxford professor models jeans
• A great source of videos for anyone interested in speaking and presentation
• A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question
• Jobsworthy News: Council official to walk along a path that doesn’t exist
• Was Kenneth in Wallanderland worth a BAFTA?
• A Labour leader with no interest in spin!
• David Cameron's attack on the Budget used some well-crafted rhetoric
• Gordon Brown seems to agree that Labour is ‘savage’ and ‘inhuman’?
• Poems for St George's Day
• Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King
• Budget speech boredom and television news tedium
• When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric
• Obama’s rhetoric identifies with Martin Luther King but appeals to a wider audience
• A day when LibDems cheered at being told they all read a broadsheet newspaper
• Time for Gordon Brown to say "sorry" to savers
• Burnham, Kinnock and the danger of speaking in a sports stadium
• Derek Draper – another psycho-therapist who talks too much and listens too little?
• A smear that never was
• Derek Draper breaks a basic rule of conversation
• INTERLUDE
• Gordon Brown’s G20 address ignores an important tip from Winston Churchill
• Is there an open-mouthed school of acting?

MARCH 2009
• Gordon Brown is finding the Jacqui Smith expenses story more ‘delicate’ than he says
• ‘The Lost Art of Oratory’ by a BBC executive who helped to lose it in the first place
• Another Tory speech that marked the beginning of the end for a prime minister
• Rhetorical techniques and imagery in Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown – edited highlights
• Did the media ignore Hannan because they think speeches are ‘bad television’?
• Does Daniel Hannan’s attack on Brown tell us what makes a speech memorable?
• UK media slowly wakes up to Daniel Hannan’s speech
• Media Coverage of Daniel Hannan’s attack on Gordon Brown
• It’s time Brown stopped recycling other people’s lines
• Daniel Hannan v. Gordon Brown at the European Parliament
• Jargon and gobbledygook comedy sketch
• Check the fixtures and fittings before you speak
• Why haven't the Lib Dems learnt from Obama’s use of the internet?
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides ...
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation?
• ‘From Stalin to Mr Bean’: putting two parts of a contrast in the right order
• How to improve impact by sequence, repetition and a rhetorical technique
• Brown’s ‘poetry’ heads up news of his speech to Congress
• Unexpected poetry in Gordon Brown's speech to the US Congress
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• Gordon Brown’s model example of how to express condolences

February 2009
• The day Barack Obama discovered his powers of oratory and rhetoric
• How to make reading a slide sound interesting
• PowerPoint style presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• The 'magic' of Oscar acceptance speeches
• Does Mrs Clinton really know someone everywhere she goes?
• Personality cult as an antidote to tribalism?
• Kenya holiday reading

JANUARY 2009
• Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose is the fairest democracy of all ?
• Rhetoric and imagery in President Obama’s inauguration speech
• The good news from the House of Lords
• Memorable lines in President Obama's inaugural speech?
• The great camcorder con-trick
• Obama’s inauguration rhetoric won approval for some uncomfortable messages
• Rhetoric and applause in Obama’s inaugural speech as a measure of what the audience liked best
• A line I don't want to hear in today's speech by President Obama
• The enduring challenge and importance of funeral orations
• Has talking the economy down become a dangerous self-fulfilling prophesy?
• Kate Winslet ignores Paul Hogan’s advice to award winners
• Slidomania epidemic contaminates another BBC channel
• How would Obama's rhetoric and oratory sound from a London back street?
• Clinton, Palin and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part III. The education of a female orator
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part II. ‘ The Iron Lady’
• Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: Part I. Cultural and vocal challenges
• “May we bring hope” – 30 years since Margaret Thatcher took office as Prime Minister

DECEMBER 2008
• Ready made words for Mr Obama from a previous president’s inaugural speech
• Neutrality in the Queen’s Christmas speech
• What did Santa say before “Ho, ho ho!”
• You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery
• High-risk practical joke for an office Christmas party speech
• End of year poll on PowerPoint presentations
• Obama’s rhetoric renews UK media interest in the ‘lost art’ of oratory
• Gordon’s gaffe explained
• The Office Christmas Party Speech: roads to failure and success
• The Queen's Speech, 2008
• Rhetoric, oratory and Barack Obama's 'The Speech', 2004
• "There's nothing wrong with PowerPoint - until there's an audience"
• What’s in a place name?

NOVEMBER 2008
• Content-free sermon by Alan Bennett
• 50 years since Peter Sellers recorded his memorable political speech
• Talking the economy up
• Talking the economy down
• Why lists of three: mystery, magic or reason?
• Tom Peters: High on rhetoric but low on content?
• Bobby Kennedy nearly got it right about Obama
• ‘Reliable sources' on where Obama’s 'Yes we can' came from
• Will there be any ‘rhetorical denial’ from the Obama camp?
• The Queen’s Speech: an exception that proves the ruler
• Rhetoric & imagery in Obama's victory speech
• Not Clinton, not McCain but Obama
• How the BBC handled one complaint about Ross

OCTOBER 2008
• Another BBC News Slideshow
• Don't put the clocks back
• BBC Television News: produced for or by morons?
• Experience and inexperience in presidential campaigns
• Presidential debates – tedious television but better than commercials
• A secret of eternal youth?
• PowerPoint Peston
• Hair today, win tomorrow: baldness and charisma
• Pesky Peston?
• ConVincing Cable
• 'Mature, grown-up and statesmanlike' at the lectern

SEPTEMBER 2008
• Cameron takes to the lectern in a crisis
• Objects as visual aids
• Powerpoint comes to church
• Mediated speeches -- whom do we really want to hear?
• Wisdom of forethought?
• Time for Cameron to surf applause?
• Did Gordon Brown take my advice?
• Eternity, eternity and eternity
• More tips for Gordon Brown
• Tips for Gordon Brown's conference speech