What's wrong with saying "Hi"?

One of the (many) things about Twitter that irritates me is that messages from would-be 'followers' start with 'Hi' - and presumably anyone I decide to 'follow' gets an identical 'Hi' from me - even though it's a word I do my best to use as rarely as I can.

This isn't just because I don't much like imports from American English into British English, but is because "Hi" is so much less efficient as a greeting than alternatives like "Hello" or "Good morning" - especially if you're making a phone call and can't see the person who's answered it.

Some of the early work in conversation analysis took a detailed look at greeting sequences, and came up with the idea that the first thing we do when we hear a voice on the other end of a phone is a 'voice recognition test'.

The rule is: if you can recognise the voice, you should immediately let the other person know that you've recognised who it is.

So, if someone answers the phone by saying "Neasden 456789", you have quite an extended voice sample (9 syllables) on which to do the voice recognition test before the answerer reaches the end of the number. By then, if you have recognised it, you should promptly acknowledge the fact by saying something along the lines of "Hello Ron" or "Hello Mr Knee."

The advantage of this for Mr Knee is that he doesn't have to go to the trouble of introducing himself or explaining who he is or where he's from, because you've already established that you know perfectly well who he is.

Like quite a lot of rules in conversation, the rule has an 'if you can' clause to it. In other words, there's a preference for showing instant recognition over failing to show recognition - so the first option is to show that you've recognised the answerer - if you can.

This is why the word "Hi" is such an inefficient or inadequate form of greeting when you can't see the person who's speaking - for the obvious reason that a single syllable on its own may not be enough for you to be sure who it is within the split second before they've finished. As a result, you'll have to admit to them that you didn't recognise their voice, which can sometimes have quite embarrassing consequences.

This might seem a rather trivial reason for suggesting that multi-syllable words and phrases like "Hello" and "Good morning" are more efficient than "Hi". But it's not at all trivial when you're on the phone, or if you happen to be blind or visually impaired.

I know this because the person I've heard objecting most strongly about people greeting him with "Hi" is someone who's been blind from birth. What's more, the reason he gives for detesting it so much is precisely because it doesn't give him enough time to know who it is that's speaking to him - and makes him feel impolite for having to confess that he'd failed to recognise them.

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

The last thing party leaders want when making their annual conference speeches is for something in the news to knock coverage of them down in the list of the day’s headlines.

So it was bad luck for Nick Clegg that he was wrapping up the LibDem conference at the same time as President Obama was speaking to the United Nations in New York, one result of which was that Sky News opted for live coverage from across the Atlantic rather than from Bournemouth. Another was that, if you look at the online versions of today’s newspapers, it’s actually quite difficult to find any references to his speech at all on their home pages.

But the fact that much of the reaction was as feint in its praise as the quote from former Blair speechwriter Phil Collins in today's title can't just be put down to 'bad luck'

Noticeable absences
Something else that party leaders should be aware of is that ‘noticeable absences’ from their speeches don't make good headlines.

The concept of a ‘noticeable absence’ is a simple but important one in conversation analysis. It refers to instances where conversationalists notice that something that had been expected to be (or should have been) said is missing – e.g. if you don’t say “hello” in response to someone who’s just said “hello” to you.

Speeches are obviously different from conversation, but you really don’t want the media giving higher priority to what you didn’t say than to what you did say, as happened in the following headline and opening few lines in The Times (which wasn’t the only paper that highlighted the absences):

Nick Clegg ignores Lib Dems' week of woe with pitch for Downing St
Nick Clegg urged voters yesterday to elect him Prime Minister in a brazen attempt to put a difficult and divisive pre-election conference behind him.

Speaking in Bournemouth Mr Clegg failed to discuss his promise of “savage cuts”, he ignored the dispute over tuition fees and made only a fleeting mention of the “mansion tax” proposal for properties worth more than £1 million, which was intended to be the flagship policy for the week.

Walkabout woe?
Given Mr Clegg’s obsession with not being regarded as a clone of Tory leader David Cameron, repeated in yesterday’s speech with jokes about Brad Pitt, I remain baffled as to why insists on aping the management guru-apparently unscripted-walkabout style of delivery that made Cameron stand out at the Tory leadership beauty parade in 2005 – and set him on course to win the top job.

