When trying to persuade people make sure they understand you.

Earlier this week we showed you several famous people and asked you what they all have in common. The answer is that all of them are powerful speakers who have managed to make memorable speeches that influenced and inspired people throughout history.

So what makes a great speech memorable? Delivery, humor, emotion, and tone to name a few. What makes a great speech resonate with its audience? Word choice. Choosing the right words can make or break a speech. How the media or your opponent interprets your words can halt progress and change your image in an instant.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivering his first inaugural address.
(Credit: Youtube user Alexander Stern)

A classic example was in 2010 when BP‘s Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg told reporters in Washington, days after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf Coast, “I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are greedy companies or don’t care, but that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people.” The media and many of those affected by the tragedy jumped on the second sentence, labeling him an out-of-touch elitist when it may have just been a slip in translation for the Swedish-born Svanberg. While these gaffes may not have been as noticeable a decade ago, smart phones, the Internet, and social media have helped to catapult them around the world and preserve them in a click of a mouse.

BP Chairmam Carl-Henric Svanberg
(Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times)

As we start our focus on word choice this month, Collaborative Services spoke with someone who knows the ins and outs of word choice. As a speechwriter Robert Lehrman has chosen the words used by our country’s leaders, corporate top dogs, and celebrities. Most notably Lehrman worked as the White House Chief Speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore from 1993 to 1995. Today, Lehrman is still in the business of choosing the right words but in addition to speeches, they are now often under his name. Lehrman has written several award-winning novels, teaches Speechwriting as an adjunct professor for American University (AU) and other schools, and is author of The Political Speechwriter’s Companion (CQ Press, 2009) in wide use on campuses and by politicians in both parties. He has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, and Politico. In 2010 Lehrman and his colleague, AU Professor Leonard Steinhorn launched the website PunditWire as a place where political speechwriters comment on the news.

Collaborative Services spoke with Lehrman about his role as a speechwriter, author, and professor, how word choice helps persuade an argument and audience, and some of his favorite speeches. We welcome his insights.

- – -
You’ve been a speechwriter for governors, senators, CEOs, and probably most notably, Vice President Al Gore. Can you talk about the role word choice plays in making a persuasive argument? Are there some words you lean on, and others you like to avoid?
It plays a central role — but not just in the way strategists suggest. They often focus on the implication of words.

For example: Frank Luntz, who writes a lot about how choosing the right words matters in persuasion, points to the difference between Colin Powell‘s term for what he recommends nations use in going to war—”decisive force”— and the way reporters describe Powell’s view: “overwhelming force.” There’s definitely a difference and those choices matter.

But what about choosing words people are more likely to understand?

Americans average a 7th grade reading level. When I write for politicians I choose “use” not “utilize,” “now” not “currently,” and dozens of other choices that let more people understand. Do you want to persuade people? Make sure they understand you.

Former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell
(Credit: Press TV)

How does word choice differ when you’re writing for a political leader, a business leader, or other speakers?
If the topic is the same — and if the audience is the same — my approach to language doesn’t vary much. I always want to use language people understand, concrete detail, clarity, and some devices people use to make speeches memorable — antithesis, or alliteration, for example.

But there is one big difference between corporate and political speech. In politics it’s common to attack the other side (“Democrats have done nothing!”). Corporate CEOs don’t do that. The Merck CEO won’t say, “Novartis has done nothing.”

In fact, even when they complain about government regulation, which they do often, corporate speakers want to sound more temperate. So those attack words and litanies of complaint pretty much vanish when I do corporate. 

Are there any words that have positive or negative connotations that the average person might not think of?
Plenty. One reason? Our biases. Here’s one example. Someone who opposes abortion might think “pro-life” has no negative connotation. Because they believe an embryo is human, “pro-life” seems positive. To someone believing in Roe v. Wade the term might be infuriatingly negative — implying that those who support the right to abortion don’t care about life. The same thing is true — in reverse — about “pro-choice.”

When delivering a speech, which is more important – the writing, or the speaker’s execution?
There’s no one answer to that. When John F. Kennedy  gave his 1963 speech suggesting a limit to nuclear testing, the most important thing was what he proposed. He could have mumbled through the speech and still accomplished his goal — reaching out to the Soviets. And actually, he didn’t deliver it very well.

But Martin Luther King Jr.‘s “Dream” speech that same year? He has some powerful material. But it’s hard to imagine the speech succeeding without his resonant voice, enormous variety, effective use of pause and emphasis, and the way he raises his voice from step to step in his closing call to action.

Dr. Martin Luther King delivering his famous “I have a Dream” speech.
(Credit: Hearst Communications Inc./timesunion.com

In addition to speeches, you’re also an award-winning novelist. You’ve written three books for young adults and one for adults. Can you talk about how you alter your word choice depending on whether you’re writing for young readers or more mature adults? How does word choice in novels differ from speeches?
I wrote my first novel, Juggling, as a book about adolescents aimed at adults. Harper & Row published it as a young adult (YA) book. But because I thought of my audience as adults I didn’t think at all about making sentences more accessible. Naturally, that can’t apply to every book for younger readers. You can’t write like Proust and hope to attract 12-year olds. Or at least many of them.

I did think about using shorter sentences, simpler language, and less detail for my two other YA novels — though not as much as you think, and it’s not easy. After all, you can say a lot with words of one syllable, but at some point you rob a passage of richness and nuance. Where is that point? I wrestled with that question, not always to my satisfaction. As for how this differs in speech — see the next question.

As a professor, how do you make your students aware about the importance of word choice?
We have two units in my course specifically about word choice — one on clarity, the other on how to be memorable. I could go into great detail about the things we talk about when it comes to being clear — but they’re not unusual. We work on being less wordy, concrete detail, and simple language.

Memorability?  That’s different. We work on something you will see in almost no other kind of writing: repetition. In most writing courses repetition is something to avoid. In speeches, litanies using the same grammatical structure adds power — there’s a reason Martin Luther King Jr. said “I have a dream” about eight times.  And there are specific devices that make speeches memorable. I hate to load this down with the technical terms but don’t know another way to quickly give readers things to look up: antithesis, antimetablole, anaphora, epistrophe, chiasmus are some.

Finally, I urge students going into political work to write speeches average people can understand, which means writing at a seventh-grade level.  That’s controversial — there’s one academic who argues that this dumbs down rhetoric to the point that Presidents can’t make points with the sophistication that allows  them to lead. But a President is often heard by millions of people — even rallies see 30,000 people in the crowd. It’s undemocratic to present ideas in language most voters can’t follow. Even writing at an 11th grade level means half of the average voters won’t understand. In politics, you can’t go to your boss and say, “I have a profound speech for you — but half the audience won’t know what you’re talking about.”

Credit: Flickr user Kevin Gebhardt

This might be a good place to point out that in Microsoft Word we have an immensely useful tool, often ignored, that helps speechwriters do that. If you go to the “Spelling and Grammar” option, click on “Options”, and find the box under “Grammar” you’ll see the box next to “Readability Statistics.” If you check it and click “OK” each time you finish Spelling and Grammar, a box opens up with all kinds of useful information — average sentence length, percent passive voice, and other things. It tells you what grade level you’ve written at — and how many Americans can “easily understand” what you wrote.

Naturally, they use a formula for this — Google “Flesch-Kincaid” if you want to know more. It’s possible to fool the guide. But on the whole it’s pretty good. I use it for all my speeches and insist students do the same. It amazes them how high their passive voice level is — and how much more energetic their writing gets when they reduce it.

The Flesch-Kincaid readability formula.
(Credit: Si Jobling)

Are there any well-known speeches that you consider a favorite, an inspiration for your own writing, or something you assign all your students to read? What about them makes them so powerful, in your opinion?
It’s rare to find a speech that’s powerful all the way through in politics. When people go to the famous speeches they will see a word or section that’s memorable (“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”) and be astonished to see how mediocre the rest is. And so, in this list of speeches I love to teach, none are perfect. But there’s usually one section that stands out. And so, in this list, it’s usually one section that stands out.

Ronald Reagan: 40th Anniversary of D-Day: Note the gripping way he uses the story of the invasion to compel us from the first 30 seconds.

Ronald Reagan: Farewell from the Oval Office: Here note the way he humanizes himself in the opening by describing the way things look outside the White House windows — and the windows of his motorcade — as well as the story about the Vietnamese boat people to symbolize his administration.

Barack Obama: 2008 Victory speech: Here’s a stunningly original close, in which Obama uses the story of one 106-year old woman to encapsulate the history of the last century — leading into his “Yes we Can” litany that sweeps the audience along.

