Ideas That Speak

Intellectual Seriousness: Part II

2009-09-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

Intellectual Seriousness, Part II: Patience and Ideas in America

In my last post, I talked about intellectual seriousness, and as a follow up, let’s add intellectual patience to the list.

We’ve all heard about the “town halls”, with the anger, misinformation, fear, and antagonism that many of us hoped and expected the last presidential election would put behind us.

The hopes, fears, and illusions around health care have proved that intellectual patience in the United States is in as short supply as ever, even with (or in spite of?) a public intellectual who can speak the people’s language as President.

I suppose the problem with the cult of the personality that surrounds presidential politics today is that so much hope and fear surrounds candidates, and Barack Obama is the largest repository of hope and fear imaginable. He appeared and still appears to personify so much possibility or so much danger, depending on your point of view, that people forget about their own responsibility as citizens to think, read, and talk to their representatives. After all, representatives make laws. The President only enforces them, or, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But we left that constitutional viewpoint in the rearview mirror a long time ago.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama appears to be a “strict constructionalist” or Constitutional literalist in that regard. He hoped to be a facilitator in this regard, but people expect him to lead, put out his own plan, and let the individuals of Congress pick it to pieces. After all, that, too, is a representative’s job. The Founders wanted, above all, a decentralization of power, or “checks and balances”, if you will.

But I digress. Intellectual seriousness…

Right.
Intellectual patience.

Right.

I have often thought that in this most impatient of societies that two issues around which people do show intellectual patience around is the Constitution, with its complexity, and baseball. I find it remarkable that such an impetuous populace as the American one can consider baseball, the game of the lazy days of summer, with its lack of a time limit, its endless nuance, its amazing and bewildering serious of required decisions and possibilities, as the National Pastime.

But the health care debate has brought out the constituents into the streets, the Talk Show hosts, with their aging and passionate storm troopers, vs. the equally hard-charging partisans on the left, such as Moveon.org.

Lost in the discussion about health care, is the discussion of cost and health insurance, the yelling about which has drowned out the word “care” in any meaningful sense.

(By the way, I urge people to read two wonderful articles on health care, emphasizing the word care, attempting to divorce care from insurance, because the partisans on both sides are missing the boat, and enforcing a dialogue of the deaf that will necessitate that real reform from a CARE point of view will not happen.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

These two authors talk in the sort of depth and complexity that we all need to in order to fix health CARE, as well as health INSURANCE. They’re not the same thing, and only intellectual patience will get us to understand that.)

After all the shouting stops, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for what we get.
Keep thinking and grappling, people. Avoid easy answers, and get out of your comfort zone, including and particularly your intellectual and political one.

Stay tuned.

Soul Satisfaction

2009-09-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been almost two months since I’ve contributed a post, and one kind reader (I seem to have one or two) suggested it might be time for another, so here goes.

My themes have loosely followed 1) speech, particularly political speech; 2) my intellectual evolution and how I see thought/reality/consciousness; and finally 3)simply how to express yourself.

Where do I go from here?

Well, let me start by admitting why my posts have lagged at late. I certainly do enjoy writing them for the few of you who read them, and I like to think they add some value to the world of thought and communication, but at the moment, my posts aren’t tethered to the rest of my business in any substantial way.

Maybe it's time to somehow change that.

I started Ideas That Speak to contribute to both speechwriting as well as help non-profits with their fund-raising copy. No one has asked me to write speeches for them, but a couple of clients and prospective clients, have asked me to write fund-raising material. Both these entities have come from the niche I want to help the most, theatre companies.

Why? Because I enjoy writing plays.

Since I was a kid, I found that the idea of intellectual seriousness provoked my deepest interest, and I reserved my strongest disagreement with those who were and are intellectually superficial, contemptuous of ideas and implications (NOTICE, I DO NOT SPEAK ABOUT INTELLIGENCE) from professors to business people to George Bush the younger. My great challenge is to sustain intellectual seriousness, to grapple with important issues of politics, history, the “humanities” as a whole, ethics, religion, and more in every way I can, through reading, speech, thought, writing, and, especially creative writing.

Here’s a list of things I don’t like.

I don’t like it when people say that disagreements simply come down to “semantics”. Well, semantics are words. If we can’t express disagreements clearly in words, we get desperate and resort to a lack of respect and violence, so we can’t simply think that labeling disagreements as “semantic” differences is a good thing.

I dislike “easy answers”, people resorting to “usual sources” when it comes to expressing opinions that come from their “comfort zone”.

I dislike laziness and a lack of curiosity.

How do I push back positively against these negatives? Well, I write plays that incorporate playfulness and idea exploration. My latest play performed (thanks to the Vermont Playwrights Circle’s Tenfest) was The Aspirants.

In Aspirants, a chartered flight is full of people who ostensibly do one things, but would rather do the other. The only passenger, who, it turns out, has boarded the plane by mistake, who isn’t an “aspirant”, ironically, is an actress.

I won’t tell you what happens, since I hope that it will get performed again, and you might see it. Much that happens on the surface is silly, but the play’s seriousness lies in the individual’s perpetual search for not just vocational satisfaction, but soul satisfaction.

I want to write non-profit copy because so many causes out there need someone to champion language on their behalf, and I am just the person to do it; these groups bring hope and joy to the world, especially theatre companies, and we ought to help and support them any way we can.

You might say that I aspire to help them and bring deepest contentment to my soul in the process.

Stay tuned.

Words Within

2009-07-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

I had the good fortune a couple of months ago to travel to Italy for the first time.

While I could tell you about the wonders of the places I visited, I am related to people who can and have written of these regions with more skill and evocative prose than I ever could.

But, I did make an interesting discovery, or should I say rediscovery.

Ten years ago, when I was last in Europe, I was in Denmark for around a week. While I discovered, for one of the few times in my life, that I was surrounded (or immersed, as language programs like to term it) by a language other than English.

As a result, just as when I am similarly immersed in quality music, I tended to focus on my mind and its language. Instead of thinking, in “automatic pilot” fashion, in English, my mind became untethered, looking, looking to "come out to play", searching creatively for any other language it knew, in my case, German.

I spoke in German to my relatives from time to time, rather than take advantage of their excellent English.

(By the way, people have often told me that they expected my German would help me learn Danish. Believe me, it was no advantage. German tends to be much far forward in pronunciation, Danish is swallowed. In fact, if anything, Danish shares more sounds with Old English, ie, Anglo-Saxon.)

Well, at any rate, in Italy, the same thing happened. While people spoke English to us without difficulty or objection, when they could, the immersion of all surrounding textual sounds forced me inward to pay attention, and suddenly, slow down and stop the sort of “tape loop” and automatic feeding of often mindless English through my consciousness.

Why does this happen?

Well, I am neither linguist, nor neurologist, but I do meditate, and, my guess is that the mind’s sudden realization of an alien textual context gave the mind something it’s supposed to have, a task worthy of reason and paying appropriate attention.

Once that happened, that unanchored mind, instead of meandering, undifferentiated, unthinking, and unconscious, among others conversations and my own, was forced back, by a wall of ignorance, into itself.

By the way, when I finally got to engage someone in German, a charming college student from Hamburg, she was very kind, particularly as my initial attempts to get back to that second language were fumbling, indeed. But, I got better quickly, and I was proud of myself for taking that chance.

