Get Your Audience to Remember One Thing by Putting It in One Word
OBAMA: Virginia, I have just one word for you, just one word. Tomorrow. Tomorrow.
Saying this the night before the presidential election, Obama imitated the obnoxious guy in The Graduate who says, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word…Plastics.” Obnoxious, yes, but memorable. Obama could have said, “This whole campaign comes down to one day: election day!” But he used repetition and a one-word summary to make tomorrow sound like the fulcrum on which the future of humankind rests. All while making a great pop-culture reference. Demonstrative addresses often do this. A single key word provides focus so that people can remember your theme.
Channel the Ethos of a Great Character
During his presidential campaign, Obama gave a first-rate speech at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. The senator occasionally slipped into wonkish arrhythmia, with clunky phrases such as “empathy deficit,” but he got the crowd shouting “Amen!” when he picked up the imagery and figures of speech that MLK himself used.
OBAMA: In the struggle for peace and justice, we cannot walk alone. In the struggle for opportunity and equality, we cannot walk alone. In the struggle to heal this nation and repair this world, we cannot walk alone.
Repeating the beginning and end of successive clauses (the symploce figure, to be technical about it) made a kind of hymn, a beautifully pathetic way of saying, “I’m one of the faithful, like you, and I’m carrying the torch that the Reverend King once held.”
If you’re ever asked to speak at the retirement of or funeral for a good soul beloved by friends and family, see if you can pick up your subject’s rhythm, speech pattern, or expressions. It’s not only a fine way of ingratiating yourself to the audience; by implying that his spirit lives on, you do the person honor.
Eventually, Switch to the Future
Right after he was sworn in as president, Obama used his inaugural address to channel another of his political heroes, John F. Kennedy.
OBAMA: Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America—they will be met.
Those three sentences follow a “narrative arc,” as writers like to say. First, we’re told that the problems (sorry—“challenges”) are a big deal. Then we’re told we’re going to walk a long, tough trail to the end. Finally we get to the happy ending. Obama rhetorically rehearses the classic heroic fable: hero gets mission, meets obstacles, overcomes all. And just who are the heroes of this morality play? We are! For a moment, the audience gets seduced into being almost glad the obstacles are so great. How else could we prove our mettle?
More important, Obama’s speech changes from demonstrative rhetoric—present-tense oratory that brings the crowd together—to deliberative rhetoric about choices. From the present to the future.
Describe the Outcome of Your Choice as a Dream
OBAMA: What if it was as easy to get a book as it is to rent a DVD or pick up McDonald’s? What if instead of a toy in every Happy Meal, there was a book? What if there were portable libraries that rolled through parks and playgrounds like ice cream trucks? Or kiosks in stores where you could borrow books? What if during the summer, when kids often lose much of the reading progress they’ve made during the year, every child had a list of books they had to read and talk about and an invitation to a summer reading club at the local library?
This speech, delivered at a librarians’ convention, must have sounded to his audience like a bookish Eden. Okay, so it’s not the most memorable “dream” speech given by an African American leader. But Obama went beyond simply describing a utopia, instead setting the scene as a way to float specific ideas past the audience: jingling book trucks, in-store libraries, and the like. Want to sound like a visionary? List your proposals in the form of a vision.
And you’ve now gone from the best demonstrative rhetoric to the best of deliberative. Oratory doesn’t get any better.
Breathe Like the Donald
Obama offers an ideal illustration of an old-style orator, with beautiful language, carefully crafted rhythm, deft use of ethos, and cinematic storytelling.
Now let’s look at Donald Trump’s style. Occasionally, if he has to, he can read a decent, prepackaged sentence off a teleprompter, a detested device that he once literally destroyed with his bare hands. Trump with a teleprompter looks like a baby eating a lemon peel. You imagine speechwriters pushing the paper text across his desk as if feeding a shark. Here you go, Mr. Trump. Now, don’t be angry with me.
No, Trump is not a reader. Instead, he follows the style of comedians and old-timey preachers: he speaks impromptu. The word fits Trump like a generously cut Brioni suit. Impromptu comes from the Latin promere, meaning “to bring forth or take out.” Think of a magician pulling one of those impossibly long scarves out of his pocket.
Yet Trump’s magic comes not from the length of his speeches (and they can be very long) but from the little sound bites he fills them with. Like a stand-up comedian, he speaks in short bursts that lead up to punch lines, which he emphasizes with repetition or with his favorite phrase: “Believe me.” Each burst may or may not follow the previous one in topic or logic. Just as a comic veers from talking about the mystery of lost socks in the dryer to complaining about his wife’s operatic snoring, Trump’s campaign speeches shifted from the size of his crowd to the lying media to immigration, often in a series of non sequiturs.