If you want to assert how different you are from someone else, why on earth would you copy that person’s distinctive (for a British politician) style of delivery? Why would you do it if you aren’t as good at it as him? And why would you do it when even Cameron has increasingly given it up in favour of looking more ‘statesmanlike’ at a lectern? (For more on which, see HERE and HERE).

I’ve asked a number of LibDem insiders why he does it, whose idea it was and what the advantage is supposed to be, but they either don't know or won't tell me.

Time to abandon autocue?
One comment submitted to The Times ‘Live chat’ feature on Clegg’s speech raised an important question:

‘Does he have an autocue problem or does he just talk that way?’

This could well be at the heart of what's holding him back – because without giant teleprompters, he wouldn’t be able to pretend that he’s speaking off the cuff (you can see another LibDem MP wrestling with the huge autocue screen HERE).

One problem of wandering about, with or without autocue assistance, is that you have to find something to do with your hands. Another is the question of what to do when the audience applauds – an issue touched on previously HERE and HERE.

The trouble is that how you handle such apparently trivial details is likely to be noticed by reporters, and you really don’t want valuable column inches being wasted by such distractions, as in the following accurate observations (in italics) from Ann Treneman in The Times:

“I want to be prime minister,” said Nick Clegg, hands clasped as he stood in a spotlight. Nick, basking in their love, stepped back for a moment, preparing himself to deliver his next bombshell announcement.

Similar details also got a mention in the Daily Mail: 'Captain Clegg looked neat and tidy and waved his hands about ... He spoke fluently, strode around the stage and clasped his palms together at appropriate moments ... Once or twice he waggled a forefinger in a way that reminded me of John Major'.

I’m not sure how far his insistence on walking about and reading from autocue screens at the same time is diminishing his performance. But his delivery does seem to attract a good deal of feint praise like that from Phil Collins in today's title and other similar reactions to yesterday's speech, like:

'he gave a workmanlike version of what a modern Opposition party leader's speech tends to be these days. But that is as far as it went', ‘a decent performance’, ‘fluent but strangely unpersuasive’, ‘there is no change in timbre in his voice, no rise and fall’, ‘I don't get the sense he really believes this’, ‘it makes you nostalgic for the rabble-rousing charisma of, er, Menzies Campbell’.

However, one thing I am sure of is that, if I were advising him, I’d get him to have a go at speaking from a lectern to see if it helped him to lift his performance beyond 'OK' and 'not bad'.

(P.S. It's great when other blogs like Liberal England pick something up from here, but I wish their readers it would take the trouble to read the whole story. From comments on the Liberal England blog so far, their complacency about media coverage of Nick Clegg's speech makes me wonder if they really are living in a world of their own).

25 years on, and all I remember about the day is baldness and chewing gum

Twenty five years ago today, Methuen published Our Masters' Voices and Granada Television began a new season of their World in Action series with the film Claptrap (which can be seen HERE).

The story of how the book came to be written, published and eventually used as the basis for a televised experiment is continuing in the Claptrap posts on this blog, and I'd been vaguely aiming at getting to to the end of it by today. But it's turned out to be a rather longer story than I'd expected and there are at least two or three more episodes that will be posted during the next week or so.

The curious thing about today is that the main things I can remember were two details in the way Ann Brennan and I reacted when we saw the film for the first time at the London offices of Granada for the press preview before the film went on air later that day.

Ann was upset by a close-up shot of her chewing gum just before going up to make her speech. She never chewed gum, didn't like the sight of people chewing gum and certainly didn't want people to think that chewing it was a normal part of her everyday behaviour.

The only reason she was chewing it was that Cicely Berry, then head of voice at the Royal Shakespeare Company, had given it her to help relax her jaw and moisten her mouth before making the speech. But that wasn't mentioned in the commentary and it was far too late to change anything before the film went out.

I experienced a similar shock about my appearance that was beyond repair. When congratulating her at the end of the speech, the camera brought the top of my head into view, revealing the beginnings of a bald patch - that has progressed a great deal further during the 25 years since then.

Apart from these two trivial details, I remember hardly anything else about what happened that day.

Given some of my posts criticising over-stated claims about the importance of body language and non-verbal communication, I find it rather depressing that, 25 years later, the only things I remember clearly about that day had to do with what we looked like, rather than anything either of us actually said in the film!

