Max Atkinson's Blog

'I was flattered' 'to be told' that my thoughts on the passive 'had been noticed'...

One thing I've noticed about unsolicited comments on one of my books is that I'm often surprised by what a reader had actually noticed, especially when it's a passage that you'd forgotten you'd ever written - which is what happened in this particular case: a short section on when speakers might find the passive tense useful and occasionally ignore the blanket recommendation against it by the designers of grammar checkers like the one that comes with Micosoft Word.

Twitter's response:
Another thing I've now learned is that Twitter can generate some interesting and unexpected interpretations of whatever it is that you've written.

About a week ago, Brad Phillips posted a blog asking 'Why passive language isn't as bad as you think'. In a later tweet, he asked "What did you think of @maxatkinson's arguments for strategic times to employ the passive voice?" which prompted Ned Barnett (@nedbarnett) , to whom thanks also, came back with the following series of tweets (with my reaction to each one in red):

"No offense to Mr Atkinson, but I thought his example of research was weak and straw-manish, deflecting... (reading it again, I didn't think what I wrote about its use to convey 'generality, objectivity and detachment' was too far off the mark).

"There are uses for the passive voice, but not in PR, speechmaking or to the media - it's a responsibility dodge... (Agreed).

"his most telling examples were the bureaucratic ones, where responsibility must be avoided at all costs... (Agreed, but I thought that's more or less what I'd written)

"In the real world. there aren't many cases where passive voice statements can't be improved by active voice." (Maybe, but I'm less than fully convinced by this).

As I have no problem with most of what Mr Barnett said, I was a bit disappointed that there was very little for us to have an argument about. I was also disappointed to realise that he (and presumably other readers) might have fewer grounds for complaint if only I'd been taken more care about how I had worded the original.

On the plus side:
But I'm still very grateful to Messrs. Philllips and Barnett, not only for spreading the word about my book to a much bigger English-speaking market than there is in the UK, but also for getting me to think more closely about two other speeches where detachment and neutrality definitely did matter or does matter.

I'm referring to Nelson Mandela's speech on release from prison and those of the annual Queen's speeches to the UK parliament. I hadn't inspected the texts of the speeches to see whether or not the passive features in them, but it's something that may now be well worth doing - as background to which, see The Queen's Speech: an exception that proves the ruler).

(Details of my next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation are HERE).

Is Paddy Ashdown reverting to type after 32 years?

Paddy Ashdown's speech to the Liberal Democrat Conference earlier today made me wonder whether he might be reverting to type after the 32 years since he made his first televised speech at a Liberal Assembly.

Although not wearing a tie may have recently become the fashion among top politicians (and business leaders), it certainly wasn't in 1981 - even if you were a prospective parliamentary candidate who was going to have wait another two years before knowing whether or not you would succeed in becoming an M.P.

But that didn't stop the young PPC for Yeovil, who spoke sans tie and sans suit - though, as I noted in my original post of the clip, 'the podium unfortunately prevents us from seeing whether or not he was also wearing sandals' (HERE):

In the same post, I also noted 'This was Ashdown in post-military mode, barking out his lines to the troops' , and I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be quite a lot of 'barking' in the way he delivered his lines to the troops this morning (see the above clip).

But in one aspect of his delivery this morning he was not reverting to type, as he seems to have taken a leaf out of Nick Clegg's book when it comes to the apparently unscripted 'management guru' style of delivery - which, as regular readers will know, I regard as something of a mixed blessing, at least until the jury returns...

Other posts on the 'management guru' style of speaking:

(Next open course on Speech writing & Presentation details are HERE).

George Osborne speaks into thin air at a building site somewhere in London

Readers will know that I've been mystified by the locations at which the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer have delivered some rather important recent speeches (see list of related posts below).

Finding out exactly where, when and to whom he made his speech on the economy this morning has been quite a challenge.

The Daily Express tells us that he was at a building site in East London and, according to Sky News, he was "addressing an audience of academics, think tanks and businesses in London'.