So, be bold, learn another language. If you take up that challenge with the right attitude, you’ll be on stage, an actor in the theater of speech, and you’ll appreciate your mother tongue all the more.

Stay tuned.

Ripping Off the Bandage

2009-05-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

This post is the one that resembles both dabbing at the wound with disinfectant as well as ripping off the bandage.

Neither process is pleasant, but both are necessary.

When you are ready to finalize your written or formal verbal communication, you need someone who is equal parts ruthless and blunt, even if not always a help in the most global sense.

Yes, that fearsome, loud, and uninhibited voice inside you, is, dear reader(s)(I am always hopeful that more than one of you is reading these posts) is YOUR EDITOR.

Don’t cover your ears, even though last time, I negatively characterized the logical part of your writing mind; I said, “that editor’s a killer”.

How do you use that challenging voice inside you? Allow him or her (remember, editing knows no sex) to do what it does best, by doing for the editor what you do for your listeners and readers: putting the editor in a position to do what it does best, what it is meant to do.

What is the process your internal editor is best equipped to do?

Your internal editor does its best work when ELIMINATING THINGS YOU DON’T NEED.

What does that reality mean for your writing process? It means that you put off editing until the very end, when you are absolutely certain that you have EVERY IDEA somehow expressed in your words, and the only thing left to do is make sure you have expressed those ideas as clearly as you can.

Think of your editor as someone helping you move from one home to another. But, remember, this packer is always someone who took a dim view of all your belongings; as a result of this packer’s contempt for your possessions, you invite him or her in at the very last minute, when you are sure what you are bringing, but you are not sure how to fit all those things into whatever vehicle you are using for transport. Your editor is vigorous, energetic, and always sure of things, so put him or her in charge of putting stuff into the vehicle.

Where does elmination come in? Well, for example, you want to “fit an idea” into a sentence. You know you need the idea, but you call it “very unique”. Items are “unique”, because they are one of a kind. If you add the word “very” to “unique”, you are attempting to add a degree of “uniqueness” that doesn’t help explain anything to your listener or reader.

Or, to put my point in blunt editorial terms: the word “very” doesn’t add value in this case.

The notion of “adding value” is the bottom line any time your editor forces you to question the inclusion of something. That bias on the part of the editor reinforces my point that you have to make your process of “inclusion” a final act, because you don’t want the criterion of adding value utilized to judge an idea’s inclusion, just a word or phrase’s inclusion.

As I said in an earlier post, you also utilize the editor best when you limit each “pass” or “review” of a speech or document to eliminate something, such as unnecessary words; noun verb disagreements (using a plural verb with a singular noun); using inconsistent tenses; getting rid of curt sentences that hurt flow or excessively long ones (where a subject stated in the first part of the sentence might be lost; and eliminating the passive voice (unless, as I’ve stated in a previous post, you don’t want to show clearly who is responsible or was responsible for a particular action).

Remember one last thing: as you do each edit pass, read aloud. You would be amazed at what items the ear catches, but the eye does not.

If you try to do too many things in a particular view, you are empowering the editor to now become that mover who is telling you to throw things out and not move them rather than how best to pack them in the moving vehicle. We don’t want that, do we? Of course not! When we move into our new home, we are the best judge of what we need there. We just may not know how to get it there in one trip.

Stay tuned.

HUMOR ME

2009-05-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I may have left some of you behind when writing these last posts on “composing”, following the time-tested and sweet symbolism of Vermont sugaring.

What did I leave out?

Well, despite the huge numbers of bloggers out there and people with things to say of all kinds, in all kinds of forums, other aspirants lead lives of quiet desperation in terms of self-expression, because they either believe they are not “creative”, or “they have nothing to say”.

If you blog, obviously, you’ve gotten past such obstacles. If you don’t blog, and/or you haven’t moved past these significant misgivings about yourself, in other words, if you don’t think you have artistic ability, creativity, and talent in self-expression (related challenging inhibitions involve carrying a tune), then you are going to cheat yourself out of manifesting your best potential when reading or writing.

Just humor me when I tell you that you may have more imagination as an “imagist” than you think.

Okay, now try this…imagine that you are trying to compose some ideas about writing. Write down the word “pencil”. Quick, don’t think, just write down the next association that comes into your mind.

Here’s what I wrote: pencil…drama…kerchief…melody.

Wait, turn off that left brain editor, I can hear he or she (inhibition knows no sex) saying, “Stop…those connections are illogical!”; when it comes to setting out sheer creative raw material, that editor’s a killer.

When the pencil writes,
Drama and a melody
Can weave a kerchief.

Nice little haiku, just a small, subtle, but significant clue as to how ready (and probably underutilized) your right brain, your creative part, is.

I won’t argue with your needlessly vague but self-denigrating preconception that you aren’t creative; all I’ll do is tell you that you and everyone else can free-associate.

Try it, you’ll like it, and you’ll find images you didn’t know you had.

Stay tuned.

Boiling It Down

2009-04-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

Okay…tapping’s done.

Syrup, the tasty finished product, is next…or is it?

Yeah, you’re right…we have to boil first, or in textual terms, edit.

I know, it’s a drag, the boring stuff, but, if you have the great raw material, lots of it, and you need an accordingly sweet, best-grade finished product, you have to edit.

Remember, before, I talked about tapping into a vein somewhere out there that exists, independently of you, some creative underground stream of sorts?

Well editing is about editing the aural…don’t I mean the oral? No, I mean the aural, the product of the ear.

If you hear what’s coming out of that stream you’ve found in the universe, unfortunately, you can’t simply ‘download’ it and utilize it. It’s a staging area, like the maple tree. You take some raw material from it, you boil it down, and then you have your finished product.

If you don’t make the effort to finish it, you just have sap.

Well, how do you connect to that stream out there? You hear it: as a result, the discovery is aural.

You edit the aural. How?

You remove things that you don’t need.

You make connections among sections as clear as you can for the reader or listener.

You add things that you need, but only things that “add value”. Don’t add anything unless you need to.

Read it out loud.

Then review the whole thing all over again, removing, connecting, adding judiciously, reading out loud.

Each time you do a “round” of editing, you’re looking for something different, word choice, consistency, verb tenses, length, etc….if you require too much from a single edit, the final sweetness won’t be as good as it could be.

I know, when you saw the word edit, you gulped, and your eyes glazed over, but that wasn’t so bad, was it?

Remember, no boiling, no syrup.

Now, go find a tree, and start tapping.

Stay tuned.

Tapping

2009-03-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

It’s the time of the year when the maple trees yield the sap that produces that superb gift, maple syrup.

Just the right combination of warm days and cold nights, spring’s advancing and retreating, result in maple syrup…and what is it, 30 gallons, 40 gallons that make for maybe a quart of maple syrup?

Well, the right words come forth that way, and sometimes you need that much textual “sap” to yield an appropriate message. The trick is to get warm enough days in your mind to make the sap flow.

How?

Get your right brain involved…free associate with a word, or a series of words, fill up a page or two of associations, without thinking, feel the shift and suddenly, you’ve connected perhaps the dullest word to the ripest, most startling image out there.

When you make that shift, you’ve hit a “vein”, the kind of word flow that’s always going on in the universe, just waiting for you to find a way into it.

