Some years ago a friend \u2013 another former speechwriter for a U.S. president — asked me to talk to a group of Scandinavians about working in the White House.\u00a0 Every year since then, I have addressed Kjell Ringdal\u2019s Washington Seminar.<\/p>\n
Each November, the seminars bring to this capital city Norwegian and Swedish journalists, legislators and government officials for several days of presentations on American politics and government.\u00a0 Speakers typically have backgrounds similar to those of their audience.\u00a0 They include members of Congress, senior journalists, current and former executive branch officials, as well as think tank scholars.\u00a0 At first, I spoke exclusively of my White House experiences, using my stories as windows on how the American presidency and American political institutions work.\u00a0 Soon I discovered that Kjell himself found the details of presidential speechwriting particularly exciting and, at his urging, started focusing my presentations in that direction.<\/p>\n
Now, of course, I understand that Kjell Ringdal is Norway\u2019s most celebrated proponent of the art of political persuasion.\u00a0 Members of all political parties and leaders of many corporations seek his wise advice.\u00a0 An independent man, for a period he was lured into government service handling communications for NORAD, the nation\u2019s foreign assistance agency. \u00a0He left when he realized that life in a bureaucracy, however noble the purpose, was not for him.\u00a0 Since then, he has taught communications at Norway\u2019s leading business school, advised his many clients on how to put across their messages, and published his newspaper columns.\u00a0 I was particularly delighted when I learned that he was writing a book on the rhetorical arts.<\/p>\n
Kjell has asked me to use this introduction to share my own thoughts on rhetoric.<\/p>\n
Following are three simple \u2013 well maybe not so simple — rules:<\/p>\n
Rule #1, be tightly cogent<\/b>:\u00a0 Abraham Lincoln was once asked how he succeeded in making his speeches so compelling.\u00a0 He answered that when he was studying law, he came across the word \u201cdemonstrate,\u201d which he took to mean a higher standard of proof. \u00a0Lincoln taught himself the law.\u00a0 He read books of statutes and cases.\u00a0 To learn to \u201cdemonstrate\u201d a point, he decided to memorize all the proofs of Euclid.<\/p>\n
Sometime after I first heard that story, I realized that I had gone through much the same process as Lincoln had \u2013 though obviously without the profound insight — in learning to write for President Reagan.\u00a0 I had discovered that making a case required starting with propositions that audiences knew intuitively to be right, the equivalent of Euclid\u2019s axiom.\u00a0 From there, I found that, to be effective, I had to build my argument from point to point in tightly fitting steps, similar to developing a geometric theorem.<\/p>\n
Sounds simple, yes?\u00a0 It would be, but rhetoric conceals a conundrum. \u00a0Aristotle discovered it.\u00a0 He wrote, correctly, that the difference between rhetoric and philosophy is compression.\u00a0 Philosophy is a series of syllogisms, as in: If A and B, then C; if C and D, then E; if E and F, then G.\u00a0 In rhetoric, you must leap the gap from A to G, largely skipping everything in between.\u00a0 But how?\u00a0 How can you, the speechwriter or the speaker, at the same time \u201cdemonstrate\u201d and compress?\u00a0 The answer lies in the next rule.<\/p>\n
Rule #2, be concrete, in small and big ways<\/b>:\u00a0 Part of leaping the gap is tapping wellsprings of association, authority, evocative experience, and emotional as well as rational understandings.<\/p>\n
This is why speakers use quotes.\u00a0 Yes, a quotation carries the force of its formulation. \u00a0But it also carries the authority of the one who is quoted, of his or her life, achievements, experience, of the things with which he or she is associated, of the circumstance from which the quote came.\u00a0 So a quote is more than a few words strung together.\u00a0 It is an entire persona and world brought to bear on an idea.\u00a0 It tells more than its words.\u00a0 It is a window on an entire story.<\/p>\n
The same, in a different sense, can be said of statistics.\u00a0 Used well, statistics tell a story, too.\u00a0 They give shape, depth and specificity to the larger tale you are telling. Towards the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/i>, the narrator, Nick Carraway, returns to Gatsby\u2019s abandoned mansion and, coming to the front steps, finds someone has scrawled graffiti on them.\u00a0 That graffiti remains a detail stuck in my mind.\u00a0 It anchors a moment of the story in something hard and real — something that I see in my imagination and believe.\u00a0 Use rightly, statistics do that, too.<\/p>\n
As you can tell, in talking about quotes and statistics, I am talking about elements of stories.\u00a0 Images and metaphors are other elements.\u00a0 So are characters.\u00a0 So are historical, personal, even fictional moments in time, as with Nick Carroway\u2019s moment on the mansion steps.<\/p>\n
The point is that in one way or another leaping the gap invariably comes down to storytelling, to putting your audience into a place, a moment, among heroes and villains, and both showing them and letting them discover how A takes them to G.<\/p>\n
Rule #3, be memorable<\/b>:\u00a0 I am thinking here both of humor and what have come to be known as soundbites.\u00a0 In linguistic terms, the two are pretty much the same thing, except that humor adds the surprising or outrageous to the sharp turn of a phrase.<\/p>\n
Either way, the memorable phrase sums up a point in your story, that is, it becomes the landing place for your leap.<\/p>\n
That phrase may be as simple as a name for an idea you are advocating.\u00a0 In American history, William Jennings Bryan\u2019s \u201ccross of gold\u201d was such a name.\u00a0 In 1896 the Democratic Party nominated this former congressman for president on the strength of both his argument that the nation should decouple from the deflationary gold standard and the power with which he put his argument: \u201cYou shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold,\u201d he declaimed to the delirious cheers of a national political convention.<\/p>\n
There are many techniques to writing reliably catchy phrases.\u00a0 Another is to allude to a moment in literature or popular culture.\u00a0 The most memorable rhetorical moment of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was an example of this device. Under pressure to change policies, Mrs. Thatcher took the name of a great play of the immediate post-World War II period, The Lady\u2019s Not for Burning<\/i>, and with a change of one letter, replied to her critics in a phrase that remains alive in common memory, \u201cThe lady\u2019s not for turning.\u201d<\/p>\n
One final item of advice, more essential than any of the others:<\/p>\n
Speak from Conviction<\/b>:\u00a0 If you are to be an effective speaker, you must carry a torch.\u00a0 You must speak the truth as you know it.\u00a0 You must argue for a future you believe in. \u00a0You must settle in your mind and your heart what you stand for, what you will work for, what you will fight for.\u00a0 Without conviction all artifice comes to nothing.\u00a0 Words are mere sounds.<\/p>\n
We hear modern sophists scoff of speechmaking, \u201cThat\u2019s just rhetoric.\u201d\u00a0 But how will free people govern themselves if not via mutual attempts at persuasion?\u00a0 And how will any of us persuade if we cannot hold an audience and speak to it in terms that its members understand?<\/p>\n
Must we not learn our audiences\u2019 cares and aspirations, their loves and their lives, the way they see the world, the way they hear its music \u2013 and is this lesson of listening which is so essential to effective rhetoric not also the essential predicate of humane and fruitful governance in any country at any time?<\/p>\n
So rhetoric in the end is listening as well as speaking.\u00a0 It is empathy.\u00a0 It is, as one whom for these pages I will call the Great Demonstrator said a century and a half ago, \u201cof the people, by the people and for the people.\u201d\u00a0 May it never perish from the Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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