Conan O’Brien: Harvard 2000 Class Day speech: Yes, it’s 12 years old — and a testament to whoever wrote this speech with more laughs per page than I have ever seen, and a great example of how effective humor can be in speech.

Comedian and Talk Show host Conan O’Brien made his speech to Harvard’s Class of 200 memorable using humor.
(Credit: Dallas Movie Screenings)

As language changes and evolves, have you noticed speech writing changing in any way? Are there any words you would use now that you would never have used ten or twenty years ago, or vice versa?
As ideas become acceptable there are words you find in your speeches that wouldn’t have been there a decade back — like “same-sex marriage.”

Not all the changes over the last few decades involve word choice, though. Since I started writing speeches I see three changes. First, litanies of repetition — popularized by JFK and King. Second, the use of antithesis, or repetition to show contrast (“Ask not what your country can do for you …”), which also probably came from JFK and which you’ll see as many as 10-15 times in an Obama speech.

The third, using story to move or dramatize. There are no stories in the JFK Inagural address, or in King’s “Dream.” Reagan’s writers used story so effectively it influenced other writers to do the same — I know that influenced me.

President Ronald Reagan
(Credit: Wally McNamee/Corbis/Guardian News and Media Limited)

- – -

Next time you are tasked with writing remember the goal is to persuade or influence as many people as possible.  Know your speaker, their audience, and the opposition if there is one, and evaluate how readable what you wrote is. To learn more about writing and word choice from Robert Lehrman you can purchase his books here.

Liz Faris, Associate
Collaborative Services, Inc.

Next up word choice

What do these folks have in common? We’ll let you know later this week.

President John F. Kennedy

Credit: Clarity Digital Group LLC d/b/a Examiner.com

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Credit: El Diamante High School Web Design

President Ronald Reagan

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice

Credit: Mental Floss

Eva Perón, First Lady of Argentina from 1946 to 1952

Credit: YouBioIt.com

Labor and Community Organizer Mary Harris Jones “Mother Jones”

Credit: Mother Jones Museum

Comedian and talk show host Conan O’Brien

Credit: Jason R. Henske/Associated Press

Comedian and talk show host Ellen Degeneres

Credit: Business Insider, Inc.

Media Mogul and former Talk Show Host Oprah Winfrey

Credit: My Urban Report

Find out this week as we learn about what makes it takes to make a great speech when we talk to speechwriter and professor Robert Lehrman and move in to exploring word choice.

Collaborative Services Blog Team

Words make the world go round

Words make the world go round and societies function. We rely heavily on words. We use words to communicate with each other, to direct us, to instruct us, to describe something, to name something, just to name a few. Can you imagine how different and extremely difficult life would be without words?

Credit: Innovations in Civic Participation

This month we looked at the different ways  in which we use words and how these uses are changing as our world and vocabularies continue to expand.We looked at web tools to analyze words and content. We learned what words are so overused or misused that they end up on a list to banish them (oh no!)  We re-examined some words banished at the beginning of this year. We also spoke with a professional “verbivore“  about why the words we use matter.

As humans we are fascinated, enamored, and obsessed with words. From Scrabble to Words with Friends to Banagrams we have always had a healthy interest in using words to entertain us.

Credit: Slide to Play

From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to Urban Dictionary words and their definitions are something we need to know in our academic, professional, and personal lives.

Credit: Urban Dictionary

From 140 characters to hashtags to word clouds, how we use and display words online is changing as quickly as our twitter feed.

We want to thank the word experts who contributed to our blog this month. They are:

Ryan Stuart, software engineer and co-creator of textisbeautiful.net

Richard Lederer, author, columnist and radio and television contributor

Tom Pink, Director of Public Relations at Lake Superior State University and member of the committee that determines the university’s “Annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use, and General Uselessness“

But what happens when we choose the wrong word? One word is all it takes to tarnish a reputation, lose waves of support, or just cause a lot of unnecessary confusion. As we move into June we wanted to explore words further by looking at Word Choice. Knowing how to distinguish words and their meanings is important to us  in our roles as consumers, voters, and stakeholders. Learning the difference between words can make a huge difference in all aspects of our lives.

Credit: printwand

Thank you for reading and please keep sharing your thoughts in your own words with us.

Catherine Smith, President
Collaborative Services, Inc.

LSSU: Banishing Words since 1975

New Year’s eve brings annual traditions and resolutions. We watch the ball drop in Times Square. We countdown to midnight with a glass of champagne. We vow to drop a few pounds starting the next day.

As we continue our focus on Words, Collaborative Services came across a small university in Michigan with a big annual tradition, one that attracts world-wide attention. On New Year’s Day for the past 38 years Lake Superior State University (LSSU) has released their “Annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”  The list of banished words is compiled from thousands of nominations received throughout the  year. While the list isn’t officially enforced, it does have an avid following and brings great publicity to the state’s smallest public university.

Credit: Lake Superior State University

As for the nominated words, you know them…probably too well. Most of the nominations are for words that are overused in the media and pop culture. Words we’ve heard (fiscal cliff) over (fiscal cliff) and over (fiscal cliff) again (fiscal cliff). These are the words we wish we could hurl off a cliff  (fiscal cliff?), never to be used again. Certain words and phrases have a way of catching on and sticking with us, some eventually becoming incorporated into every-day vocabulary, giving them a fate worse than death…eternal life!

LSSU’s annual list provides an outlet for people to voice their frustration over their favorite mis-used, over-used, and useless word and in turn they have the chance to see it banished.

As we continue to explore words this month, Collaborative Services caught up with Thomas Pink, LSSU’s Director of Public Relations and member of the committee who decides which words and phases to banish. We wanted to know how the banished words are chosen, why certain words and phrases garner such strong reactions from people, and some of the  candidates for next year’s list. We welcome his insights.
- – -
LSSU’s annual list of banished words is in its 38th year. How did it begin?
The list began at a New Year’s Eve party in 1975, when former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe was talking with some friends about words and phrases that drove them crazy. Someone mentioned that there should be a “dishonor” list for words and phrases in the English language, an antithesis to the annual New Year’s Queen’s Honour List, and they came up with the “Annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.” Bill wrote his friend’s suggestions on a cocktail napkin, and when everyone else went to bed, he wrote a story about the new list. Bill was an astute reporter and he was a genius when it came to getting international publicity for LSSU, the smallest of Michigan’s public universities. He figured the story would get some play on New Year’s Day, typically a slow news day, and he was correct. He said when responses to the story started coming in to his office in the form of letters and phone calls, he knew that he was on to something. He turned those replies into nominations for the next year’s list.

Credit: localfirstaz.com

How many nominations do you receive each year and how are they submitted?
We receive a few thousand nominations. These days, they come through e-mail (banish@lssu.edu) and through our web page (lssu.edu/banished) and some through our Facebook page. We prefer e-mail and the link through our web page because it is easier to sort through them and the web page prompts fans to include a good reason for banishment – something other than “I hate this word.” When the list started, the office would receive hundreds of letters and postcards with nominations. In the early 1990s, the bulk still came through mail, but many came through the fax machine. These days, we rarely get hard copy nominations.

Who makes up the committee that makes the final decision on which words and phrases to banish?
The core of the committee is made up of me and John Shibley, the campus photographer/writer. We involve anyone who is interested, but because we often do the bulk of the work during the holiday break in December, it’s sometimes tough to get assistance. So it varies from year to year. Faculty and staff have helped. Students have helped. A couple years we had local kids attending out-of-town schools who helped when they were home on break. One of them was able to get some academic credit for her work on the project.

LSSU’s Thomas Pink and John Shibley have been banishing words since 1989.
(Credit: Lake Superior State University)

What makes people react so strongly to certain words?
Most of the words and phrases that are nominated are for “overuse.” When they send in nominations, people often write things such as, “If I hear a politician utter this phrase one more time…” or “My teen-aged son uses this word constantly!” The way that news is communicated these days contributes to how much words get under peoples’ skin. Sound bites get picked up and played over and over again. That’s one way, anyway. Some people just have pet peeves with certain words. My college speech professor used to stop us in the middle of our presentations if he heard us say the phrase “you know” or “y’know.” He’d say, “No! We don’t know. You tell us!” If he had nominated “yuh know” for banishment – and he may have, since he was one of Bill Rabe’s best friends – he would have said, as he so often did, “Y’know has got to go.”