But you have to share.

What do I mean? Well, in the old days, in college campuses, wisdom was “received”. Only when you’d read sufficient secondary works or cribbed notes from some exalted scholar did the powers that be permit you to push out some minimal, timid opinion.

But if you’re willing to make that shift to right brain associations to launch you on to that flood of words that you can then edit and shape, you’re already your own authority. You don’t need any tyrant to tell you how to describe what you want to describe to people in essays, fiction, poetry, or speeches.

Offer the same freedom to others. Be open to the vein that you’ve tapped into, share those images, and then be open in turn to the folks out there as you pass on the universe's wisdom.

Stay tuned.

How do you START to say something?

2009-03-19T16:36:00.000-07:00

Last time, I talked about people wanting to communicate, wanting to get something across, but not sure if what they had to offer was valuable…a sales package, an essay, a blog post, a possible conversation with someone, a letter, an email, a poem, a novel, a play…

So, if you have a gap between the urgent need or wish to communicate something and the doubt you have about whether what you have to say is worthwhile, important, or potentially of interest to a recipient, then you have a maximum amount of stress at the “point of entry”.

How do you bridge that gap?

Well, it can start with intimates that you trust, to broach something. But that approach is not the failsafe that you might think it is. Imagine how devastating it might be if someone you really care about trashes an “approach”? You are almost better trying things out on strangers.

But let’s forget the recipient for a moment, because it’s your identification with the recipient, rather than with yourself, that’s creating the gap we spoke about above.

Your need to communicate is at least as important as anyone else’s need who has already succeeded.

So, how to begin? Let’s see.

The first thing? Let it all hang out.

That’s right, just let it go, don’t worry about it being good, bad, indifferent, important, just pick your topic and write EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF CONCERNING IT, WITHOUT ONE BIT OF EDITING.

Plenty of time to do that later.

Let’s repeat that.

Just pick your topic and write EVERYTHING YOU CAN THINK OF CONCERNING IT, WITHOUT ONE BIT OF EDITING.

Or, to put it another way, imagine that, instead of writing something that uses you at the source, imagine that what you’re pouring out is simply channeling something from outside you, some force that’s bigger than you. If you allow yourself to permit that “useful fiction”, you can get away from self-blame, self-consciousness, self-criticism, and just get it out there.

Not only will you get more good stuff out there in this wildly uninhibited ‘first pass”, the good news is that the editing will be much easier…why? Because you’ll find it’s must easier to delete material than it is to come up with it in the first place, so if you provide much more than you need, you’ve just made it all so much easier.

Okay, but what if what you want to express is more oral than written? Well, you still need to start somewhere, and writing it out is the best way to do start that. Once you’ve done the “draft”, as if it’s a letter, or some sort of written piece, when you are sure you have the essentials, begin to practice speaking it out loud. Know the material cold, get rid of as much of the written aids as you can, limit yourself to 3 x 5 cards, and refer to them less and less. Lock yourself in a private place and speak it again and again.

See how long it takes, just so you know and can plan sales calls and speeches accordingly.

Once you get more and more familiar with this subject matter, you’ll make the transitions and the personalizations for particular audiences on the fly as you present this material more and more often. You won’t worry about being interrupted with questions, because you’ll have “owned” the material and feel good about it as a result.

Still skeptical?

Wondering how to tap into that “vein” out there that’s bigger than you are?

Stay tuned.

Got something to say?

2009-03-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

Last time, I talked about how your listeners or your readers can have a “stake” in you.

That’s a daunting reality, as well as an exciting one.

What happens if you’re not sure what to talk about, what to say?

Well, if you’re faced with the idea of uncertainty of how to communicate, the good news is that you have lots of company. Here are some images that you can keep in mind to understand just how widespread this challenge is.

When I used to write commercials in a radio station, I noticed that some salespeople were rarely in the office, as they had established success with an established client base. They were out as long as they had to, they came back with sales, and they wasted no time in coming back and writing them up.

Other salespeople never seemed to leave. They had what the industry deemed “call reluctance”. They were afraid to “pitch” a sales package to a potential client, even one who might have bought something from them before. Obviously, this problem isn’t unique to radio…it spans the entire spectrum of businesses that rely on sales…and just as obviously, that means every business out there!

So, you may see the same conundrum we had before. Clients are listeners, and if they need to buy your product, they need to have a stake in what you’re selling. If they don’t have that stake, then you need to make them believe they do. You need to up the risk for you, as well as the opportunity.

How does this relate to speaking and writing? 100%!

How do you “have something to say”?

EVERYONE has something to say, including you salespeople with “call reluctance”; you students wondering what to say in an essay to indicate you not only know how to write, but understand the reading material you’ve been assigned; and you speakers who are trying to “connect” with your audience.

Yes, EVERYONE has something to say. The real issue is whether you believe that what you say is important.

So, up the ante, raise the stakes, take a chance, call on someone, write something for someone, speak to someone.

How?

Stay tuned.

Do your listeners have a “stake” in you?

2009-02-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

Last time I talked about voters’ “investment” in Barack Obama, then moved to the general “investment” that listeners have in a speaker.

The word “investment” has an initial economic context, as do the words “equity” and “own”. But all these terms of moneyed wealth have increasingly taken on new fields of operation in the realms of the psychological, spiritual, and political.

So when we talk about a speaker and his or her audience we are concerned about the “currency” he or she offers the audience in their “transaction” and whether or not they accept the “gift” of that currency.

If the audience accepts the transaction, the speaker now has made the listeners “stakeholders”, at least implicitly. If the listeners begin to become at least partial disciples of the speaker, they and what they pass on comprise dividends provided by the intellectual “stock” of the speaker splitting in the event of the speech.

Curiously, the more “equity” the speaker “loses” by the spreading of his or her intellectual “wealth”, the more influential that speaker becomes through this wide dissemination of his thought. Listeners become followers, owning, at least in part, the words and ideas of the speaker.

Now, we have returned to one of the earliest distinctions I shared with you, from Kirkegaard, in my first blog post, the difference in the Danish thinker’s mind between the genius and the prophet. The prophet’s message does not “dilute” or “splinter”; a genius’ thought, however, gets “broken down”.

Keep ownership, equity, investment, and the currency of your ideas in mind as you plan your next communication.

Ask yourself whether you should worry about the essence of your ideas “breaking down” or not.

Stay tuned.

Investments, Expectation, Silence, and Deconstruction or Hedgehogs, Foxes, Part II:

2009-01-26T15:52:00.000-08:00

You may have thought, given my last post, that I prefer foxes.

Well, I may be a fox by temperament, but foxes don’t have it easy.

Look at Barack Obama.

Right now, he’s got these amazing poll numbers. People appear to understand the complexity of his mission; they appear to have patience; they appear to have a high regard for his capability.

But, people don’t just appear to have high expectations of him. They DO have high expectations of him, and all these expectations are different. That myriad of expectations is one problem; the other problem is that, for each of these voters, they value certain things above others, and they think that Obama shares the same hierarchy. He cannot possibly share the same hierarchy of values with everyone, and when all those folks who have an “investment” in him (“He’s the one I’ve been waiting for”) start to worry that he’s not who they are, his situation will get even more complex, even more difficult, because on the one side, the problems won’t go away quickly, and on the other, the expectations will become part of the problem.

