Cameron's speech: who thinks he should be seen pretending not to use a script?

It is very well-known that technology can have a marked impact on how effectively speakers come across to an audience - as anyone who's ever been at a PowerPoint presentation knows only too well (see also HERE).

So a matter, if not the matter,  arising from this year's party conference season is just how effectively do speakers come across when they pretend not to use a script?

Three 'scriptless' leaders
Because this year, we saw Ed Miliband repeating the feat of memory that worked so well for him last year, while Nick Clegg and David Cameron relied on huge teleprompter screens that were hidden towards the back of the audence - as did  George OsborneJeremy Hunt and no doubt a few others .

Of the party leaders, Miliband showed us that he could indeed do it again and Clegg showed us (as I've long suspected) that standing at a lectern works better for him than wandering about the stage like a management guru.

But Cameron was more disappointing than usual, not least because he's a talented enough public speaker, whether speaking from a script or from memory, not to have to rely on such gadgets. You don't have to watch very far into the above to notice that his head and eyes don't always move in time together: his head sometimes turns slightly while his eyes stay firmly glued to the screen directly in front of him - rather like some of Margaret Thatcher's problems when she spoke from Autocue screens.

Where is the advice coming from and what's the evidence for it?
As has often concerned me about the BBC's obsession with PowerPoint style news and current affairs coverage, what gave them the idea that audiences like it and can they point to any research that actually supports such a claim.

So for Messrs Miliband, Clegg and Cameron (and their aides), I have a similar question or two.

Who has advised you that it's a good idea to be seen to be pretending not to have a script and have they shown you any empirical evidence that supports their claim. If so, what is it and where can I see it?

If not, why on earth are you taking any notice of their advice?

(P.S. And some questions for Mr Miliband: who thinks it's a good idea to have some of the audience behind you and do they have any evidence to support their claim? If so, what is it and where can I see it? If not, why are you taking any notice of their advice?)

Related posts

Did George Osborne get away with reading his speech from the back of the hall?

Embedded image permalink

Gigantic screens at the back of the hall, big enough for speakers to read their scripts from, seem to be replacing more traditional teleprompters (like Autocue) this year.

The picture above was posted on Twitter earlier today by Paul Waugh during George Osborne's speech at the Conservative Party conference - and retweeted as follows by John Rentoul, who had presumably also noticed similar goings on at the Liberal Democrat conference:  

"Very Nick Clegg RT @paulwaugh: Autocues in the audience for Osbo speech.. Helpful for any soundbites we miss."

This raises at least two questions that our politicians might like to consider.
  • Do they really want comments on their latest gadgets to become a focus of attention for journalists?
  • Does this technological gadgetry help them to improve the delivery of their speeches?
The answer to the first of these questions is presumably "No" - unless, of course, they're quite happy about reporters being distracted away from the content of the speech.

And, on the evidence of today's performance by Mr Osborne, the answer to the second is also a resounding "No" (but you can judge this for yourself below).

As for why this should be, I suspect that the technology and/or the script aren't in place soon enough for the speaker to get enough practice at using it before making the actual speech itself - for which he, his aides and the gadget operators would all have to make extra time when the hall was deserted..'



Some related posts on teleprompters:

Lincoln the movie: 'too many words' and 'too American' for British ears?




Last night we went to watch the film Lincoln in our local village hall - and, as something of a speech and communications nerd, it was something I had been looking forward to for quite a while.
But, from a few minutes in, I found it increasingly difficult to get two rather negative thoughts out of my mind.

1. Too many words?
One was a memorable line from the film  Amadeus, when Mozart is confronted by the complaint that his latest composition suffered from having had "too many notes." From discussions afterwards, I know that I wasn't the only person in the audience who thought that Lincoln suffered from having "far too many words".

Among other things, this had the effect,  of making it the film too long. For example, when individual members of Congress started to vote on the crucial amendment one by one, I wondered just how many hundreds of these we were going to have to sit through.

2. Too American?
I'll admit that our village hall film shows do have a problem with the sound quality, so it was also a relief to learn afterwards that I hadn't been to only one there who had trouble hearing the dialogue. Leaving that to one side, however, there was something else that was difficult to get out of my mind -  that I'd implicitly touched on in a recent presentation on on how well does English work as a common language.

This was the fact that differences between American and British culture may have ensured that Lincoln was unlikely to impress British audiences as much it had apparently impressed audiences on the other side of the Atlantic.