YOLO, the acronym for “You Only Live Once”, made LSSU’s 2013 list of Banished Words.
(Credit: BrandNuThreads)

Some of the words like “boneless wings” and “superfood” just don’t make sense. Why do you think these words catch on so quickly and stay with us?
Again, we believe it has much to do with the way we communicate electronically. An advertising term such as “boneless wings,” or a cute word used to describe foods that are better for you than others, “superfoods,” is used by someone in their advertising or writing and people find it interesting – for a while. Then others use it in their writing and in their communication to friends. It spreads quickly. A word or phrase can go from “cool” to “I hate it!” in less than 24 hours these days.

Credit: Grub Grade/ The Daily Meal

The phrase that received the most nominations this year (2012) was “fiscal cliff.” Why do you think this word took the top spot compared to the others on the list?
We believe this one rose to the top because of its association with politicians and the economy. Its overuse in the news cycle contributed to its infamy.  We receive a fair number of political nominations every year, but that number increases during presidential election years. People love to hate politicians and their follies no matter what, so when you get a phrase like this that’s waved in their faces over and over, and it relates to political action – or inaction, as in this case – it’s ripe for banishment.

Credit: Jeff Parker, Florida Today and Fort Meyers News-Press

Why has LSSU continued the tradition of banishing words?
Our favorite answer to this question is, “Because no one will let us stop.”  John Shibley and I have been associated with the list since 1989, longer now than Bill Rabe, its creator, was involved with it. Each year we wonder if people will lose interest, but as soon as the list is released on New Year’s Eve, we can tell from the response that we’ll have enough nominations for next year’s list. The nominations come from around the world. Most come from the U.S., and many from Canada, but a fair number also from the U.K. and Australia. We’ve always received a nomination or two from far-flung places, mostly from U.S. service men and women stationed overseas.

We’re grateful for the interest. Bill Rabe created the list as one of several ways of gaining attention for LSSU, which was then and still is Michigan’s smallest public university. We pride ourselves on being able to provide personal attention to students because of our size (3,000 students) but of course we still need to let future students and parents know about us. Banishing words is one way of accomplishing that. It leads prospective students and others to our website to find out more about our school. As we mentioned, Bill was a genius when it came to coming up with low-cost ways of promoting LSSU. Word Banishment is one of them. He started the tradition of burning a snowman on the first day of spring back in 1971, and that is something we continue, also.

LSSU’s annual snowman burning on the first day of spring.
(Credit: Lake Superior State University)

Radio shows, especially, love the list. In early December, we start hearing from reporters who want to make sure that they are on our mailing list. In the days before New Year’s eve and for a couple weeks afterward, we start doing radio interviews – some live, some taped, anywhere from three minutes on a morning show to hour-long, call-in talk shows.

Are you already receiving nominations for words to be added to next year’s list of banished words? Can you share any with us?
Yes. There are hundreds in the mailbox already. Many have already made the list in the past. We don’t start looking at them seriously and weeding them out until the fall, but some that are catching our eyes are listed below. This does not mean they will make the list on New Year’s Eve.

Lockdown – appears to be a response to the Boston bombings and other recent crimes that put schools, neighborhoods or entire towns on “lockdown” while police investigate.

Instagramming – follows along with “Facebooking,” “Googling” and other nouns turned into verbs.

Mr. Mom – For some reason, we received over a dozen nominations in February and March from many different states for this one. None of them mention over-use in the news, so it’s interesting to see that one catching so much attention. They all mention it as being insulting – perhaps it’s a reflection on the economy, with more fathers out of work and staying home while mom works. We’ll see how that shakes out over the year. One guy says, “I am a stay-at-home dad/parent. And if you call me “Mr. Mom,” I will punch you in the throat.”
(So I guess we could add to the earlier question that we’re performing a public service by letting people vent.)

Credit: A Survivors Guide to Being Mr. Mom

Craft Beer – Just like “hand-crafted latte” in 2004, this person asks, “Aren’t they all crafted? Are we supposed to believe each glass of beer is ‘crafted’ after we order it?”

Credit: Brewers Association

Sometimes a word or phrase only needs one nomination to make it on the list. I’ve only seen one so far for “breastaurant.” The person from California who nominated it says it’s a ridiculous word used to describe restaurants/bars such as “Hooters, Twin Peaks and Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill, etc…You know, those places for people who are too uptight for strip clubs and too libertine for Applebees and Fridays.”

A person from North Carolina nominates the phrase, “I thought to myself,” and asks, “Who else can you think to?”

Bill Rabe had a great sense of humor and liked entries that would make him laugh. We do, too.

What is your favorite word or phrase that has been banished and why?
That’s a tough one. Not only are there so many words and phrases to remember, but there are many that make us laugh. I liked “alcohol-related drunk driving” from 1989 and remember someone else nominating “legally drunk” and asking if someone could be “illegally sober.” I still grind my teeth when I hear “safe haven” in the news, and “co-conspirators.” “Pre-planning” is another word that one hears often.  Really? (“Really” made the list in 1979, but “Really?” has been nominated often over the past few years and will probably make the list soon.)

As much as we like to laugh at the nominations, none of us on the committee claims to be a word expert. In interviews, we remind people that we make as many mistakes as anyone else. We also point out that the list at least causes us to think a bit more about how we communicate, and that’s a good thing.

- – -
To see the 2013 list of banished words click here.  Is there a word or phrase that you would like to banish? Send your nomination to banish@lssu.edu or submit it online at lssu.edu/banished and see if it makes it on next year’s list.

Liz Faris, Associate
Collaborative Services, Inc.

Introducing the Verbivore

There is an intelligent creature that lurks among us and preys on words. In its natural habitat it surrounds itself with dictionaries, thesauri, writing instruments, and word-processing programs. This elusive creature, known as the verbivore,  is a master of language arts and can seemingly craft catchy, creative, and thought provoking-phrases at the blink of an eye. Its existence can be traced back to the beginning of human kind, when the first words were uttered, but only the alpha of this species has gone on to succeed in society.

Credit: Amerika Australia

This month, Collaborative Services has tracked down a verbivore right here in San Diego and we spoke to him about his love of language. Admitted verbivore Dr. Richard Lederer is a best-selling author, columnist, former radio show host, and current radio show contributor. He has appeared on nationally broadcast television shows, including NBC’s Today Show and CNN Prime Time, and has been elected International Punster of the Year and won the Toastmasters International’s Golden Gavel. Currently, Lederer has a weekly column, “Lederer on Language,” which appears every Saturday in the San Diego U-T and also has American history quizzes every day therein. You can say this verbivore has a way with words.

As we continue our theme on words this month we wanted to hear from a leading linguist about his thoughts on the subject. Lederer took some time to share with Collaborative Services his love of words, his thoughts on the evolution of language online, and how growing older gracefully has helped him become more wordstruck. We welcome his insights.

- – -
You’ve written more than thirty books on the joys of language. You seem to love not only how words sound and what they mean, but how you make puzzles out of them, like anagrams, palindromes, and crosswords. When did this love of words start, and when did you first think to write about words themselves, rather than the sentences or stories they create?
I can’t remember when I wasn’t a wordstruck, word besotted, word bethumped wordaholic. Early in my life I observed that a butterfly will flutter by, creating my first spoonerism, even though, at the time, I didn’t know that eponymous word. Decades later, I graduated to the more sophisticated reversal “A dragonfly will drink its flagon dry.”

Over time, I became fascinated with words themselves, not just their content. Carnivores eat flesh and meat; piscivores eat fish; herbivores consume plants and vegetables; verbivores devour words. I am such a creature. My whole life I have feasted on words — ogled their appetizing shapes, colors, and textures; swished them around in my mouth; lingered over their many tastes; felt their juices run down my chin. We have achieved our level of civilization because human beings are rather different from each other. Somehow I got born a verbivore, and I do my best to contribute that gift to the mix.

Richard Lederer

What made you want to create the public radio program “A Way with Words”? To what do you attribute its success?
Language is like the air we breathe: It’s invisible, it’s all around us, we can’t get along without it, yet we take it for granted. But when you step back and listen to the sounds that escape from people’s mouths and luminesce up on their computer screens, you are in for a lifetime of joy in a world in which you drive in a parkway and park in a driveway – and your nose can run and your feet can smell.

Language is the defining characteristic of our humanness. Not only do we human beings define language. We are language. What topic, then, could be more entertaining, enlightening, and edifying than words? Add to that the presence of hosts like Charles Harrington Elster, my original partner, and our successors, Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, each of whom have put in more than the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours of focused practice on our passion for words, and you have the perfect ingredients for a widely-listened-to show.