Let’s follow this notion of expectations away from politics and back to speech and communication in general.

Up above, I talked about “investments” and “expectations”.

What if you’re speaking to someone, your words interest them, and you fall silent.

Well, if you’re an actor on a stage, and the folks in the audience think you forgot a line, they get anxious.

But, what if, like Harold Pinter, the recently deceased and revered “angry” British playwright, you build in silence as part of the play?

Anxiety is one audience reaction to silence; increased interest is certainly another, IF the speaker had their interest in the first place.

What has happened during the silence? Deconstruction.

Deconstruction, as a literary theory, tells us that the written text has an obvious, above the line meaning.

But Deconstruction also tells us that texts also are filled with below the line, hidden meanings.

When you, the speaker, have them, then hold them with silence, you are increasing their expectations…you are adding the words and meanings inside the listeners’ heads to the overt speech you have just paused during. Now, when you open your mouth and add words to the silence of your pause, you suddenly have a dialogue where you had monologue.

This moment of renewed speech is dangerous, yet full of possibility, not unlike the moment of truth Barack Obama faces.

Stay tuned.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

2009-01-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

If you haven’t noticed it yet as an “embed” in the “coverage” of communication that my blog is so obsessed with, I’ll hit you over the head with it now: word choice.

In order to talk about word choice, I need to start off with something else.

One of the foremost political thinkers of the 20th century, Sir Isaiah Berlin, went back to ancient times to talk about his symbols for totalitarian and non-totalitarian political systems, the hedgehog and the fox.

The hedgehog knows one big thing.

The fox knows many smaller things.

While I won’t attempt to “unpack” these symbols in terms of Berlin’s larger political points, I will talk about them in terms of word choice.

But first, a relevant anecdote.

In my ill-fated initial attempt to get my master’s degree, in Medieval Studies, I entered the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Let’s just say that things didn’t work out, and I left after one semester.

But I did learn something quite important intellectually.

I wasn’t a hedgehog. I was a fox.

Graduate school is a hedgehog experience, and I was lucky enough to realize quite early that temperamentally, at least at that time, I was NOT happy learning more and more about ONE BIG THING (or as some people term graduate school, "learning more about less and less").

How does that relate to word choice, and how does that relate to you and speeches?

Here’s how:

When you make speeches to people, in your preparation, your organization, and most important, your word choice, you need both some hedgehog and some fox.

You need a kind of intellectual center about you that the hedgehog represents, a kind of compass that lends continuity, credibility, and authenticity to every speech you do.

However, you also need the flexibility, variety, and varied excitement and inspiration that only a fox can have to “mix it up” and speak appropriately and uniquely to each and every audience.

Still not getting it?

Here’s another way of thinking about the difference I’m trying to get across.
The sharp-edged political conflicts between and among notions of what characterizes a president certainly has killed many a forest and is likely to kill more.

However, people do agree that Ronald Reagan and George Bush the younger have similar characteristics.

Presidents Carter, Clinton, and I suspect Obama are in a different category.
I am not making a value judgment, talking about effectiveness, intelligence or any other preference.

Instead, I will characterize Reagan and Bush 2 as hedgehogs.

Reagan talked about Communism for decades. Finally, sufficient people agreed with his ideas that they elected him President.

Bush 2 talked about terrorism relentlessly. At first, after 9/11, he apparent steadfastness and singularity of speech and ideas seemed exactly the sort of leadership needed. When the language persisted despite the difference in contexts that marked the later part of his administrations, doubts increased.

Carter, Bush I, Clinton, and Obama are foxes…they can work on many things and re-invent themselves in the midst of a presidency. This sort of flexibility can be just as valuable as leadership, and it can also appear to be “flip flopping”.

The hedgehog’s obsessive urge is to continually grapple with a single set of terms of reference in the world; in terms of leadership, a kind of intellectual fundamentalist can make a difference in the right context. A leader who appears to only care about one thing and expresses that one thing over and over again in a crisis, IF he reaches a point of “congruence” with his constituents, can point the way forward even in the darkest time.

However, when contexts change, the variety of tools that the fox employs can be more useful.

After almost three decades in my intellectual “Long War”, I was sufficiently established as a fox that the idea of pursuing an advanced degree not only didn’t turn me off, I enjoyed the process, and I was ready for it.

Never forget who you are or what’s important to you when you talk to people.

In between those times, never stop learning, never stop creating new terms of reference, new ways of considering context and terms, never stop trying something new, because communication means getting something across to people…always try to outfox yourself.

Stay tuned.

Reality, Part II: “Objective” Reality

2008-12-29T10:43:00.000-08:00

Okay, so what does all this have to do with speechwriting, you might ask?

Stay with me but a little longer, Dear Reader.

Someone once commented to me that “Objective Reality is about as meaningful as someone hitting .400 in spring training.” While I do think that objective reality has a sort of final significance, I also think that the term is problematic. Most people agree that material reality, from sense perception, also known as “common sense”, provides wide basis for agreement, commonly known as “evidence”.
A related issue concerning “objective reality” is the “descriptive” vs. the “predictive”.

Description of various things, whether events, objects, or whatever, can, to a degree, generate at least some agreement, based on the weighing of “evidence”. However, utilizing a description of the past in order to predict the future is “dicey”. David Hume, the greatest of British philosophers questioned whether we could expect a physical “law”, such as gravity, or the sun shining somewhere, to continually be true in the future, even though the occurrence has always played itself out in the past. He concluded that while we could, as a result of observation of past events, have a reasonable expectation of natural phenomena occurring the same way each and every time, we could not guarantee, in the manner of a “law”, that it WOULD CONTINUE to automatically occur.

What does all this have to do with speech?

Well, the art and arc of persuasion depend on compelling listeners to accept the subjective offered by the speaker. While the speaker may offer “evidence” in the common meaning of that term, he or she selects the evidence. As a result, the “values” of the speaker rely as much on the choices of his or her selection, as much if not more so than on the evidence presented.

So, the consistency of the evidence is a product of someone’s subjectivity, a combination of the objective (“evidence”) and the subjective (“choices” or “values”).

While the combination of “choice/value” and “evidence” may have moved each audience sufficiently to persuade them to agree with a speaker, the same speaker cannot guarantee that the same combination will “wow” a future audience.

Research your audience ahead of time, be flexible, and keep your expectations reasonable based on what you have observed in similar cases in the past.

Stay tuned.

Reality: Part I

2008-12-26T11:55:00.000-08:00

You know you’ve been waiting for it, and I guess I had to write about…you guessed it, “reality” and its many, many meanings.

Someone who loves words has to write about their relationship to "reality" at some point. Today's the day!

I have to start with my late father’s diatribe against philosophers: “If they’d done more dishes, they’d have known better what reality was.” I don’t ever remember him doing any dishes; I’ll leave it at that.

(Correction: Family members have pointed out that they remember him doing dishes, so I need to set the record straight in that regard; obviously, he strove, at least at some points, to attain reality, at least as he saw it. Please note these issues of consistency and selectivity in my next post.)

I can also remember the anger from a classmate who had just been introduced to Plato. She pointed skyward, like Plato in the “School of Athens”, but without conviction, only with a kind of betrayal, as if class had ruined her day. “You mean, the real world is up there?” Her single and final afterword was unprintable.