Before the film started, another member of the audience had already said to me "I don't know much about American history and I've really only come because I felt I ought to - I might learn something."

Too Ethnocentric for a British audience?
And here lies the rub. We Brits really know very little about the history of the USA, let alone its constitution or how it works.

We do know that they had the audacity to declare their independence from us, that they had a civil war that led to the end of slavery - though not the end of segregation (HERE) - and that they had opted to have a president rather than a monarchy.

But most of us know very little about the separation of powers between the legislative and executive arms of government, nor about the differences between the individual constituent states of the USA and the federal government - or the machinations between them that this gives rise to.

So for us, some of the basic assumptions at the heart of the film were at best culturally strange and at worst, completely foreign to us.

Vices & virtue as drama?
Apart from the characters of Lincoln and his family, it was never really made clear who everyone else was and we were left guessing who they were and which side they were on, whether in the ongoing debate or the civil war itself. All too often conversations sounded more like a succession of speeches or soliloquies, as when Mrs Lincoln had a row with her husband.

But, however unrealistic, unclear or plain boring the script might have been to British-English ears, the superb acting of Daniel Day Lewis not only deserved  all the acclaim and awards that he received for it but was main thing that made it worth seeing at all,

Now we've had an Anglo-Irish actor making such an excellent job of playing a US president so soon after an American actress (Meryl Streep) apparently played a British prime minister (Margaret Thatcher) rather well, we may even be witnessing a promising trend that might actually bring our two cultures a bit closer together.

But that may depend on whether screen-script writers on each side of the Atlantic take note of the famous line that's widely attributed to George Bernard Shaw - England and America are two countries divided by a common language - but which he apparently never said...

Next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation. 10-11 October

Is it really 5 years since my blogging (or vanity) began?

Today this blog marks its fifth anniversary.  

Blogging hadn't really occurred to me until Michael Crick, then of BBC 2's Newsnight programme, and now at Channel 4 News, suggested to me that it might be a good idea.

I suppose he must have already known that the rise of the internet and social media, etc. had severely limited the chances of 'specialists' like me to get their output published in the mainstream media.

But I have to admit that it's rather a mixed blessing to be able to 'publish' anything you feel like writing without any kind of editorial comment, feedback or control..

A few of the 998 blogposts (so far) were based on material that had already appeared in newspapers. But the vast majority never did.

There was, of course, a time when to publish you own writings was referred to as 'vanity publishing'.

But a big difference between 'vanity publishing' and blogging is that this costs you very little other the hours you spend on it.

Whether or not it's proof of my vanity, I'll leave others to decide. To help on yout way, I've decided to mark the anniversary by putting links to old posts from the archives on Twitter - the first one of which outlined some tips for Gordon Brown's party conference speech in 2008.

Next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation. 10-11 October

How well does English really work as a 'common language' of communication?


(Script of my presentation at last week's European Speechwriters Conference).

This talk has been prompted by a number of experiences running courses on speechwriting and presentation in various parts of Europe.

Like some of my previous presentations at UK Speechwriters’ Guild conferences, it poses more questions than it answers. But at least it may open a discussion of possible interest and relevance to many of you here today.

All the courses on speechwriting were conducted in English

None of those attending was a native-speaker of English.

But all of them had the job of writing speeches in English, to be given by other non-native speakers of English to audiences of yet more non-native speakers of English.

We who have been native speakers of English since acquiring language in the first place (and who have little need to develop a command of any other language) cannot help being full of admiration for the fact that they can do it at all. But the challenge they face brings three true stories to mind, and raises at least three questions worth discussing.

Speaking to non-native speakers (1) 
The first time I ever spoke to an audience of non-native speakers of English was more than three decades ago at an academic conference in the Council of Europe chamber in Strasbourg.

It was long before I'd developed a technical interest in how audiences react to public speaking. when my main experience had been listening to academics read out papers at other academic conferences.

I was to present a 30 page academic paper, for which I had been allocated 5 minutes.

So I decided (very unwisely) to read it aloud as quickly as possible and see how far I got - which wasn't very far. After about half a minute, the chairman interrupted me. 

The  simultaneous interpreters had complained that they couldn't keep up with me speaking at such a pace, so he asked me to slow down.

Speaking to non-native speakers (2) 
Later on, at another academic conference at the University of Konstanz, I could tell that my audience was looking increasingly puzzled by what I was saying.