Current hosts of A Way with Words, Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette. A Way with Words first aired in 1998 with co-hosts Richard Lederer and
Charles Harrington Elster.
(Credit: Last.fm)

You’ve spoken about the “miracle of language,” and you’ve studied words in other languages besides English. What are some key differences between English and the other languages you’ve studied, both in their origins, and how they convey meaning?
The history of English (“Angle-ish”) bequeaths us a unique three-tiered tongue. The common words of everyday life, many of them fashioned from a single syllable, Anglo-Saxon is the foundation of our language. Its directness, brevity, and plainness make us feel more deeply and see things about us more truly. The grandeur, sonority, and courtliness of the French elements lift us to another, and more literary, level of expression. At the third tier, the precision and learnedness of our Greek and Latin vocabulary arouse our minds to more complex thinking and the making of fine distinctions. Each of us English speakers re-enacts the history of our language as we grow up. We acquire the Anglo-Saxon words so early that we can scarcely remember learning them. As we become adults, we learn the harder, more learned words, which generally derive from French, Greek, and Latin.

A reenactment of a home in an Anglo Saxon village.
(Credit: BBC)

What most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. More than 600,000 words repose in our biggest, fattest dictionaries, and the true size of our lexicon exceeds a million words. In comparison, German, according to traditional estimates, has a vocabulary of about 185,000, Russian 130,000, and French and Spanish around 100,000.

One reason English has accumulated such a vast word hoard is that it is the most hospitable and democratic language that has ever existed. English has never rejected a word because of its race, creed, or national origin. Having welcomed into its vocabulary words from more than three hundred other languages, ancient and modern, far and near, English is unique in the number and variety of its borrowed words. Fewer than thirty percent of our words spring from the original Anglo-Saxon word stock; the rest are imported. As the poet Carl Sandburg once said, “The English language hasn’t got where it is by being pure.”

Sir Philip Sidney, the quintessential Elizabethan — at once poet, courtier, and soldier — celebrated this word-wealth: “But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceite of the minde, which is the ende of thought, English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world.” Sidney saw how the abundance of synonyms and near synonyms in our language offers wondrous possibilities for the precise and complete expression of diverse shadings of meaning.

A portrait of Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney painted by the younger John Decritz.
(Credit: http://humphrysfamilytree.com)

You’ve written books for both children and adults. How do you write differently for each audience?
I’m astonished to find that about 20 percent of my current titles are books for children. A writer must discover what kind of writer he or she is, and long ago I realized that I could never be a writer of fiction. That’s because I stink at creating fictional elements such as plot, character, motivation, setting, and dialogue. But I love explaining ideas and gradually found that I could share language fun and skill with hormones poured into sneakers, that is, children ages eight to thirteen years. That’s a market sadly neglected, in part because parents often stop taking their children to book stores around the third grade.

I very much respect the intelligence of children, so my subject matter for boys and girls is not much different from what I write about for adults. But my work for kids is cast in a simpler sentence style and includes more games and illustrations.

Credit: Richard Lederer

The Internet has created a whole new dialect of abbreviations and memes. As a proud septuagenarian (Lederer turns 75 on May 26) who has studied words for some time, what do you make of so-called “LOL-speak”? Are you enjoying how language is evolving online?
Long ago, Heraclitus taught us that we never step in the same river twice. Similarly, we never step in the same language twice because, even as we do, the river rushes ahead. Lexically, the English language gains about three words each day, and think about how established words acquire new means. Think about the computer’s impact on words such as back up, bit, boot, hack, memory, menu, mouse, park, prompt, port, scroll, spam, trash, virus, window, and worm.

As a linguist, one who studies language scientifically, I am bullish language evolution, including emailing and texting. Early Victorians wrote scads of personal letters to each other, but the invention of the telephone significantly diminished that number. Nowadays, cyberspace is filled with more personal letters than we’ve had for almost a century and a half. And the new cyber language makes for an exciting exercise in concision, as long as writers understand that numbers in place of prepositions and other such shortcuts are not appropriate in formal writing. Being good in language involves the ability to code-switch from one context to another.

Credit: One Hour Translation

You’ve written several columns lately about poetry. What interests you about poetry? How is it different than prose? Do you think most people misunderstand it?
Sadly, there are scarcely more people reading poetry than there are writing poetry these days. Most of us view/hear poetry as an artificial refinement of natural speech or an unrhymed and incomprehensible language. But in the literature of every country poetry comes before prose. “Poetry is the eldest sister of all arts, and parent to most,” according to the playwright William Congreve. It is the oldest language we have – the most primitive, the most elemental, and the most natural expression of ourselves as human beings. Poet John Frederick Nims has said that “poetry is the way it is because we are the way we are.”

You’re a prolific writer. Does your vast knowledge or words give you more to say, or is it just that you love the topic so much?
Both. Because, in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Language is the skin of living thought,” a passion for words and breadth and power of one’s vocabulary gift you with more to say. Simultaneously, when a passion for words reaches deep into the heart’s core, you are incandesced to share what you know.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
(Credit: BestWiseWords.com)

I’ve devoted my life to blowing up the distance between who I am and what I do. The more I have become one with what I do and the more I do what I am, the more easily flow the words about words. I’ve been choosing words and cobbling sentences for more than six decades, and I’d like to think that I still learning how to do that better each time.

You’ve written about growing older and trying to do so gracefully. How has aging influenced your love and respect for words? How has that love helped you express your feelings on aging?
To purloin a few lines from William Shakespeare, my life has become the sere, the yellow leaf that falls from the bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. I like being seventy-five; it’s such a lovely change from being young.

As time’s wingéd chariot hurries near, as the body fades and loved ones depart the earthly stage, words and language endure and indeed prevail. I have never been more wordstruck, besotted, and bethumped, than I am right now. Now that I am full of years and the evening star is in the sky, I find myself shot through with gratitude that I have been able to labor so long and so lovingly in the language vineyards. I have actually made a decent living as an English major. Yippee! Huzzah! Woo-hoo! What a ride!

- – -
Are you looking to find your own way with words? Pick up a copy of one of Lederer’s books as a start and then jump right in to the wonderful world of words. To learn more about Lederer visit www.verbivore.com.

Liz Faris, Associate
Collaborative Services

A More Intelligent Word Cloud

Take a jumble of words, add different shapes and sizes, some bright colors,  fun font, and different directions and voilà you have a word cloud. It’s actually a little more complicated then that, but words churned out into a beautiful digital layout known as a word cloud have become the easiest and trendiest way to present a text analysis in recent years.

These clouds have a short history dating back only to the 1990′s when the first tag clouds originated. These distant cousins of the word cloud are used primarily to display the popularity of keywords in website content data and as a navigation aid. We have seen word clouds grow to become a phenomenon in recent years, thanks in large part to websites like Flickr and Wordle.

From being used as a marketing tool for various brands, teams, and products to capturing moments in pop culture and history like the Dark Knight Rises and speeches from the 2012 presidential campaign, word clouds are everywhere and can be used for almost anything.

A word cloud of most popular search terms associated with Dark Knight Rises.
Created in Tagxedo. Data sourced from Experian Hitwise.

But are word clouds here for good or merely a fad? Although, having a nice image of the most frequently used words in a document is a great visual, it only produces one dimensional data.

What if you are looking for something with a deeper meaning?

Now there is a website that offers just that. Textisbeautiful.net goes a step beyond traditional word clouds and produces concept clouds. Co-creators and software engineers, Ryan Stuart and Kris Rogers, wanted to use their skills for a more in-depth analysis of text. What started out as a pet project for its creators, textisbeautiful.net has become so popular it has been a wonderful challenge for Stuart and Rogers to keep up with the demand, which implies that this trend is far from over. Being able to identify concepts within a group of text has expanded popular interest and suggests that we are only beginning to pioneer the next frontier of text analysis.

Credit: textisbeautiful.net

This month Collaborative Services is turning our interest in communications from how we speak to the words we say. With so many places to start we wanted to see what was on the horizon for words and their meanings. We spoke with textisbeautiful.net co-creator Ryan Stuart to find out more about concept clouds, where he thinks textisbeautiful.net is headed next, and why he thinks text is beautiful. We welcome his insights.

- – -
Word clouds have become increasingly popular over the past few years. Why has there been such mass appeal?
Social media has turned vast amounts of people into media producers, not just consumers.  People are pushing out vast amounts of content to the digital world via social media in a wide range of forms including text and images.  Because of this, people are constantly on the lookout for content they can produce that communicates their message which is what visualizations like word clouds provide.  Couple this with advancements in both web and text analytics technology that enables sites such as textisbeautiful.net and wordle.net to visualize large volumes of text succinctly and quickly and I think you have identified one of the major reasons why word clouds have become so popular.  Word clouds are the simplest and most intuitive way of visualizing text data, plus they are easy to share.