Imagine the implications: If you’re a Boston Celtics fan, the essence of Kevin Garnettness lives in the celestial “form” of Kevin Garnett, in that basketball game in the heavens than which none greater can be imagined. The Kevin Garnett who labors somewhere near where the Mass Pike begins (or ends, depending on your point of view), is only an imperfect copy.

Yes, friends, what we consider “realism” and “idealism” in current parlance were actually reversed in the Middle Ages. Realism had to do with the forms in heaven, and “ideas” were the imperfect, sense-derived human notions that individuals labored under, far removed from celestial “universals”.

Thinkers who took after Plato were known as “realists”, while those who followed Aristotle’s more earth-bound ideas (remember him pointing downward in the “School of Athens”) were Nominalists, those concerned with the “names” of things (also called “Terminalists”, after terms for things). Realists thought that you knew what a tree was because you were born with an imperfect copy of “treeness” in your mind, while Nominalists figured you looked in a book, saw a picture of a tree, then read the caption.

In the Enlightenment, when thinkers considered sense perception the baseline for reality, these “Empiricists”, or insisters on the primacy of sense perception, had to account for extra-sense images in some way, so they came up with “innate ideas”, or ideas you were born with.

You might find these sorts of disputes quaint, or not so quaint, simply irrelevant.
But they’re not.

Linguistic Analysts of recent decades still think that all we can “know” boils down to language, and the rest is, well, something that mystics worry about.

You might think that scientists would be the greatest believers in reality, or common sense; well, what about nuclear physics, particle theory, etc….when was the last time you saw a “quark” or some other sub-atomic particle?

Or, consider the ongoing, seemingly intractable disputes between religious fundamentalists and those who consider themselves more “open” to multiple realities, Biblical criticism, etc. The problem for fundamentalists is NOT convincing others of “miracles”…in fact, their insistence is the opposite. Their obsession is and must be proving that all their beliefs can be proven in material fashion so that it can be common sense reality, empirically able to test and prove. If they can make that case, then, they can say that their religious outlook is “true” and cannot be disproven. What does that need do for mysticism, that root of all religion? Such materialism, such an insistence on material, “objective” reality kills mysticism, that most subjective impulse.

Social control in totalitarian regimes, whether religious or secular, depends on just that, the control of reality for a populace at large.

Stay tuned.

Scrabble

2008-12-15T16:29:00.000-08:00

Scrabble
I am blessed with, as my sons would term it, a “ridiculous” vocabulary, so much so, that my wife accuses me of making words up. My wife’s “directness” (for which I love, admire, and prize her greatly) is an appropriate reminder that the bottom line in speech, whether speechmaking, speechwriting, or speech of any kind, is communication. The trick, of course, is knowing what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.

I have to admit that I’m a lousy scrabble player; vocabulary is meaningless in scrabble, utilization of letter capability to obtain the maximum point value…that relationship between letters and best possible use is the ballgame. A visual sense is the key to maximizing potential at every turn. I don’t have that spatial gift, so my verbal endowment doesn’t mean much. However, in my head, I play a mean game of “scrabble” in the widest sense. I do well on the conceptual boards that life presents me with at any given moment of every day.

I wasn’t always such a good player. I had the vocabulary in a superficial sense, but I didn’t “own” it. I played the game as a bystander, eager to impress others, not caring about context or communication.

That shallowness changed at college. My friends and classmates challenged me with their specificity, and I internalized the challenge; I take it up every day, looking for the right word. Plus, to let you in the big secret: I find that searching in the fraction of a second for the right word is one of the great delights of my life. Sometimes the right word is simple, sometimes the right word is complex. (By the way, just to set the record straight, polysyllabics are NOT those who practice having more than one spouse at a time.)

The major change at college occurred not only in terms of usage; it also occurred in terms of written style.

I abandoned adjectives, the passive voice, and the “one does this or one does that” mode of expression. I insisted on the declarative; after I left college and went into the corporate word, I learned just how dangerous the declarative is…it demands an unambiguous subject, a clear agent. People in business do not want to take responsibility, so the passive is a handy tool. “The numbers were given to me only last night.” Well, that action was late. Who gave them to you last night, and not two days ago? Or, dead agents become the subjects of declarative sentences, as when “The situation demands new leadership.” When was the last time a situation rose at a meeting after politely raising its hand and receiving recognition?

Speak clearly, not to impress, but to communicate. Play scrabble for your best speech: use the best letters and words you can to cover the board for maximum points.

Next time: “Reality”

Stay tuned.

Earliest Images

2008-12-10T13:28:00.000-08:00

Now that one chapter in our national political narrative is over, I’m going to make this blog broader, deeper, and more personal.

Like many people, now that the national narrative (an episode, at least), has ended, and our vicarious thrill and/or defeat has occurred, I’m returning to something more internal.

In the interests of full disclosure and full advice to those who consider speech and speechwriting essential, I’m going to work with my personal narrative and tell my faithful few readers about my dialogue with words since the beginning.

My earliest memories of my experiences with words vary. Some are episodic and good for the occasional anecdote, “breaking the ice at parties" material, while others form their own rooms in the verbal house I’ve constructed.

Some anecdotes…

At the age of four, falling in love with a particular phrase on a family vacation, “I wouldn’t say that”, and, I am sure, reaching the heights of the obnoxious.

At the age of six, cursing (I don’t remember the actual words) the siren (I don’t know what it ever did to me; it was just there) with some of my friends from the apparent safety of a tunnel in the spillway of a creek in our little town. My oldest brother, may he rest in peace, came to collect me so that I could come home and receive some punishment.

At the age of about ten, riding a bike down to a spot near that spillway, saying proudly to one of my friends, “Fancy meeting you here!”, then promptly hitting a mud puddle and wiping out. I doubt I ever rode a bike again.

As a sophomore in college, at a friend’s suite for dinner, gulping down some wine because we were in a hurry to see the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, and getting slightly inebriated. As a result, I whispered repeatedly, “That Katherine Ross, what a piece!” to the endless amusement of my friends, because I had the reputation of a straight arrow.

The more fundamental associations: Psalm settings and biblical imagery in general, famines, thirsts, deserts, sheep, all these hot and dry elements juxtaposed against the often cold and snowy reality of the upstate New York hamlet where we lived.

Probably the most striking verbal images had to do with the speech of North American Indians, particularly those in the Northeast. I became quite an expert, at an early age on the Algonquins and Iroquois of New York, and New England, part of my fascination had to do with the rich and fundamental vocabulary of these tribes. The biggest impediment to the forming of the League of the Iroquois was the Onondaga wizard, Atotarho, a sorcerer so terrifying that his hair teemed with snakes. When the great orator Hiawatha, (“He Who Combs”), along with the inspirational genius behind the League’s forming, Dekanawidah, persuaded Atotarho to lend his support to the forming of the league, Hiawatha combed the snakes from Atotarho’s hair. In parallel, Prophetic terms, Hiawatha “made the crooked straight”.

Tribal imagery was immediate and concrete. While white authorities relied on their notion of exploration, treaty, precedent to buttress land claims, the Iroquois proclaimed that they “sprang from the ground”.

And the loss of land became the most descriptive and heart-rending: “We barely have the place to spread our blankets.” Amazing how poverty's descriptions provide the richest images...