Beware of mobile phones and 5-part lists

If you're looking for sample clips of how not to do it, go no further than the BBC Parliament Channel during the party conference season - if you can bear to sit through one dire speech after another.

Its apparently random editing as the picture switches from speaker to audience also throws up the occasional gem - or maybe it's not so random, but is deliberately done to show that some people in the audience have more important things to do than hanging on the speaker's every word.

Tonight I spotted this one, which highlights a problem with mobile phones that's all too familiar to those of us who regularly speak in public.

It also illustrates the kind of response you're likely to get if you're rash enough to use a 5-part list (i.e. none) and the fact that using an autocue doesn't guarantee a brilliant delivery.

Not the LibDem Conference – BBC website news

The title of yesterday’s post ‘Not the LibDem conference in Bournemouth’ was not intended to imply that the Liberal Democrats are not holding their annual conference there this week, but to highlight another conference in the same town.

But if I had anything to do with LibDem communications, I’d be very worried indeed that there isn’t a single reference to the conference in the top 11 stories being headlined on the BBC website a few moments ago, which gave the following stories higher priority than anything going on in Bournemouth:

• Attorney General is fined £5,000
• Killer mother jailed for 33 years
• Autism rates back MMR jab safety
• Police clear French migrant camp
• Baggott to 'take police forward'
• Building companies fined £129.5m
• Rape victims treatment reviewed
• Airlines plan 'to cut emissions'
• UK rivers failing new EU standard
• 'Open internet' rules criticised
• Gilbert the whale dead on beach

I’d also be quite worried by the results of yesterday’s poll about their leader’s recognisability (also from the BBC website):

'More than one third of British people have not heard of the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, a poll conducted for BBC Newsnight suggests. The 1,056 UK adults canvassed were asked for their opinion of him. Thirty six percent had a favourable view of Mr Clegg, but an equal number said they had never heard of him.'

Nor is this the first time that media coverage of the LibDems (or lack of it) has got me wondering whether the party has a communications department at all (see also HERE and HERE).

However, as this is a 'non-aligned' blog, my interest in the problem is entirely 'academic'.

Claptrap 5: In the right places at the right times

This is the fifth 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.

Part 2: Eureka! is HERE
Part 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre is HERE
Part 4: How to get a book published is HERE

If a chance meeting on a Croatian beach had broken the deadlock of 22 rejections slips (Claptrap 4), another similar encounter resulted in Our Masters’ Voices being promoted to a much wider audience than expected.

How it happened and where it happened made it difficult not to believe that fate was working in mysterious ways – as it’s unlikely that any of it would ever have happened if I hadn’t been a research fellow at Essex University more than fifteen years earlier.

Another chance meeting

I mentioned in Claptrap 4 how easy it had been to get academic books published during the 1970s – so easy, in fact, that my PhD thesis had been published, more or less verbatim, by the Macmillan Press (Discovering Suicide, 1978).

Although I knew that sociology students, from ‘A’ level to universities, were all required to know about Emile Durkheim’s classic Le Suicide (1898), it hadn’t occurred to me there was therefore a market for secondary reading on the subject, especially if it was cheeky enough to question the methodology of such a famous founding father of the discipline.

One result of this was that some of my earliest publications had penetrated as far as the ‘A’ level syllabus. A spin-off from that was that I found myself being invited to speak at sixth form conferences, where bus-loads of reluctant school children were treated to the dubious pleasure of listening to some of the authors whose work they were supposed to know about.

At one such conference, I bumped into someone I’d known from when I was working at Essex University. By then, Ivor Crewe (left) had become a professor in the department of government, and his work on elections meant that he too was getting invited to speak at sixth form conferences.

When I told him about the clapping research, he became interested enough to ask me to send him some samples of what I’d written so far – which I did.

An invitation to meet the media
A few months later, he invited me to speak at one of the most fascinating conferences I’d ever been to. In those days, Ivor Crewe and Tony King used to organize a weekend at Essex University on ‘Political Communications’ during the most recent general election campaign.

They were planning the one on the 1983 election, which was scheduled for the early spring of 1984. A paper from me comparing the performances of Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot during the campaign, they thought, might give a novel angle on their usual proceedings.

