Learning and Listening

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.