Next time: language and learning. Stay tuned.

Victory and Defeat

2008-12-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

It happened quickly, considering how long the whole process had gone on.

By election night at 11:00 EST, someone had won, and someone had lost.

Barack Obama's victory speech, as elegant as it was, paled against the reactions of an expectant and moved crowd, from small children, college students, and young adults, to veterans of many political and social battles, like Jesse Jackson.

"Yes, we can," became the coda as the curtain came down on the Obama campaign, and the curtain went up on the Obama Administration.

John McCain was gracious in defeat, calling for unity and solidarity with the majority's choice.

What do we take away from all that we have witnessed over the past couple of years?

Dismissing someone as only an "orator" or "talker" isn't necessarily an effective campaign tool.

Neither is utilizing those labels as if they negate and compromise capacity for action.

Words matter.

Let's consider this in the posts and polls and passions ahead.

Stay tuned.

Acceptance Speeches Part II: The Democrats

2008-11-04T15:32:00.000-08:00

Last time, I talked about the acceptance speeches of the Republican Party, the “classical” approach of John McCain, the aspirational outlook of Sarah Palin.
Tonight, as ballots are being cast, I am going to take a look at the acceptance speeches of the Democrats, Senator Joe Biden and Senator Barack Obama.

Governor Biden’s speech had a number of the elements that the Republicans exhibited, including the “nods” to family, the hardscrabble narrative, the attempt to make connections with the most ordinary Americans. This narrative segued into an attack on the Republican ticket and its purported connection to the Bush Presidency; Biden cast the Republicans as the enemies of common folks.

So, while Palin’s “construct” was an elite straw man of education and culture in order to make alliances with listeners, Biden’s “construct” was a secretive elite of economic privilege.

The overarching theme was a call for change, to fight the elite of economic privilege by voting Democratic.

These elements warmed the crowd up for Barack Obama.

While Biden alternated “nods” and criticism, narrative and complaint, Obama wove them all together, synthesizing more closely his humble beginnings and the circumstances that threaten the humble now.

But what distinguished his words from Biden’s was not the structure of the elements, but the cadence of the elements, utilizing the symbolism of a country whose core character he deemed better than what the last eight years have shown.

What distinguished the aspirational nature of his call was not Palin’s invitation to Republicans to vicariously emulate her individual example, but instead, to invite the country to rise above the leadership and shortcomings of the last eight years.

This alternation, between the struggles of the humble, and the call to a national transformation, formed the central dynamic of the speech. As a result, Obama used no “straw men”, he simply identified the concrete forces of opposition and change, and if anything was a construct utilized in his speech, it was “America”.

Next…someone’s victory speech, we’ll see who.

Stay tuned.

Acceptance Speeches Part I: The Republicans

2008-09-27T10:42:00.001-07:00

Last night was the first Presidential debate…

How did we get here?

Let’s look at the acceptance speeches of the nominees for President and Vice-President of both parties.

First, the Republicans, and Presidential nominee Senator John McCain.
Senator McCain’s speech was in the “classical” mode of the Presidential nominee.

He began with “nods” or acknowledgements to family, titular party heads, in this case, President Bush, even to the opposition.

The main body of his speech centered around the image of “fitness”, derived from his military background, his captivity, his fighting nature, his maverick nature, his ability to form bipartisan cooperation, his basic belief in America’s greatness, and America’s need to “return” to its roots.

These narrative components formed the tree branches on which he hung his conservative philosophy with policy pronouncements, taking his audience by the hand from the base of the tree to the top.

(As an aside, McCain blew me away last night with his use of the word “festoon” in the debate…I have NEVER heard a politician use it, and I salute him for his brave expanding of voters’ vocabulary!)

How about the new entrant on the scene, Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin?

Well, her speech also displayed some customary elements, but from a different model.

While Senator McCain certainly attempted to distance himself from Washington to a degree, he did not deny his role in it; this implicit promise of continuity, of fitness through appropriate experience, made his speech classical. He also did not deny the appropriate role of government as an aid to people in trouble, traditionally a 20th century Democratic theme, and, in the tradition of the Founding Fathers, federal.

Sarah Palin’s speech reached back to a Jeffersonian model, the politician as embedded revolutionary, anti-federal government, a theme as old as the Republic, and particularly pleasing to the Republican base of the last generation.

In this tradition, a lack of experience is not only an aid to competence and new ideas, it is an implicit guarantee of virtue.

While Governor Palin also gave “nods” to her senior on the ticket and her family, these “nods” developed into her branches. Her family became her symbol of government, and her heritage in a rural state, far from “elites”, became the gauntlet she threw down at the feet of her critics, both real and imagined.

In fact, while her choice was of concern to many (including her own party), to some degree, her deriding of “elites” was not so much a criticism of those forces, as the setting up of a “straw man” in order to invite her listeners to join her in an alliance of good and common folk.

That alliance, that partnership that she invited her listeners to join not only derided the elite, whoever that might be, it was an evocation of American “exceptionalism”, that localism that the Founders knew would be a check on the potential concentration of power in the federal government.

From this exceptionalism flows the aspirational alliance that Governor Palin formed with her listeners: I am only a Governor, a Mom, most of all a parent, just like all of you, and I can be a great person, the number two person in the federal executive, and so can you! That aspirational possibility of American politics, where American idol meets the Jeffersonian small farmer is the nexus of the Palin appeal, and one pole of the central argument about government’s role that has shaped American politics since the beginning.

The jarring aspect of her speech, was the use of one classical element: the positioning of the Vice-Presidential nominee as “hachet man” (or in this case, woman!) for her party. Deriding Obama’s work as a community organizer was jarring because such criticism could be turned against Palin. Community organizing is the knitting together of local elements and nothing if not aspirational.

The other jarring aspect of her speech was her lauding of McCain’s federal experience while also distancing herself consciously and proudly from his heritage, a balancing act she did not quite bring off.

But, then, this balancing act is the discomfort at the core of the Jeffersonian small government position: we must take over the government to make it smaller and more responsive, even if that act of dismantling in a sense makes the government more intrusive.

I’ll examine the other side of that argument when I review the Democratic acceptance speeches in my next post.

Stay tuned.

Competing Goods and Inhumanity

2008-08-10T16:08:00.000-07:00

Speaking about humanities and inhumanities necessarily leads to a discussion of needs and a hierarchy of needs.

One way of organizing needs, at least in a political sense what I tend to call a Pentagon of Ends.

What are these five ends?

Freedom, Wealth Creation, Social Protection, State Survival, and Group Identity/Actualization.

Does the pursuit of these ends by governments and/or individuals lead to a harmonious, balanced, and comprehensive result or series of results?
Unfortunately, while all of these ends are worthy in themselves desirable in combination, the pursuit of them individually leads to a kind of competition.

Let’s examine each of these “ends” in turn, and use the United States and the most prosperous countries of the EU as testing grounds for how these ends play out.
Freedom in these countries exists in a reasonably comprehensive manner; so does the ability to create wealth through starting businesses, with protection of efforts to create and grow wealth promised by the rule of law.

Both of the above ends speak to absolute goods.

Meanwhile, social protection, the existence of unemployment insurance, health insurance, and similar measures, while sharply different in the United States from the countries of the EU in certain respects, provides recognition of issues of relative means and inequality.