What made their conferences so different from all the other academic conferences I’d ever been to was that it wasn’t just attended by academics, but also attracted people from politics, the media, opinion polling, etc. So speakers at that first one I attended included Cecil Parkinson, fresh from presiding over Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, Austin Mitchell, M.P., Robin Day and Peter Snow from the BBC, Gus Macdonald from Granada Television, Bob Worcester from MORI, representatives from the advertising agents used by the main political parties - as well as leading academics from politics and government departments around the country.

The mood of these conferences was best summed by the delegate who told me that what newcomers had to understand about them was that all the academics there wanted to be on the media and all the media people there really wanted to be academics.

'Opening Pandora’s box'
As no one there knew who I was, let alone anything about this still unpublished research into clapping, the comparison between Thatcher and Foot depended on my starting off with a selection of introductory video clips illustrating the main rhetorical devices that trigger applause in speeches.

Before the session was over, two notes had been passed up to me at the front. One was from someone asking for a copy of (the yet to be published) Our Masters’ Voices to review in his column in The Times. Another was from someone asking me to go on his TV show.

By the end of the weekend, people were saying that what I’d shown them had been like watching someone opening Pandora’s box, and I’d been approached by five different producers and/or presenters about my work being featured on five different television news and current affairs programmes.

It was as if the media interest in that first lecture I’d given a few years earlier (Claptrap 3) had suddenly started to explode. It also reminded me of the secret vow I’d made not to go on television again until I’d published a book on the subject.

A kindred spirit?

Of all the media people I met at the conference, the one who intrigued me most was Gus Macdonald (right), who was then still with Granada.

It wasn’t just his unusual background – a former ship builder from the Upper Clyde with little in the way of a formal education – but he was the only person there who’d spotted that there might be a connection between what I was doing and the work of one of my heroes, Erving Goffman. Gus, it turned out, was a Goffman fan too and one of our meal-time conversations must have made those nearby wonder what on earth we were talking about.

I was also intrigued by his parting words as we were all leaving. He shook me firmly by the and said “Don’t sign up with any of these other bastards until you’ve spoken to me.”

There’d been no promises and no hints about what he might have in mind. But he sounded so emphatic and decisive that I couldn’t get his words out of my mind when some of the ‘other bastards’ did start phoning a few days later (on which more in Claptrap 6).

Coincidental domestic footnote

The Essex post-election conferences eventually became part of the EPOP group of the Political Studies Association. One of the co-organisers of the last one I went to was my son, Simon Atkinson, who has worked for MORI (now IPSOS-MORI) for nearly twenty years.

Bob Worcester, the founder of MORI, assures me that no nepotism was involved in his appointment. Sociologists who know of my early diatribes against survey research and quantitative methodology will find this very easy to believe - and will no doubt appreciate the irony of my having a son who was to became a senior manager of the UK's leading polling company.

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

Not the LibDem conference in Bournemouth

Before last week, I'd only ever been to Bournemouth to attend LibDem annual conferences - and I haven't done that for at least 10 years.

But I did go to another conference in Bournemouth on Friday, the first Annual Conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild, whose founder, Brian Jenner, is to be congratulated for making it possible for about fifty people with this apparently esoteric interest to spend a day together.

One of the most fascinating talks was by Phil Collins, former speechwriter to Tony Blair, who had an interesting and plausible line on the main theme of the conference, 'Why is there no British Obama?' - which he developed further by explaining why he thinks it unlikely that there will ever be a British Obama.

But for speechwriters, one of his more interesting revelations was about the difference between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in their approaches to speechwriting.

Blair was not only a good writer (as we've all known since long before he became leader of the Labour Party) who wrote quickly and effectively with a fountain pen, but he also understood the importance of using other people's material as well.

The more computer-literate Brown apparently prefers DIY and makes little or no use of material from other writers. In stead, he's continually composing, reworking and storing his own lines about different subjects on his hard disk, and then cuts and pastes different sections according to whatever his next speech is going to be.

For me, this shed interesting light on some of the comments I've posted over the last year, and especially those bemoaning his tendency to pack far too much information and far too many numbers into his speeches (see below).

If he had a better understanding of the importance of keeping things simple, or listened to and/or used speechwriters who do, this might be less of a problem for him.

And, in the unlikely event of his still having to give so many speeches at this time next year, he might pick up a few helpful tips if he came along to the second annual conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild.

• Gordon Brown’s G20 address ignores an important tip from Winston Churchill
• How many numbers can you get into a minute?