But there’s ancient method to this seeming madness. While watching one of those speeches, I decided to time those bursts. Each one lasted about twelve seconds.
Interesting.
So I went to YouTube and timed movie speeches, from Braveheart to Hoosiers. I watched scores of them, hitting my smartphone timer from the moment the music wells up—signaling the climax of the speech—to the end. Twelve seconds, on average. Rarely more than thirteen or less than eleven.
Very interesting.
Argument Tool
PERIOD: A climax of a speech delivered in the length of a human breath—about twelve seconds.
Why? Because twelve seconds last about the length of a well-drawn human breath. Try it yourself. Breathe deeply, then read loudly from this page until your breath runs out. The ancients believed that our brains developed around that very timing. A well-expressed thought, they said, lasts the same length of time. An audience’s ability to absorb that thought? The same as the time it takes for an orator to expend a breath in speech. Rhetoricians called that stretch of time a period (or periodos if you want to get all Greek about it).
Great speakers all use the period during their orations’ peroration, or emotional climax. Barack Obama used it in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech:
There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.
Time yourself reading it and see how close you come to Obama’s rhythm. It took him twelve seconds, exactly. Like Cicero, he brought the house down.
Trump, on the other hand, does things differently. He uses the period the way a comedian uses a gag, sending little twelve-second thought balloons into his audience. They’re particularly suited to social media, where attention spans rarely last longer than that. And they allow people in the crowd to cheer every twelve seconds, making them feel part of the whole deal.
So how should you use the period? Unless you happen to be speaking in front of a crowd of rabid, sign-carrying supporters, you might follow the traditional route. Not only can you use it to get your audience charged up; you can actually use the period as the pith of your whole speech or presentation. Instead of outlining your points right away, instead t
ry to come up with about forty inspiring words. Do you want to get them excited about supporting a local recycling ordinance? Talk them into joining your organization? Or give them an amazing idea worth spreading? Think what your speech is really about; that’s your frame. Your forty-word period becomes a beautiful frame. If you have trouble beginning, start with these words: “This is about…” You may eventually choose better words for the topic and occasion. But “This is about…” lets you cut to your theme and its implications for the audience. You can even use a neat antithesis, as Obama did: This is not about liberal versus conservative, et cetera.
Suppose you want to give a TED-style talk about modern-day slavery in American prisons. You have told the audience that the Thirteenth Amendment, the one that abolished slavery, contains an exception for people convicted of crimes. Then you deliver this period:
This is not about some metaphor. And not just about African Americans in prison. This is about literal slavery, slavery mandated by law! By the United States Constitution! Which, more than anything else, tells us who we are as a people.
Or suppose you represent a consulting group. You give a presentation pitching a major retailer on a program to improve the loyalty and retention of the company’s employees. You show great slides, walk the executives through all the cool things you’ll do, and then you dive into your period:
YOU: This is about more than retention. It’s about access: to financial expertise, networking channels, even backstage passes. The kind of access the rest of us take for granted. The kind of access that makes us feel part of something special.
I actually delivered a version of that period in a real-live presentation; we won the business. Those forty words came toward the end of my pitch. But when I was drafting the presentation—a convoluted, procrastination-filled writing process involving a Nerf basketball, a spiral notebook, and hours spent walking up my meadow—the first thing I worked on was that period.
The ancients considered that nugget of the peroration a literal form of inspiration, breathing in the essence of the Muses. The very word “inspiration” comes from the Latin spirare, meaning “breath.” While I doubt that my peroration on employee retention came from the gods, there is something about that connection between lungs and brain, thought and breath.
It doesn’t get more oratorical than that.
The Tools
Soon after taking office, Obama toned down his demonstrative rhetoric, choosing to deal with pragmatic policies between campaigns. Some of his oratory-loving fans were disappointed, but the president knew that his power ultimately rested on competence, not speeches. Still, whenever the nation faced an immediate crisis or tragedy, he got demonstrative again.
In his second term, Obama got demonstrative when he needed to bring popular opinion to his side, pressuring a reluctant Congress on issues such as immigration, gun control, and climate change. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t call the White House a “bully pulpit” for nothing. Leaders reserve their best speeches for sermonizing, reminding us of the values we hold in common. That’s why Obama used so many identity tools, along with first-rate figures of speech and thought.
Cicero’s outline. Introduction, narration, division, proof, refutation, conclusion.
Identity strategy. Distinguish your audience from outsiders. Then make them believe they’ll be better people if they do what you want them to.
Enargeia. Envision your choice, so the audience sees it as the fulfillment of a dream. And dramatize your narration using cinematic techniques.
Figures of speech. A balancing figure can make the complex seem simple. Emphasize a point by summing it up in one word (“Plastics!”) or by starting a new sentence without finishing your last one. Use alliteration to make the unalike seem alike.