Credit: Designtechnica Corporation

Your website produces concept clouds instead of word clouds. What is the difference? What type of qualitative analysis does Text is Beautiful perform on the text submitted through your website?
Word clouds are traditionally based on the frequency of occurrence of particular words in the text, but frequency is one dimensional.  We believe that a single word and its frequency does not give the whole picture.

People communicate in concepts – clusters of words on a topic and often interchange words to mean the same thing, e.g. Dog, Hound, Beast, Animal and associate different descriptors to it.  And the relationship and influence of these concepts on one another can be as important as the frequency of occurrence.  Hence the Concept Cloud (and Web) – it is based on clusters of words on a topic (a concept) and their relative proximities indicates their respective connectedness and relationship.  It is a more intelligent word cloud.

Credit: ITPro

What has been the biggest challenge you encountered with the Text is Beautiful website so far?
The popularity of the site. It was originally made and maintained in our spare time (although that is set to change). The response has been amazing; we get 100 new people visiting every day plus an ever increasing amount of returning visitors. So, we struggle to keep up with the email traffic sometimes!

Why does your website require a 5,000 character minimum?  Do you find that requiring a minimum of 5,000 character helps with the analysis?
It is an arbitrary limit, but the principle is that if the volume of text is small then you don’t need a word cloud to interpret it for you automatically – you can simply read it yourself!  Technology comes in to play to achieve scalability over large volumes of text.  And ‘yes’ to get a meaningful summary of a passage of text, you need a reasonable volume of information to summarise.

You and the co-creator of Text is Beautiful, Kris Rogers are software engineers by trade. Why did you become interested in using your software engineering skills to analyze text?
We had been interested in data visualisation with regard to text since university and had liked Wordle but thought it could be taken a step further. Quantitative (numeric) data analytics has been around for a long time, but text analysis is a newer and burgeoning environment, largely due to the ascendancy of social media.  Text is not linear like numbers – it is an amorphous n-dimensional mass with room for innovation in its analysis and visualisation.  We find it a great challenge to take such an environment and ‘convert’ or de-mistify it into a simplistic picture that can be digested by non-experts. Plus, I hate reading books and manuals, so this is a great short-cut for me!

Credit: Denver Post

Your website provides three ways to identify and analyze text, the concept cloud, concept web, and correlation wheel. What are the differences between the three and are some more effective for different types of text?
The Concept Cloud is really like art – arguably the best looking but has the least amount of semantic information as it is frequency and theme only. The Correlation Wheel is intended to interrogate the most prominent concept relationships interactively and is also organized into themes.  The Concept Web is the full-metal-jacket: concept frequency, theme and relationship with all other concepts. It is our preferred visualization and hugely informative, but it isn’t for everyone.

A concept web for reviews of the Sydney Opera House on TripAdvisor shown on textisbeautiful.net
(Credit: Text is Beautiful)

Why do you consider text beautiful?
In our minds, it is a question not a statement.  We are taking an amorphous mass and condensing it into different meaningful visualizations or patterns that are intended to stimulate the end-user and help prompt them to ‘see’ the meaning or beauty contained within the text that has been inspired by the author. The proof is in the pudding!

What’s next for your website? What are your goals for the next year?
This is a first-cut endeavor at interpreting and visualizing text. We already have more advanced ways of distilling the content in process in our “Lab” and additional visualizations. We would like to deliver this with some further analytical features and improve the ways that we can share the outputs, i.e. social integration. We want textisbeautiful.net to bring meaningful text analytics to the masses in a simple, visually compelling and intuitive way. Watch this space!

- – -
Next time you are looking for a new and visually pleasing way to analyze your text, try out textisbeautiful.net and see if a concept cloud, concept web, or correlation wheel works best for you.

Liz Faris, Associate
Collaborative Services, Inc.

Next Up: Words

Here’s a hint about the first topic for our series on Words. Find out more later this week.

Credit: saymedia.com

We move from how we speak to what we say

Maybe public speaking isn’t all it’s hyped up to be. Maybe it’s simple. A conversation. Odds are most of us had a conversation today. Whether it was at work, school, or the dinner table, you spoke to someone and were doing a form of public speaking. Is a simple conversation, with no formal audience, public speaking? Yes, the one overarching theme we learned during our series this month on public speaking is that maybe it really is as simple as conversing.  Learning to view speaking to an audience as just a conversation with many different people – and not as a performance in front of a panel of judges – reduces speech anxiety and improves your overall delivery. Yes the fear of failing in front of others may always hover over us to some degree, but know this – the audience is rooting for you and wants you to succeed. Have a meaningful message and just talk like you would to a friend.

Credit: Kiwi Commons

We also learned that you don’t have to be a lawyer, politician, or celebrity to give a great speech that commands people’s attention and compels them to take action. But you can learn a thing or two from watching speakers like that.

Credit: ehow.com/Demand Media, Inc.

You can also learn from people just like you, seeking to improve their public speaking in a no-pressure environment, by attending a Toastmasters International meeting at one of their 13,500 chapter clubs.

In April we wanted to explore public speaking because verbal persuasion is a powerful skill.  We communicate every day and knowing how to do it well makes all the difference. Good communication and effective public speaking are essential to your success whether you are a CEO, architect, teacher, yoga instructor, or public outreach professional like us.

This month we heard from a variety of experts in public speaking, including a world champion. We want to thank them for taking the time to contribute to our series and for offering their knowledge and great advice on the subject. They are:

Ryan Avery, 2012 Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking

John Lau, 2012 President of Toastmasters International

Professional public speaking coach Geraldine Barkworth

Molly Bishop Shadel, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia and co-author of the book Tongue Tied America: Reviving the Art of Verbal Persuasion

Michael T. Motley, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and author of Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking: A Proven Method, and other publications on speech anxiety.

Next month we turn our focus from how we speak to what we say. We will explore words and how and why we use them. We’ll look at word origins, meanings, new words and even words we wish we could get rid of altogether. Words are beautiful, fun, and fascinating.

We love words.
(Credit: http://kuteev.livejournal.com)

We hope you will keep reading our words and the words of the experts we interview. Then please provide a few words of your own and send us your feedback, comment on our blog or Facebook page, or tweet us at @CollaborateInc.

Catherine Smith, President
Collaborative Services, Inc.

Facing our fear. What to know about conquering speech anxiety.

Sweaty palms, dry throat, butterflies in the stomach . . . you know the feeling. These are the symptoms that come on just before you are about to speak in public. You’ve spent hours preparing and organizing your message, and know your topic inside and out, but you still can’t shake the feeling of speech anxiety creeping on. Chances are most of us have battled with a case of speech anxiety at some point in our lives. According to some studies, public speaking is the number one fear among American adults. The fear of death comes in second.

So why are we so afraid of public speaking? How can we tame this practically universal fear?

 Michael T. Motley, Ph.D., a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis, has studied this topic and written several books and articles on it. Motley believes our fear comes from our mistaken belief that public speaking is a performance. When we start to associate the pressure to speak with the pressure to perform we add a whole new level of anxiety. Performing in a dance recital, a concert, or even competing in a talent contest is typically evaluated and scored in some way.  Speaking in front of others is usually not, yet we tend to put performing and speaking in the same category.
As it turns out, however, speaking in public is much more like speaking in normal conversation, says Motley, and recognizing this can help to reduce the anxiety.

Credit: http://www.visualphotos.com

As we continue our look at public speaking this month, we wanted to learn more about this number one fear and what causes it. We spoke with Motley on why people are so afraid of public speaking, how we can manage and eventually overcome speech anxiety, and what to remember if that moment of panic strikes during a speech. We welcome his insights.
- – -
The number one fear of American adults is the fear of public speaking.  The fear of death comes in second.  Why are we so afraid of public speaking?
The most common answer to this question is that the fear comes from having had a traumatic public speaking experience in the past, but I really doubt that this is the case very often.  A more accurate answer for most people, I think, is that they mistakenly think of a speech as a performance instead of as a communicative effort to get certain points across to listeners.  Accordingly, they mistakenly believe that the situation calls for formal or “proper” behaviors — special gestures, special eye contact, special vocabulary, and so forth — and mistakenly believe that the objective is to be evaluated positively by a scrutinizing audience.   These two conditions — thinking that one is being evaluated “under the microscope” and believing that the situation requires unfamiliar behaviors — happen to set off anxiety in all kinds of social situations, such as job interviews, meeting your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time, and so forth.   The good news is that the typical speech audience in fact is not focused on evaluation (after all, is that your main objective when listening to a speech?); and that the gestures, expressions, inflections, and other behaviors needed for a speech are the familiar behaviors of everyday conversation.