State survival and group Identity/actualization are non-issues in the wealth states of the first world. No one worries about these governments collapsing or about the safety of certain ethnic or religious minorities, despite discrimination, because of the rule of law and overall stability.

But consider new countries in the shadow of the old empires that these new countries used to belong to. Georgia, a former Republic in the Soviet Union (and Stalin’s native land) has experienced an uneasy coexistence with its behemoth neighbor since its independence in the early 1990’s.

Georgia’s territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, with large Russian populations pose puzzles for Georgia and Russia alike, indicative of the problems in the Balkans that resulted in “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990’s. Should any region with a majority of a particular ethnic group secede from the government it belongs to? Should a government endangered by such a possible succession forcibly keep such a region tethered to the larger entity, often at the expense of the ethnic group that has majority status in a particular province, but minority status in the country as a whole?

In such situations, the last two ends, the survival of the state, in this case, Georgia, and the actualization of a particular ethnic group, in this case, Russians, compete. Both Georgian and Russian authorities accuse each other of aggression and “ethnic cleaning”. If Russia overspreads Georgia and takes it over, it will obviously liberate ethnic Russians inside Georgia, but at the expense of the Georgian government and ethnic Georgians. If Georgia somehow fights the Russians off and forcibly reasserts itself over territories with large Russian populations, Georgia’s government will survive, but at the expense of ethnic Russian safety.

Inhumanity has become the result of this clash and the competition for governmental and ethnic survival.

Stay tuned.

Learning and Listening

2008-08-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I talked about sharpening and deepening our use of the Humanities…how? By making a negative into a positive, by using the indisputable horror and suffering of the INHUMANITIES as a plea for taking a marginalized, academic, poorly funded “niche” and making it the center of a new kind of learning.

Let’s talk more about the humanities, and let’s take a broader approach to positively defining the humanities and what they mean to speech and speechwriting.
Certainly, a core ingredient of the humanities is the notion of education, in the broadest sense of the word.

How do people learn?

Hundreds of years ago people thought that reality existed in terms of either universal objects that we knew about from pictures in the heavens or in our minds from before birth OR because we read about them in a book. As a result, thinkers were idealists, affirming the existence of objects that we know about even before we have labels for them and nominalists, thinkers who affirmed the primary reality of names.

Another way to think about the question of how people learn is via right and left brain, the creative vs. the rational.

A third way, perhaps the most relevant to speechwriters and speakers, is the notion of using narrative, or stories as opposed to simply relating facts.

Good speakers employ both sorts of approaches, the visually evocative and the literal, the creative and the fact-based, and finally, the story (narrative) and common-sensical, commonly held truth.

Have you ever noticed that good speakers (or comics, for that matter), like to start things off with a story, or even sprinkle them inside a talk? Sermons and homilies, with ethical strictures as their core, are leavened with parables, fables, and legends, right brain material that soften and convey otherwise harsh, stark, and unmoveable and unmistakable ethical truths.

Speakers utilize such things, such stories, because it makes an immediate connection with the audience, bridging the gap between them, relaxing both parties, making for commonality that simple fact presentation might not provide.

Why do presidential politicians talk about individual citizens, using stories about “a disabled woman in Akron, Ohio”, or an “unemployed textile worker in Raleigh, North Carolina”, or the like? They know that simple “facts” do not convince audiences…nor do most of the audience insist on ideological consistency. Political audiences do insist on getting to know a candidate, and successful candidates understand that truth and provide the personal information that audiences crave. As a result, stories are the currency in which political speakers and their audiences deal.

So, remember, if you want to reach your audience, you need to blend elements that will help your audience learn what you wish them to.

Stay tuned.

The INHUMANITIES

2008-07-23T16:33:00.000-07:00

You’ve got to care…

I read a well-written and provocative article on the importance of the Humanities recently.

The author certainly made a strong case about the continuing and perhaps increasing relevance of the Humanities. He didn’t need to persuade me that the Humanities are NOT an academic enterprise.

But after reading the article, I realized that he’d left out the one thing that could persuade more people than hundreds of similar articles about the importance of the humanities.

The INHUMANITIES.

Why should we learn about the humanities, whether literature, history, or the like?

Well, it would be nice to do something about the inhumanities, of which so many exist. If human-created misery is so prevalent, whether warfare, greed, cruelty, or ignorance, how do we combat such terrible things?

But, we need to do more than say, study the humanities.

We need the equivalent of vocational training to fight specific inhumanities, and then after someone's trained, they need to go out and work in a field of the humanities.

What fields?

Well...

We need The arts of peace and diplomacy to solve the issue of war.

We need the arts of sharing in order to bridge the brutal disparities that exist between neighbors and between countries.

We need the arts of language and story to overcome the appalling ignorance that marks so many, even, and, in particular, those with educational resources that should be sufficient to solve the issue, but fall short due to a lack of will.

Well, where does speech fit into this vocational structure?

Right in the middle of it.

No matter what we are speaking about, whether it’s a burning issue, on behalf of a candidate, to help people in a particular business solve a problem, one universal ingredient is required.

We need to care.

I challenge anyone to make a speech that will move anyone, despite the quality of its content, if the listeners are not sure that the speaker really cares about what he or she is talking about.

Speaking in such an unconcerned manner marks the specific inhumanity of indifference.

The next time you speak, no matter what your subject matter, I challenge you to do your part to stamp out indifference.

Stay tuned.

The Good Word

2008-07-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

The Good Word
As I was considering what to share for my next post, I realized that the whole issue of “Word Choice” that is so “internal” to writers is an issue worth exploring.

How do we choose the words we use?

If we write for an academic audience, we tend to use specific words that, at least in theory, mean something to that academic audience. While the whole context of something being “academic” has taken on the meaning of irrelevance, among academics, the meaning of particular words is of intense importance. Academics always right toward the overriding goal of precision; however, that goal can sometimes bring about abstraction and lose of connection with potential listeners.

In fact, those same precision-intended (or should I say “Precision Guided”?) words used among the wrong listeners, in other words, misused, take on the feeling of abstraction, elitism, and yes, irrelevance, as a result. Listeners hearing the wrong word think, often correctly, that the speaker is more interested in impressing them than in communicating WITH them.

Academics also learn early on in their careers to avoid the passive tense (in which the subject of the sentence is being acted upon, rather than doing the acting), the use of first person (“I think” or “We feel”), and contractions.

If we speak to a less academic audience, or a mixed one, we might value the use of these things, in the interest of making a connection, even thought we might lose precision as a result. That’s a fair trade-off.

Or, we might not want to leave mysterious the responsibility for some action or belief. Use of the passive is a good way to not lay blame on anyone in that regard.

If you think the sometimes instantaneous, yet painstaking choices outlined above are limited to an ever older set of speakers, think again.

A number of studies have shown that the college age writer is quite aware of the difference between the “IM” culture, with its abbreviations and shorthand, and more formal discourse.

Word choice, then, far from being an academic concern limited to an ever smaller circle of speakers, has increasing relevance among young people, not in spite of, but because of the proliferation of abbreviated speech in a particular contexts such as instant messaging.

For more evidence that Computer Culture is increasingly relevant to speech and connection (the horizontal and the vertical), stay tuned.

Mirroring

2008-06-30T16:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve talked about the perpendicular and the horizontal before.

