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FREE fortnightly newsletter full of public speaking tips, techniques, humour, quotes & anecdotes you can use in your very next speech or presentation |
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Rhetoric Words are powerful. They can drive us to our knees and bring us to tears. They can raise us to the heights of joy or the depths of despair. As the Greek Sophist Gorgias wrote in 414 BC:
What a fantastic final phrase that is - " .. drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion." Wouldn't it be incredible to think that your own words could do that (OK, let's drop the 'evil' bit)? That your words were literally irresistible? Unfortunately, most speakers give hardly any forethought at all to the words and phrases they will use, or the tone they will use when delivering them. They don't even write their speeches or presentations out, preferring simply jot down notes in bullet points or headings, assuming that the actual, specific words to be used will somehow appear to them in a magical flash of inspiration once they stand up to speak. Yet all the truly great orators spent an age on preparation, and behind every perfect speech is hours of hard work. From his first speech to his last, Sir Winston Churchill (the man who, according to President Kennedy, "mobilised the English language and sent it into battle") was fanatical about thorough preparation and worked as hard in his seventies to prepare a speech as he did in his twenties. He regarded each one as a work of art, and treated them accordingly. "I do not compose quickly," he wrote. "Everything is worked out by hard labour and frequent polishing. I intend to polish till it glitters." He would spend days dictating a speech to his secretary, testing words and phrases and muttering to himself as he paced up and down, cigar in mouth. And then finally, he would sit down at his desk and revise what he had written, applying final alterations, insertions, substitutions and deletions like the finishing touches to a painting. He was obsessed with making his words pleasing to the ear and liked to think he set his ideas to rhetoric as a composer would his to music (to mix artistic metaphors). In his book ' Savrola' he writes about how his hero prepared a speech:
What Is Rhetoric? In choosing words that would "please their ears" and "stimulate their minds," Churchill was consciously using the ancient art of rhetoric, which has been with us since the fifth century BC. For centuries its study was regarded as a staple of a gentleman's education, being one of the seven 'liberal' arts (the other six were mathematics, grammar, logic, geometry, music and astronomy), i.e. those not tied to the necessity of learning a trade. However, nowadays (apart from the phrase 'rhetorical question', i.e. a question asked for effect which does not require an answer) the word tends to be used mostly in a negative sense, as in 'nationalist rhetoric' or 'crowd-pleasing rhetoric' (is that necessarily a bad thing? What is wrong in pleasing a crowd?). So what is it? Some definitions are shown below:
So we can see that rhetoric isn't some dusty, ancient art with no relevance to the modern age - it is "the art of using language so as to persuade or influence others." And isn't that exactly what you are trying to do when you speak before an audience? Your intitial reaction at this point might be, 'Hang on Nick, I don't want (or need) to be a Churchill or a JFK. I just want to learn how to make better presentations. If I started to speak like them, my colleagues or customers would laugh at me.' Well, I'm not trying to turn you into one of the twentieth century's greatest orators. 'm simply exposing you to the conscious techniques they used to make their speeches so effective. Techniques that will make your OWN talks or presentations ten times more effective, if you have the guts to use them. There are a number of these tried and tested rhetorical techniques in my Speak Like A Pro E-Manual with instructions and advice on how to apply them using ordinary, everyday language. You can also read about them here. Now here is the key bit. If you use them, you will increase your chances exponentially that your message will be remembered, for they are specifically designed to sear your words indelibly into the hearer's brain. Not specifically a rhetorical technique and more a general principle is the 'RULE OF THREES.' For some reason, the human brain seems to absorb information effectively when it is presented in this way. Think of these famous examples:
You will no doubt have noted that each of these examples involves the repetition of words or sounds. Whereas in normal speech we tend to avoid repetition to avoid sounding long-winded (in a normal conversation, Lincoln would probably have said, 'Government of, by and for the people'), there is something about repetition in formal speech which is very effective. Several of the techniques explained below deal specifically with this. For example, In his 'I have a dream' speech, Martin Luther King starts six successive sentences with 'I have a dream' and then seven with the words 'let freedom ring.' And anyone who thinks that speech is boring, repetitive or long-winded needs their head examining; it is the single most moving speech I have ever heard. Click here to learn useful rhetorical techniques that can make you 'speak like Churchill'. Famous Speeches The links below will take you to a number of famous speeches. Some of them are filled to the brim with the rhetorical techniques explained here, and in these I have highlighted them in bold print, with the name of each in brackets. No wonder they stir the blood so effectively! "I have a dream!" - Martin Luther King Jnr. Inaugural Address - President John F Kennedy "Fight them on the beaches" - Sir Winston Churchill 9/11 Speech (excerpt) - President George W Bush General Patton's address to the Third Army on the eve of the D-Day Invasion Elizabeth I's speech to the English army on the eve of the Spanish Armada "The Iron Curtain" - Sir Winston Churchill Note how most of the language they use is very simple. The 'we shall fight' paragraph in Churchill's speech is a masterpiece of plain speaking. There are 146 words in it, and only five have more than two syllables (none of which are unusual or 'fancy': confidence, whatever, surrender, subjugated and liberation). Sometimes speakers are tempted to show off their eloquence and level of education by the judicious employment of polysyllabic words where their monosyllabic cousins would suffice (exactly what I just did then - a more effective way of saying the same thing is 'using big words when little ones would do'). Now I am not encouraging you to become a hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobe and I do not mean to floccinaucinihilipilificate about large vocabularies (just showing off there - the first means a person who has a fear of using long words, the second is the act of estimating something as worthless). It is just that simple words are usually far more effective in getting a message across. If your audience has to keep dipping into a mental dictionary for clarification, you've lost them! As we used to say in the army many years ago, remember KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. 34 Queens Drive | Mossley Hill | Liverpool | L18 0HE | Merseyside | United Kingdom |
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