Credit: Empower Network

Are adults more prone to the fear of public speaking?  Do youths also experience this fear?
In our culture, people of all post-adolescent ages experience public speaking anxiety.

Your book, Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking: A Proven Method, recommends viewing speeches as a conversation rather than a performance.  How does adopting a communication orientation toward public speaking, instead of a performance orientation, reduce anxiety?
Let’s start with the ways that performances and conversations differ.  Think in terms of true performances like music recitals or Olympic gymnastic routines, or in terms of a speech being approached as a performance.  Notice that in each case the performance is almost bound to cause more anxiety.

As for the order of the behaviors, they are scripted in performances versus spontaneous in conversation.  As for the behaviors themselves, they need to be specialized and artificial in performances, but need to be natural and familiar in conversation.  As for the objective, in a performance it is to impress people and score points, while in a conversation it is simply to get an idea across.  As for error tolerance, in a performance, mistakes are noticed and cause real or figurative points to be deducted, while in a conversation, glitches such as hesitations, false starts, slips of the tongue, and so forth, are hardly even noticed.  And unless they are excessive to the point of distraction, they are not held against the speaker (indeed, they make us “human”).  As for what the audience prefers in speeches, all other things being equal, they usually don’t like a speaker who seems to be up there to show off skills and get the practiced routine over with, and they usually do like a speaker who is genuinely trying to communicate a message he or she believes is important.

To put it another way, true performances put considerable pressure on the performer and failure is a real possibility.  But conversing is something we have proved to ourselves that we already know how to do successfully, because we do it  successfully every day.  Add to this the fact that a conversational style — natural gestures, natural facial expression, natural vocal inflection, and so forth — actually improves the speech as well, and it becomes easy to see how abandoning a performance orientation should reduce anxiety.

McKayla Maroney of the United States women’s gymnastics team after a vault competition during the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
(Credit: Inquisitr Ltd.)

What motivated you to study and write about public speaking and speech anxiety?
I was a contest orator in high school.  Contest oratory is definitely performance oriented, and I had high stage fright.  In college I had an instructor who emphasized a communicative, non-performance, approach to public speaking, and as I adopted it, the anxiety went away.  Then, at about the same time, another professor invited me to be his research assistant.  Part of his research involved using heart rate to measure public speaking anxiety.  I got to work on studies about how anxiety vacillates before, during, and after a speech.  I think the combination of my own experience with the two extremes of stage fright, along with assisting on my professor’s work, made it sort of natural for public speaking anxiety to be one of my first specializations when I began doing my own research.

Different people experience different degrees of speech anxiety.  For some it is the feeling of butterflies in their stomach before speaking, for others the fear is paralyzing.  What causes this range of symptoms and why does the interpretation of these symptoms matter?
I think the only way to have zero anxiety for a speech is to not care at all about the success of the effort.  Obviously (I hope), to not care at all would not be a good thing.  So even the experienced communication-oriented speaker is likely to have a twinge of anxiety, because a lot of planning and effort has already gone into the speech, presumably, the opportunity to communicate the message is finally here,  and he/she wants the communication effort to be successful.  But extreme anxiety — “paralyzing fear,” as you call it — is almost certain to be the result of a performance orientation toward the speech.  As for the interpretation of the symptoms, that’s not the trick.  The interpretation of the speech situation and the speech objectives is what matters.  For most people, interpreting the speech as a performance is going to jack up the anxiety and the more troubling symptoms, while interpreting it as a communication task will reduce the anxiety and leave only the milder symptoms.

Credit: The Presenters’ Blog

People don’t naturally interpret the physical symptoms of speech anxiety in a positive way.  How can we work to change the negative interpretation of these symptoms into a positive one?
Since there are ways to reduce the anxiety, the objective, I think, should be to change the intensity of the symptoms rather than to change our interpretation of them.  Even when one reduces the intensity of the symptoms, however, it is helpful to have realistic targets.  You’re simply not likely to completely eliminate the tiny bit of anxiety that virtually all speakers have right before getting up to give the speech, for example. Even low anxiety speakers have minor symptoms and it can be helpful for the high anxiety speaker to make these the goal. 

Many people regard the fear of public speaking and stage fright as the same thing.  Is there a difference and if so what is it?
The anxiety felt by most musicians in a piano recital, dancers in a dance recital, participants in a contest debate, and public speakers may all be called “stage fright.”  They are examples of  what is also referred to as “performance anxiety.”  The primary difference is that the assumptions of a performance orientation — being there to have the performance scrutinized, showing off special skills, being penalized for mistakes, receiving a final performance score, and so forth — may be true for many piano recitals, figure skating competitions, contest debates, and so forth.  But the assumptions simply are not true for most speech situations.  And as soon as we realize that a speech is not like these other performances, the causes of “performance anxiety,” “stage fright,” “public speaking anxiety” –whatever you want to call it — subside considerably.

Credit: Service Scout, Inc.

Speech anxiety can strike at almost any time.  Probably the most mortifying is during an important presentation or speech.  What are some important things to remember in that moment that can help someone struck with speech anxiety get back on track and make it through to the end?
Two points here.  First, the near total meltdown you seem to be alluding to tends to happen only when one has the speech content down too pat — too word-for-word planned out.  Most every public speaking instructor would agree with me that one should never, never, never try to memorize a speech, or write it out word for word to read, or use as a prompt.

Any time we think there is only one right way or best way to say it, three bad things happen:  The anxiety goes way up (because we’re afraid of forgetting or losing our place), we sound phony and artificial (because we’re missing the natural rhythm that comes with conversational talk), and, as you suggested, a minor glitch can throw us completely off kilter.

The idea is that we should plan very carefully what points we’re going to make, the order in which we’re going to present them, the examples we’re going to use, and so forth. But we need to be spontaneous — as we are in conversation — with respect to the exact words we’re going to use.  If we take that approach, then an outline with brief notes is all we need to get through the speech or to get back on track if something throws us off.

The second important point here is to realize that all of the objects of the “fear” are irrational.  My book spends about 15 pages on this so I’ll have to be give a very abbreviated version here, but in a nutshell, it simply isn’t true that, “The audience will ridicule me if I make a mistake,” “I might make a fool out of myself,” “This needs to be perfect,” and so forth.  It can be very helpful to have a more rationale and realistic understanding of these and the other dozen or so common answers to, “What am I afraid of?” about giving a speech.

Credit: Pat Alexander

How can the average person use public speaking in his or her daily life?
Let’s begin by noticing that there is hardly any difference between a speech and an ordinary conversation.  Indeed, there are only three differences.  And if we take a communication orientation, all three of them actually make the speech preferable in some ways:  First, with a speech we get more time to plan what we’re going to say — more time to think before we speak.  Second, we get to share our information without being interrupted or having to digress from our message.  Third, we get the efficiency of sharing our message with several people at once.  Assuming that we have something important to say, the more people who can hear it at one time, the better.  So, getting back to the question of how we can use public speaking in our everyday lives, we can use it virtually any time we have something important or valuable (to others) to say, and have time to plan an effective way to present it, and have a group of people who might want or need to hear it.  Depending on the message, that group might be colleagues, clients, the PTA, the City Council, a group of wedding guests, and on and on.

A Peterson, New Jersey resident speaks before the City Council during a discussion on limiting the hours of some late-night businesses.
(Credit: George McNish/ North Jersey Media Group)

What are some resources and practices you recommend for people looking to manage their speech anxiety and improve their public speaking?
There have been about a dozen or so research studies in the past few years to test various kinds of public speaking anxiety therapies against one another.  Over and over, the most effective approach is to replace the performance orientation with a communication orientation.  I’ve only scratched the surface in this discussion, of course.  The complete therapy takes about 1 1/2 hours face to face, or about 150 pages in print.  I know several university instructors who can help with this approach.  But I stopped doing therapy myself a few years ago when I realized that I was saying the same thing to practically all clients and decided to put it into a book.  In most of the research studies that compare therapies, the communication-orientation therapy is administered simply by having the research participants read the first four chapters of my book — Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking: A Proven Method.  By the way, the “A Proven Method” part of the title comes from the fact that all of these studies have shown that people who read the first four chapters have significantly more public speaking stage fright reduction than those who received other therapies.   There are other solutions, of course, but this is the easiest and works well for most high- and very high-anxiety speakers.
- – -
So next time it’s your turn to speak relax and remember its just a well thought-out conversation between you and the audience.

Click here to purchase a copy of Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking: A Proven Method.

Liz Faris, Associate
Collaborative Services, Inc.