As usual at such events, there was no hint of a response from anyone in the audience, if indeed anyone was there at all.

Also as usual, there's a weird backdrop of a blank window with a bar chart to the left that looks like a rather creative use of scaffolding - unless, of course, it's the latest in templates from PowerPoint...

Related Posts:

(Next open course on Speech writing & Presentation details are HERE).

Two speakers speak at the same time in the New York mayoral election: exception that proves a rule?

This extraordinary 'conversation' between a voter and Anthony Wiener, a New York City mayoral candidate, is making me think again about one of the most basic rules of turn-taking, namely: 'one speaker speaks at a time'*.

New Yorkers may of course be an exception that proves the rule.

But, as I lack the transcription skills of the late Gail Jefferson, my chances of demonstrating that it's merely an extreme case of 'overlap competition'**, in which they were actually closely orientating to what each other said on a turn-by-turn basis, are minimal.

* A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation by: Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A Schegloff, Gail Jefferson,Language, Vol. 50, No. 4. (1974), pp. 696-735.

**See also 'Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them.'

(Next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation details are HERE .

British students' first encounter with segregation in 1963

British students of today will no doubt be appalled to know that, by the end of our first year at university, my girlfriend and I had saved enough money from our grants to book tickets on a London to New York charter flight - for £50 return.

As it was a last minute decision to go, we hadn't much of a plan about what to do when we got there, other than to visit relations who had emigrated to North America in the early 1900s. We'd also been too late (and too short of cash) to buy the then amazing Greyhound Bus deal of unlimited travel for 99 days for $99 - so we had little choice but to hitch-hike

An early stop was in Portsmouth, Virginia, to stay with my girlfriend's great uncle Willie. Then in his 80s, he had emigrated to the USA as a young man and had developed into a typical white Southerner, a first hint of which were the numerous Confederate flags arrayed both inside and outside his house.

We'd heard about racial segregation in the Southern states of America, but had no idea that it was practised so widely or to such an extreme extent. Three examples stood out from the many:

1. To get to a local swimming pool, much needed to survive in levels of humidity we'd never before experienced, we had to walk through an area populated by black Americans. Everyone at the pool was white, which Uncle Willie explained by telling us "they have their own pool else where."

2. One Sunday, we were taken to the local Baptist church, where every face was also white. "They have their own church elsewhere", explained Uncle Willie.

3. On another day, we went to Virginia Beach armed with details supplied by Uncle Willie of bus times for getting there and back. At Virginia Beach, the only people on the beach were white, also predictably explained by Uncle Willie: "They have their own beach further along the shore."

On the way back, we realised that there was actually an earlier bus home than the one that Uncle Willie had suggested. All the other passengers in it were black, and seemed vaguely surprised when we got in - and even more surprised when we headed for and sat in the back seat.

When we told Uncle Willie about our day out, he was furious, telling us that we'd taken the wrong bus. That one was for blacks only and we should have waited for the later one for whites. What's more, as whites, we should certainly not have sat anywhere near the back seat.

A lesson we quickly learnt was that it was quite impossible to argue rationally with Uncle Willie (or any other white Southerner we met). After all, everyone knew and accepted that black people liked having their own swimming pools, churches, beaches and buses, and that the arrangements suited both blacks and whites.

Any comparison with South Africa was dismissed out of hand - not least because they didn't seem to know where it was, let alone about the kind of society the apartheid regime was running in those days (when many of us in the UK were already boycotting South African fruit and wine).

I now realise that it was only a matter of weeks before there would be a march on Washington where a black Baptist minister would be making a speech with a few relevant points about what we had just seen. Planning for the march must have been in full swing, but we never heard anyone make any mention of it.

Uncle Willie and his friends obviously had no plans for making the short journey to Washington in August, 1963 - and were no doubt greatly underwhelmed when Martin Luther King went banging on about having a dream.

(For next open course details, see HERE