Figures of thought. Make something seem impossible by connecting it in the audience’s eyes to something else that’s impossible. Want to show determination? Follow a string of negatives with a surefire short, positive clause.
Channeling. Associate yourself with the audience’s heroes—not just by praising them, but by sounding like them.
The period. Create the moral center and frame of your talk with a twelve-second burst of inspiration.
27. Write a Persuasive Essay
THE FRENCH EXPERIMENT
Writing that changes the world
When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight, not the measure of the thing. —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Persuasion Alert
Why do I begin a chapter on essay writing by talking about the guy who invented it more than five centuries ago? I’m trying to practice what I’m about to preach. The best persuasive essays have a storytelling heart. A story does more than entertain. It helps put the reader into cognitive ease, that most persuadable of states.
In the winter of 1571, on his thirty-eighth birthday, one of history’s most original minds retreated to his castle tower. Michel de Montaigne had been a successful diplomat and businessman. He owned a winery, Chateau d’Yquem, that still makes pricey Sauternes. Now, with his life more than half over, Montaigne sat alone with his fifteen hundred books and his cat and his dog and began a series of experiments called “assays” (essais in French). He was making a deliberate metallurgy pun; an assay finds the components and value of a metal. But the word also means “attempt.” Montaigne’s assays were an experiment on himself. They mentally weighed, melted down, and assessed the value of his own life. No one had ever conducted this kind of experiment before; and because of his essais, the world has never been the same. Montaigne’s writings ushered in the age of the Enlightenment, helped the Christian world recover from bitter religious wars, and became a chief inspiration for Thomas Jefferson.
And so Montaigne invented the essay, a genre of literature that has tortured students for many generations. Reading this funny, bawdy, conversational, ingenious man for the first time feels like meeting the greatest uncle you could imagine. You almost expect him to gently lift his cat off the chair and offer you a seat. He pours you a glass of his sweet golden wine and then tells you about the time he talked his way out of being held hostage by a group of bandits. But most readers don’t realize that Montaigne was doing something even more powerful than inventing a new way of writing. His essays comprise one of the most effective arguments in human history. In a world that was tearing itself apart with conflicting eternal truths, Montaigne argued for a humble, science-loving, tolerantly curious view of humanity. His famous motto should begin every book: Que sais-je, “But what do I know?”
At a time when angry tribes are forming around conflicting certainties, Montaigne’s kind of persuasion offers more than a great way to improve your writing game. It can help you feel better about yourself, and maybe heal a whole society. So let’s get to assaying life through our own essays. While other books will tell you all the technical ins and outs of essay writing, here we will focus on three persuasive tools: ethos, pathos, and logos. Sound familiar?
Once we go through the essay techniques of the Big Three tools, we’ll watch them come together in a single college admissions essay. It just happens to be one my son, George, wrote.
Useful Figure
The PARADOX creates a marriage of opposites with two conflicting truths. Because it defines an unstable reality, you could call the paradox a trope. Some rhetoricians say it’s a kind of irony. However you slot the paradox, Montaigne loved it. He lived at a time when Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other over irreconcilable ideologies. Paradox to him wasn’t just an intellectual exercise. It offered a way to save the world.
Ethos: Quirk It
The most persuasive kind of essay is the personal essay. Its seduction comes through the relationship it establishes with the audience. By getting your readers to like and trust you, you can get them t
o agree with your essay’s point—the moral of your story.
But despite what your essay reveals about you, no matter how many intimate details you share, the personal essay isn’t really about you. This is worth repeating, because it states the central mantra of rhetoric: even if it’s about you, it’s not about you.
When you put yourself on a page, you display an example of humanity. An essay works like a laboratory experiment. When I was taking high school biology, each of us students had to dissect a frog—a practice that most schools mercifully no longer require. The point wasn’t to learn about my particular frog; it was to learn about frogs. That one sacrificial victim was supposed to teach me what any frog might look like inside. (My own frog seemed to have come from outer space; none of its organs looked anything like the pictures in the textbook.)
Writing yourself into an essay creates a character much like a laboratory frog. When you reveal your greasy, imperfect innards, you offer a lesson in humanity. Montaigne certainly thought so. His assays into his life followed the theory that the more he examined himself, the more he would learn about people in general. And, because he published his essays, he was showing humanity to humanity itself. The beautiful thing about his approach was that he was writing at an especially inhumane time, when religious zealots throughout Europe were slaughtering each other. By making his essay about a likable and trustworthy character—himself—he showed his fellow humans that they weren’t such a bad breed after all. In the most persuasive way, Montaigne helped invent humanism, the belief that people could get together and improve society on their own.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 38