From Bill to Condoleezza to you – Great Speakers in the Making

Politicians and public speaking go hand-in-hand. Some of the best public speakers out there are the people we have elected to lead us. While politicians are known for having a way with words, they also need to be able to back up their words with facts.  A great speech is only as good as the information in it. A well delivered speech filled with errors and misinformation may have had a nice ring to it, but it discounts the credibility of the speaker. The best politicians use their words and their facts to compel and convince us.

During this past year’s presidential election, our nation and the world watched speakers from all parties drum up support for their chosen candidate at the national conventions. Those who watched the Democratic National Convention (DNC) will remember the return of Bill Clinton and his speech, all 48 minutes of it, calling on the delegates to officially nominate Barack Obama for a second-term in the White House. While Clinton is known for being a charismatic speaker, his speech at the DNC was also recognized for something else: All of the facts he presented in it checked out. The media scoured the mountain of statistics and claims Clinton made for major inaccuracies only to turn up empty handed. Opponents tried to build a case for criticism but in the end could only comment on the speech’s length.

President Bill Clinton delivering his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.
(Credit: Hearst Communications, Inc.)

To one person in particular, Clinton as a speaker and his speech at the DNC is the perfect case study for successful public speaking. Molly Bishop Shadel, an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia and co-author of the book Tongue Tied America: Reviving the Art of Verbal Persuasion analyzed speakers from both parties during the 2012 Presidential campaign.  She and her colleague Robert Sayler critiqued the public speaking skills of the candidates on their blog, Tongue Tied Applied,which they created to show how the lessons of their book apply to the real world.

But don’t count out Republicans when it comes to public speaking during the 2012 presidential campaign. Shadel highlights former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice‘s speech at the Republican National Convention as one of her favorites. Rice established her credibility and captivated the delegates gathered in Tampa, Florida – and the viewers at home – by using facts to back up her points and emotion to relate to her audience.

Condoleezza Rice at 2012 Republic National Convention
Credit: examiner.com

But these skills don’t just apply to politicians. Shadel says having effective communication and good public speaking skills is important in every field and especially for her students entering the workforce.

Continuing our focus this month on public speaking, we spoke with Shadel to learn more about the art of verbal persuasion and what makes a great public speaker. She shared with us her observations from the 2012 presidential campaign, her favorite public speakers, and why successful public speaking is so important. We welcome her insights.
- – -
You co-founded your blog Tongue-Tied Applied with your colleague Robert Sayler to analyze speeches delivered during the 2012 Democratic and Republican National Convention and demonstrate how the lessons of your book, Tongue-Tied America: Reviving the Art of Verbal Persuasion, apply to the real world. Why did you decide to focus on the political speeches?
We focused on political speeches because they matter.  We live in a representative democracy, and people make decisions about who will lead our country based in large part on what those leaders say and how those speeches make them (the voters) feel.  Understanding how politicians are trying to persuade you—the rhetorical tools that they are using to make an argument—gives you a better understanding of how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their positions.

We also thought these speeches would provide a terrific lens through which to study effective verbal persuasion.  Learning how to say what you think in a convincing way will empower you, both professionally and personally.  Watching skilled speakers at work is a great way to start improving your own public speaking skills.

Creidt: tonguetiedamerica.com

Who did you consider the top public speakers at each convention and why?

If you’re looking for a master at public speaking, it’s hard to get much better than Bill Clinton.  He’s got an authentic style that convinces through charm and good humor.  Take, for example, his opening salvo in his Democratic National Convention speech, delivered with perfect comic timing:

Now, Mr. Mayor, fellow Democrats, we are here to nominate a president… and I’ve got one in mind.

The Democrats had been waiting to cheer for quite some time, and Bill Clinton gave them a reason to.  Clinton is also worth watching because he is a lawyer, and knows how to make a closing argument.  You start with a pithy theme (known in lawyering terms as “the theory of the case”):

In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president’s re-election was actually pretty simple, pretty snappy. It went something like this: “We left him a total mess. He hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so fire him and put us back in.”

Then you support that theme by stacking fact upon fact to make your case. (Here, that Obama should be re-elected):

Everybody, when President Barack Obama took office, the economy was in freefall. It had just shrunk 9 full percent of GDP. We were losing 750,000 jobs a month. Are we doing better than that today?
AUDIENCE: Yes!
. . . In 2010, as the president’s recovery program kicked in, the job losses stopped and things began to turn around. The Recovery Act saved or created millions of jobs and cut taxes — let me say this again — cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people.
(APPLAUSE)

And in the last 29 months, our economy has produced about 4.5 million private-sector jobs.
(APPLAUSE)
We could have done better, but last year the Republicans blocked the president’s job plan, costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another job score. President Obama: plus 4.5 million. Congressional Republicans: zero.
(APPLAUSE)
During this period — during this period, more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama. That’s the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.
(APPLAUSE)
And I’ll tell you something else. The auto industry restructuring worked. It saved…
(APPLAUSE)
It saved more than a million jobs, and not just at G.M., Chrysler, and their dealerships, but in auto parts manufacturing all over the country. That’s why even the automakers who weren’t part of the deal supported it. They needed to save those parts suppliers, too. Like I said, we’re all in this together.
(APPLAUSE)
So what’s happened? There are now 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than on the day the companies were restructured.
(APPLAUSE)
So — now, we all know that Governor Romney opposed the plan to save G.M. and Chrysler. So here’s another job score. Are you listening in Michigan and Ohio and across the country?
(APPLAUSE)
Here — here’s another job score. Obama: 250,000. Romney: zero.
AUDIENCE: Zero!

Credit: Fazzio Law

It is an effective lawyering technique to line up facts to point to your conclusion. It is even more effective if you can do it in a way that paints a picture for your audience, as Clinton does here. And it is most effective of all—required, in fact—if you do it with facts that are true. Clinton’s speech was chock-a-block with facts, and much of the media coverage that has followed has marveled that they all check out. As Bloomberg News reported succinctly, “No False Claims in Clinton’s Speech.”

My favorite speaker at the Republican National Convention was Condoleezza Rice.  Aristotle, who is the father of classical rhetoric, said that we are persuaded by the speaker who exudes credibility (ethos) and who engages our emotions (pathos).  Rice established her credibility by offering plenty of facts to back up her points.  You are more likely to be credible if you actually know what you are talking about because an audience at a speech can sense it if your knowledge is only surface level, either because you won’t understand the complicated topic well enough to make it comprehensible to an audience, or because you will give yourself away through a hesitant delivery. Rice’s command of foreign policy issues is clear, and you can see this in the way that she calmly and clearly takes us through the information.

It was Rice’s pathos that really made her speech stand out.  She talked at one point about being a little girl raised in Jim Crow Birmingham, who couldn’t eat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter because of her race, but who could rise to be the Secretary of State of the most powerful country in the world because of the opportunities that America offers its citizens.  Effective pathos is achieved by finding your own emotional connection to a topic, and letting yourself feel that connection while you are talking about it, while at the same time not letting the emotion overwhelm you so much that you seem out of control.  You can see on Rice’s face as she talks about her own story that she can feel how far she has come, but even as emotion flashes across her expression, she remains composed and poised.

A young Condoleeza Rice at home with her mother Angelena Rice in the late 1950′s in Birmingham, Alabama.
(Credit: AP Photo/Coutesy of the Rice Family)

You also analyzed the 2012 presidential debates on your blog. How is analyzing public speaking during a debate different then during a speech?
A debate requires some different preparation for the speaker because you are fielding questions that might come at you in an order that you didn’t expect.  You have to keep your cool because the person that you are debating is likely to say things intended to rattle you. And you have to think on your feet, to figure out a pithy way to fairly answer the question while tying it back to the main points that you want to make.

But when I analyze the effectiveness of a debate, I find myself employing many of the same tests that I would apply to a prepared speech.  I think about that helpful rubric from Aristotle:  Speakers persuade through ethos, pathos, and logos (credibility, emotional engagement, and logic).  For both debates and prepared speeches, your ethos will be higher if you know whereof you speak, and if you avoid exaggerating the facts.  You will achieve pathos if you think about what your audience wants to know and if you keep your own emotions in check, while at the same time sounding like an authentic person rather than a talking head.  And your logos will be improved if you have a few, well-selected, concisely stated points that you make more than once so that we can process them.