By then, I had become a bit more sensitive to the needs of my audience and came up with what might have been a suitable strategy: simplify, simplify, simplify.

Suitable strategy it might have been if only I hadn't use more colloquialisms and slang to 'simplify' my points. And that, of course, was no solution at all, as it made my talk even more unintelligible to the audience than it had been in the first place.

Speaking to non-native speakers (3)
In the third example, I wasn’t actually speaking but was in an audience of mixed,  nationalities, mainly from Europe, at a conference in Urbino.

It was a memorable lecture analysing a letter by Pliny the Younger by the well-known semiologist and author, Umberto Eco - though memorable more for what happened than for what he said.

He had just started his lecture when a group of locals demanded to know why he was speaking English in an Italian university. His response was impressively democratic and he asked the audience:

“How many of you can only speak English?”

I was one of the tiny minority of 5 or 6 native speakers of British and American English who raised their hands.

In response to which Eco quickly rephrased his question:

“For how many of you is English the only foreign language you can understand?”

The vast majority of hands now went up, to which Eco turned to his compatriots and said:

As my lecture was advertised to be in English and the only language most people here understand is English, I shall give my lecture in English” – at which point, the rebellious Italian minority walked out.

Lingua Anglica
So, although English may have become Europe’s new Lingua Franca its dominance is not always without its problems.

Speaking more quickly and simplifying via colloquialisms and slang are obviously no solution.

And there is quite a lot of good news. For one thing, the same rhetorical techniques are just as effective in getting messages across in any particular language – and have been for at least 2,000 years since the classical Greeks began teaching and writing about rhetoric.

For example, I remember when writing Our Masters Voices, Francois Mitterand had just been elected President of France – and the one line that was widely quoted in the British media was a poetic contrast with alliteration.

In English his aim was translated as: “My aim will be to convince, not to conquer.”

The original French version must have arguably sounded even more poetic, with its simple rhyme:
á convaincre, pas á vaincre." 

Stories & imagery
Nor is it just rhetorical techniques like contrasts and three-part lists that work effectively to get messages across in any language. The same is true of using stories or anecdotes to illustrate your key points.

Other forms of imagery can also work effectively in any language, but metaphors do sometimes need handling with care, especially in the case of sporting metaphors.

As a native speaker of British English, I often find myself bemoaning the fact that we have imported so many baseball metaphors from American English,  even though it’s not a game that's played or understood by most British adults.

But that doesn’t stop us having to listen to fellow British presenters telling us about “Going up to the plate” or “getting past first base”.

Cricketing metaphors may be fine for speakers of English in Australasia, the Caribbean or the Indian sub-continent, but they're not much use in  the USA, or indeed in the rest of Europe.

What do they really mean?
All of which brings me to some rather obvious questions, about which I'm curious, but to which I have no obvious answers.

Although English is so widely spoken around the world, how well is it actually understood?

Or, going back to my opening comments, how effectively are non-native speakers of English who give speeches written by other non-native speakers of English to audiences of yet more non-native speakers  of English?

I used to do quite a lot of work with the director of communications at a British company that had recently been taken over by a Dutch company.

When I made some remark about how lucky they were that the Netherlands was part of the English-speaking world, he replied:

“Yes, their English is very impressive – but there are times when we’re not quite sure whether they’ve really got the point.”
  
The crunch question
It was a similar story from a Japanese student in Oxford who was studying for a PhD.

As she had spent many of her teenage years growing up in the USA, she was fluent in Japanese and English, which enabled her to pay for her studies by doing simultaneous translation at high level business meetings.

After one such meeting between Japanese and British motor manufacturers, I asked her how it had gone – to which she replied:

“OK as far as it went, but I do think that they should pay me for an extra hour after the meetings so I could tell them what I think they really meant.”

Her point, of course, was that the simultaneous literal translation was all very well, but she was also noticing and interpreting a good deal more than the words that were actually coming out of the Japanese mouths.

And what she thought they really meant was a potentially valuable asset in the negotiating process.

Three questions 
Many of you in this audience will have had first hand experience of such issues, so I'll end with three questions in search of an answer.

How important do you think the problem of translating what speakers really mean is.

Does the use of English as a common language mean that there’s something unavoidably cloudy about the way the countries of Europe – and the wider world - are communicating with each other?

And if listeners are not quite understanding what a speaker really means, how much does it matter?