Let’s talk about these differently.

People refer to “mirroring”, a term that means that someone identifies with someone else.

If you’re a speaker, how do you want to connect someone else’s “perpendicular” with your own when you speak? How do you get people to identify with you and what you are saying?

Simple language helps.

So does repetition.

But don’t underestimate your audience. Don’t consider a speech an elementary school session that will bore the life out of your audience due to endless repetition, and dull subject matter.

In order to engage your audience, you need the following key elements:

1-the stimulation of something new

2-surprise

Something new:
Don’t be afraid to teach your audience something, or at least remind them of it. You do not want your audience to f eel that you are talking down to them. You do not want them to think that you are part of elite, and they are not.
On the other hand, elite opinion does matter, because it helps provide clear definition and appropriate context required to fully explore and explain vital subjects.

So, you need to “frame” or set a context for your subject matter. When you do that, you need to do it in simple, yet meaningful fashion. You shouldn’t talk down to your audience by seeming to be more intelligent than they are, but you shouldn’t talk down to them by patronizing them, either, appearing to oversimplify complex matters.

Surprise:
Repetition can help make your audience comfortable. But you don’t want your audience to be TOO comfortable.

Remember in an earlier post when I talked about people’s minds insisting on a totality and so showing discomfort with silence.

You can also lead people down a road and suddenly bring them to a sharp turn that they did not anticipate, just as composers put in elements that bring in a new key or a new tempo, or even sudden loud notes to get their audience to pay particular attention.

Get people to identify with you, your thoughts; make that horizontal as strong, varied, and stimulating as it can be.

Stay tuned.

Content and Cadence and Yes We Can

2008-06-19T14:31:00.000-07:00

What do composers and speechwriters share in common?

They both need to balance the interplay on the one hand between elements of content, whether pitch for musicians or text for writers and on the other hand, elements of duration, rhythm for musicians, cadence for Speechwriters.

What happens when one element or the other needs to govern in a particular creative situation?

In the late Renaissance, composers, particularly those active in the fledgling art form of opera, decided that the rhythmic elements of speech had to take precedence over concerns of pitch. This philosophy, self-consciously harking back to the dramatic arts of the ancient Greek stage, was known as "Prima Practica".

If text and cadence are two perpendiculars, what sort of horizontal can unite them to make a brilliant speech?

Well, consider two, an inviting silence, and the human mind of the audience.

If you've ever been in a situation of observing speaker and audience, neither element is happy with silence. It's thought of as the equivalent of "dead air" in radio.

But the skillful speaker uses silence to crucial effect. He or she does the same thing with the human minds of the member of the audience.

Since the speaker knows the audience abhors a vacuum, they are more than willing, with the right cue, to help provide the totality that their minds demand.

The most visible example of this horizontal between the perpendiculars of speaker and audience are Barack Obama's "Yes, We Can" answers from the audience.

Which do you think are more important, the questions he asks, or the fact of repetitive and empowering response?

He'll take the rhythm of the response every time over the content of the questions he's asking.

Prima Practica, alive and well in the 21st century world of politics. Stay tuned.

The Perpendicular Problem

2008-06-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

In my last Post, I talked about the difference between the message of a prophet and a genius, how the first, according to Kirkegaard is pertuated in more of its totality, mystery, and essence, while the second, no matter how brilliant, still gets broken down and somehow dissolved.

Well, let's return to the problem of how a speaker considers that difference when deciding how to approach his or her audience.

Each potential speaker, whether in private or in public, considers how to connect with some sort of audience, of one person, a few, or a crowd. Picture the potential speaker as a vertical entity, with a point of view, images, and ideas. Other vertical entities exist in the form of the audience, irrespective of size.

What horizontal connects these verticals of speaker and listener?

In the last post, we talked about the insistence on "takeaways". This insistence is akin to the notion of repetition, or being "on message" for a political campaign. We have to say the magic word or phrase, over and over, like some sort of superstitious incantation, lest we step on the crack of the political sidewalk and break the campaign's back as a result.

This is the same approach that commercials use, bludgeoning listeners' minds, particularly in radio, with a repeated, and, as radio ad reps term it, "intrusive" message.

That notion of enforced repetition is the language and idiom of fascism.

Should we be surprised at the coarsening of political dialog, with the suspiciousness and anxiety that the wrong thing might be said and the right thing might not be repeated enough?

And, when politicians see a particular audience, because they've polled that audience exhaustively, they think they know what the audience's perpendicular is, and they think they know what horizontal will "connect" the speaker with those voters.

Add to these concerns of the horizontal and vertical, the problem of market segmentation. What's that?

Well, you love your very small music devices because you can control exactly what you listen to on it. Your choice rules the device. You've never had more choice in this regard, in these smaller and smaller, sliced pieces of media that bring you exactly what you want. Niches...market segmentation...advertisers love these phrases, and so do consumers, who are able to make individually imposed choices and intense satisfaction.

What a perpendicular feast!

But can voters get the same satisfaction in a democratic universe where compromise is a prized value? Are they more inclined or less inclined to get the whole in a world where they are used to getting exactly what they want as consumers?

Notice the perceived famine for the horizontal as a result.

Part of this phenomenon is the localized, messy, deconcentrated, and particularly American democracy, designed in its splendid quirkiness by the Founding Fathers who distrusted the public and each others.

Market Capitalism and democracy raise expectations.

Market segmentation and consumer choice challenge politicians to create a horizontal that can join their vertical to that of the voters. Who will do a better job in discovering or creating the better horizontal in the coming elections?

In short, who will bring "axis grease" and balance the vertical and horizontal most effectively?

Stay tuned.

Ideas That Speak-Returning to our Roots

2008-06-08T12:34:00.000-07:00

Wecome to the first post from Ideas That Speak, a new company that works with aspiring speechwriters and helps non-profits with direct mail.

Speechwriting, in a sense, has never been more difficult.

Why?

Because we are centuries removed from the oral cultures that, no matter what our background, began and sustained our communication.

How many times do you, or someone you know, insist, "PUT IT IN WRITING!"

What's the message? The oral isn't authentic somehow. We can't rely on it.

And yet, a politician bursts on the scene, and even without informing or necessarily satisfying voters on his policies and the details of those policies, he makes history by inspiring those voters, sweeping them up on the coattails of his words and the way he speaks them.

How?

Soren Kirkegaard, the Danish thinker, said that the difference between a prophet and a genius is that no matter how brilliant, the message of a genius will be broken down and its essence lost as a result.

However, a prophet's message always retains its totality, its core, somehow. Politicians who speak well, no matter what the details of their message, rely on the prophetic tradition to move voters to give them their trust, despite the unknown choices that such politicians will face in office.

I remember about six months ago, I was at a gathering where an outside speaker spoke about Emotional Intelligence. I think he moved most of us in the audience. However, some, especially, those at the higher end of the organization were uneasy. They wanted more details on how to improve their own and their subordinates' emotional intelligence.

As a result, they missed the point. Their insistence on "takeaways" made them miss the essence of the positive context and inspiration the speaker was trying to provide.

Let that be the feeling you give your audience. Even if they do not remember the details of your speech, even if you don't provide them, move them with your essence, and they will be receptive to your message.

Thanks for joining us here at Ideas that Speak and stay tuned for more posts.