Credit: barnesandnoble.com

The book you co-authored with Robert Sayler, Tongue-Tied America: Reviving the Art of Verbal Persuasion argues that public speaking is an essential skill for every American. It is certainly important in our industry of public outreach. Why do you believe mastering the art of public speaking is so important?
Being able to speak clearly and with confidence is professionally empowering.  I started thinking about this because I am a law school professor, and I teach law students how to make arguments in court.  But I quickly realized that the students who could make those sorts of formal presentations had the tools in hand to do well at job interviews—even in that sort of informal Q&A, you will impress people if you have a few points firmly in mind (e.g. why you would be a great fit for the job), can back those points up with some evidence (your excellent writing skills, for example), and can articulate those points in a succinct, convincing way (which requires practicing out loud until you feel comfortable). And those students who aren’t afraid to speak their minds are also more likely to succeed in a job, because that’s how you persuade colleagues of an idea, connect with clients, impress the boss, and win the day in court.  This isn’t just limited to law.  I’ve been asked to speak about how effective verbal persuasion works in all sorts of venues—I’ve spoken to bankers, nurses, fundraisers, librarians, businesspeople, and they all tell me that a requirement of the job is being able to explain ideas to sometimes skeptical, sometimes intimidating audiences.  I think that’s going to become true for more and more people as we transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.  Most of us will find ourselves in jobs that require us to talk.

Credit: Kauai Economic Opportunity

I also strongly believe that having the confidence to speak up empowers women, students of color, and students who come from less advantaged backgrounds.  It’s certainly true in law school—and may be true in other settings as well, though law school is the one with which I am most familiar—that the people who are most likely to speak in class are men, often white men, and often white men who come from relatively affluent backgrounds, from which they received the training and the confidence needed to express their ideas.  Female students particularly are much less likely to raise their hands or their voices.  I look at law school as an incredible opportunity to arm these students with the skills they need so that they will feel confident putting themselves forward once they are out in the real world.  I wish all high schools and colleges contained a tonguetiedamerica.com component to teach our children, especially our daughters, how to say what they think in a way that will move other people to action.

Credit: nomadlaw.com

Most of us aren’t lawyers, politicians, or CEO’s who address large crowds. How can the average American use public speaking skills in their daily lives?
There are opportunities all around you to speak to an audience, but you have to be willing to reach for them. It’s so easy to be passive and to say, “Oh, I couldn’t possibly make that presentation to our colleagues; let Joe do it instead.”  But you won’t improve your public speaking skills if you don’t make yourself try.  If you’re nervous about doing this at work, try a non-work venue at first—at your daughter’s Girl Scout meeting, or in church, or (if you are a student) at a meeting of your favorite extracurricular activity.  Then offer to make a presentation at work over the lunch hour to some colleagues about something that you are working on.  Then move on to a presentation to a client or a sales pitch or what have you.  If you really need practice, I highly recommend Toastmasters, which is an organization that you can join that lets you practice making speeches before an audience.

Credit: Toastmasters International

What is more important in public speaking, delivery, body-language, or tone? Or can you not do one effectively without the others?
I think that delivery includes both body language and tone, so I’m not sure that you can separate them.  Body language means the physicality that you use when you are speaking (your eye contact, the way you carry yourself, what you’re doing with your hands).  Tone means the attitude you are taking towards the words that you are saying (inspiring, or understated, or humorous, or sarcastic—the latter of which I do not usually recommend, by the way).  Delivery includes body language, tone, the way your voice sounds, pauses, paces, using props—all sorts of things. In my classes, I usually focus on body language first because if you are feeling nervous, your body language is likely to reflect this and your credibility will be shot.  It’s pretty easy to fix awkward body language, believe it or not—take a look at Tongue-Tied America, chapter 5, for ideas on what to do.

Confident body language is key for effective public speaking.
(Credit: Public Speaking International)

In your book and on your blog you discuss “ethical speech” and describe it as honoring facts, allowing the other side to be heard and avoiding using emotion manipulatively to cloud reason in the minds of the audience. In today’s world social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogging allow for more interaction between users, but also provide people with the ability to have more control over their message. Do you think social media and other advancements in technology are helping or hurting ethical speech?
The great thing about social media and being part of the digital age generally is that it is easier to check facts.  Some of my Facebook friends are academic types who love nothing more than to dig up the truth about what someone has said.  I’d say my own digital experience has made me more aware of when a speaker is playing fast and loose with the facts, because some people in my social network are interested in that question and happy to post links to give you more information.

Credit: kellimarshall.net

But I do think social media could also encourage you to ignore facts.  It is very easy to surround yourself with like-minded people who repeat a skewed vision of truth to one another in a sort of digital echo-chamber.  You might think that the whole country agrees with a particular idea because all your Facebook friends believe it, and that might cause you not to investigate a contrary position.  I also worry that the rise of social media has eroded the ability of traditional news media to support itself.  If our newspapers are closing their overseas offices, laying off reporters, or shutting down altogether, then the fact-checkers that our country has traditionally relied on to keep our government honest will disappear.  It takes time, training and resources to check many complicated facts (for example, claims about conditions in a foreign country or information about scientific topics).  When I am looking into whether what someone has said is true, I want information from someone with the expertise to actually investigate the claim, not from a layperson who has formed an opinion about it that sounds catchy so it’s getting re-tweeted.

Credit: Ethics Alarms

Is public speaking different for men and women? Do different genders need to focus on different things or utilize different skills for effective public speaking?
I do think there are differences.  The goals are the same, regardless of gender:  You want to seem credible, engaging, and you want your logic to be clear.  But sometimes women are judged by a different metric than men are—for example, a man who says “um” too frequently might seem irritating, but a woman who does it might trigger the stereotype of the ditzy, Legally Blonde-type.  Her credibility may take a greater hit than a male speaker’s would because that stereotype lurks out there in our culture.  There might also be a difference because of habits of communication that the speaker has, that also may fall along gender lines.  For example, most women have some sense of what constitutes “ladylike” physical behavior, which often translates into taking up less physical space when you sit or gesture.  Amy Cuddy, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard, talks about how we perceive power in open, expansive postures.  The thing that strikes me when you look at the pictures of what she’s talking about (which you can see below) is that these open, expansive postures are very male, and might seem unladylike if a woman were to assume them.  The trick for a female speaker is to find those power poses—standing up tall, moving with assurance, taking up a little more space at the table—in a way that still feels socially acceptable.

Credit: Dana R. Carney, Amy J.C. Cuddy, and Andy J. Yap

In my male students, I sometimes see a struggle with finding the right tone in situations where you have to be aggressive.  Law school teaches you that the law is inherently adversarial, and for many men, that means talking and acting like Rambo.  But that can backfire. If you’re a bully from the moment you first open your mouth, the audience will tire of you pretty quickly, and it will be difficult for you to show any nuance in your performance.  Sometimes, reaching for a more understated tone makes your attack even more deadly, because we focus less on your aggression and more on the points that you are trying to make.

Credit: PopScreen, Inc.

On your blog you provide examples of good and bad public speaking throughout history. Who is your all-time favorite public speaker and why?
I love Barbara Jordan.  She was a freshman Congresswoman during the Nixon impeachment hearings, and one of the first women of color to serve in Congress.  Those differences—gender, race, lack of experience—might make a less confident person shut down.  Instead, she delivers this amazing speech, the “Statement on the Articles of Impeachment,” that may have been the final nail in Nixon’s political coffin.  You can listen to the speech here:  http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/barbarajordanjudiciarystatement.htm.  The speech is notable because she chooses her words so carefully, and every word is precious.  She lays out her argument in a clear, logical way.  And her voice is full of power. People expect female voices to be high-pitched, but she demonstrates how strong lower notes can be.  I also love her Democratic National Convention keynote address, which you can see here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg7gLIx__-k.  She is full of joy—and you can hear how positively the audience responds to that.

Barbara Jordan
(Credit: The University of Texas at Austin)

What advice can you provide to people looking to improve their public speaking skills?
Public speaking is essentially just a conversation, in which you are doing all the talking.  You’ve had thousands of conversations before in your life, and if you can do that, you can do this.  Lower the mental stakes for yourself.  Don’t tell yourself that it is a performance and that it has to be perfect—it doesn’t.  If you get your idea across, you’ve accomplished your goal.

You will also get better at this the more you do it.  So keep trying.  If you make a speech and it bombs, so what?  Get up and try again.

Finally, take a look at Tongue-Tied America: Reviving the Art of Verbal Persuasion, and Finding Your Voice in Law School: Mastering Classroom Cold Calls, Job Interviews, and Other Verbal Challenges.  (That last sounds like it’s only for law students, but it really can help anyone.)  These books are full of practical tips that can help.  You can also look at www.tonguetiedamerica.com for video clips of terrific speakers.

- – -
Thank you Professor Shadel for your great thoughts and encouragement on public speaking.

Liz Faris, Associate
Collaborative Services