Confessions of a Public Speaker (19 page)

On my way home from Norway last June, I had a layover in Dulles
International Airport in Washington, D.C. With hours to kill, jet-lagged
out of my mind, I sat in the only
comfortable place I could find, a bench next to the United
Airlines customer service desk. I couldn’t help but overhear the
conversations taking place between irate passengers and the under-siege
United Airlines service staff. Annoyed at first by the constant arguing, I
soon found these dialogs fascinating. Every two minutes, another drama
would play out—downtrodden passengers made their cases for something they
didn’t have but wanted: upgrades, better seats, refunds, or meal vouchers.
Sometimes they were simply trying, after long hours stuck in the airport,
to get home. After hours of encounters, I recognized three ways people
made their cases:

If Aristotle were stuck in Dulles with me, after wondering why no
one else was wearing a toga, he’d recognize this list. These three
approaches fit what he outlined more than 2,000 years ago for how to make
a point. Back in the day this was called
rhetoric
:
the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of
persuasion. Most people today only know of the most limited use of the
word, as in a rhetorical question (a question asked for effect: “Do you
think I want to be stuck in Dulles Airport all day?”). But it turns out
the Greeks outlined all the tactics used today by courtroom lawyers,
infomercial pitchmen, Sunday preachers, and just about any other person
trying to make a point to someone else. In
rhetorical terms, the previous list is described
as:

With this list in mind, you have the basic time-tested toolkit
for making a point. Any pitch you make, story you tell, or
question you ask uses one of these three elements, and often more than one
at the same time. Good presentations hinge on sorting out which approaches
will work best with your particular audience. Sadly, on this day in
Dulles, I didn’t hear any passengers win their cases. They were all turned
away. Sometimes there is no way to win, no matter what tactics you use
(for the record, there was one bribe, a young woman broke out in tears,
and a guy the size of a linebacker threw his backpack on the ground in
frustration). Just as on some days, with some audiences, you make your
best points and they don’t buy them at all.

But when an argument works in a presentation, all the principles
come from rhetoric. I learned about rhetoric growing up in my house in
Queens, New York. We didn’t call it rhetoric, we just called it dinner.
Most nights, as we ate our meal, we’d argue about the Cold War, the
Yankees, the meanings of various words, and where the safest place in the
world would be during a nuclear war. And when we ran out of things to
argue about, we’d argue about different ways to argue. My dad loved to
argue so much he’d rarely ever admit he was wrong, using various
rhetorical tactics to save himself, provoking long debates late into the
night. This drove my family crazy but also gave me amazingly thorough
lessons on practical rhetoric.

Many well-known phrases from modern advertisements are just simple
applications of one kind of rhetoric or another. The famous, “But wait,
there’s more,” found in most infomercials, is called
Dirimens
copulatio
, which translates to mean a joining together that
interrupts.
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Tricks like saying, “Are you that stupid?”, where you shift
the focus away from the argument and challenge the character of the person
making the argument are called
Ad hominem
, which translates to attack
the person. It’s a trick because even stupid people can make smart
arguments now and then, as well as vice versa.

Public speakers unfortunately abuse
rhetoric all the time. It’s hard to stop them. Since
audiences tend to mostly listen and are rarely brazen enough to interrupt
a presentation, by the time it’s over, they’re more likely to want to go
home than to question something said 20 minutes earlier. Speakers can
intentionally distort, mislead, and even say outright lies, and most of
the audience won’t do much to stop them—even the people who know more
about the subject or rhetoric than the speaker. Many points made in
presentations are unsupported, deceptive, or downright made up. It’s a sad
thing. Filling out feedback forms and writing emails to people questioning
what they said is about all we can do.

The most useful inventory of rhetorical tactics I’ve seen is
Thank You for Arguing
, by Jay
Heinrichs (Three Rivers Press). And the best reference on
rhetoric never before offered in a public-speaking book is the movie
Animal House
. It contains two speeches that should
be studied by all public speakers. In the first, Otter successfully
equates banning their fraternity with being un-American, and in the
second, Bluto and Otter convince the demoralized fraternity they are just
the guys to do a really futile and stupid thing.
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Beyond these recommendations, rhetoric is too large a topic to take
on in full here; instead, here are much simpler tactics for making your
points. And this starts with emphasis.

The first thing, and it’s very important that you do this
immediately, is to say the following sentence aloud:

I suspect you struggled with it, as everyone does. This was the
point, since it makes the next exercise easy. Now say this nonsilly,
non-rhyme-based sentence out loud:

If you said it in your normal speaking voice, and we charted how
much emphasis you placed on any specific word, it would look like
Figure B-1
a flat line of
equally emphasized words.

Figure B-1. If this were an EKG, we’d be calling the morgue.

This is how people often speak when they’re nervous—everything is
flat and monotone. Even if they’re loud, every word is equally loud. They
could be talking about the surprise ending of a movie or revealing the
secret recipe for Coca-Cola, but their natural energy for the topic is not
conveyed in how they’re saying what they’re saying.

Now say the same sentence again, but emphasize the bold word. Say
the bold word twice as loud and twice as long as the others:

You’d have a chart that looks like
Figure B-2
.

Figure B-2. If this were a patient’s EKG, there would be hope.

You’re putting energy into the sentence, and that energy creates a
new kind of meaning. You can change the point you are making simply by
changing which word you emphasize. Try saying the following sentences,
again emphasizing the word in bold
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by saying it twice as long and twice as loud:

Many speakers bury their
emphasis. Or they’re sloppy, throwing it around like dirty
laundry on the floor of a teenager’s bedroom. They will score points for
putting energy into how they speak, but it’s confusing as to why they’re
doing it when they do. This is better than being flat, but not by much.
The goal is to use emphasis to help make each point as clear as
possible.

You can listen to any great speaker and break down each sentence he
says purely by where he places emphasis. He will use different kinds of
emphasis, such as repeating words, pausing, gesturing with his hands, or
even speaking with a whisper. There’s a whole system of information being
given by a good speaker that many people never notice. It’s not in the
slides. It’s not in the thinking. It’s in the thoughtful delivery of each
sentence he says. Good speakers have a range of emphasis methods, which
are easy to spot if you look for them, that improves everything else about
their presentations.

However, much like
in life, people with big vocabularies often insist on being
magniloquent when it’s unnecessary. Public speakers had no microphones or
video cameras 150 years ago. They had to be larger than life just so most
people watching could see and hear them. But today, anyone who goes too
far just looks phony, like they’re acting more than presenting (preachers
are notorious
for using an oratory style that’s no longer necessary given
the invention of microphones). Being overly dramatic often kills the goal
of connecting with an audience.