TransCanada chief uses rhetoric to lay the blame on rhetoric

A well structured sound-bite is guaranteed to win you headlines.

TransCanada president and chief executive, Russ Girling, knows this. Here’s what he had to say about last week’s decision not to go ahead with the Keystone XL Pipeline:

“Today, misplaced symbolism was chosen over merit and science — rhetoric won out over reason,”

Take a quick scan of the resulting coverage and you’ll notice that most articles not only reference this line, but lead on it.

And that’s because this line is a carefully constructed piece of rhetoric specifically designed to generate a sound-bite. So well crafted in fact, it could have come straight from our very own Dirty Rhetoric toolkit!

Hang-on a moment though, because the quote itself is attacking rhetoric as being the evil that doomed the pipeline!

So – Russ Girling…. J’accuse! And the crime is that of skullduggerously attempting to shift the blame by blaming rhetoric, while using – rhetoric!

Here’s my evidence before the jury:

Item: Use of Opposites

Misplaced versus merit. Symbolism over science. Communicators call this antithesis, and it’s a guaranteed tool of the sound-bite.

Item: Use of the sound-pattern ‘FunPhrase’

It’s no coincidence that we’ve got those double ‘M’s, repeated ‘S’s and finally that lovely triple-play on ‘rhetoric…won…reason’.

Technical term – ‘Consonance’, but we call it FunPhrase. Yet another sound-bite technique.

Item: Use of Analogy

Here’s where it all gets just a little bit clever, because when we look at the whole phrase, there’s a hidden logic-structure at play. A is to B, as C is to D:

Misplaced symbolism is to science, as rhetoric is to reason

Having lost the argument, Russ Girling now blames defeat on his opponents’ unfair use of this evil thing called rhetoric — while freely using rhetoric himself.

Rhetoric is an essential human tool. It’s the tool that allows us to create everything from structured logic through to poetry of the highest art. It is also, admittedly, the first refuge of the scoundrel when seeking to shift the focus.

So – today’s top-tip – whenever you hear a public figure laying the blame on ‘rhetoric’, be suspicious.

Be very suspicious.

The Dirty Rhetoric Guide to Horrifying Writing

As times of the year go, Halloween is terrible. Wonderfully terrible. Ghoulishly terribly. Fantabulously terrible.

I like Halloween!

So – while I head off to prepare my pumpkins, allow me to leave you with this little offering inspired by the literary heights of horror. How do authors put shivers down our spines?

Re-blogged from Make A Powerful Point — it’s our Dirty Rhetoric Guide to Horrifying Writing.

It’s time for Dirty Rhetoric

A hundred-thousand voices screaming into an electronic echo-chamber. Welcome to modern communications. Your idea must be heard, but how?

We’re not the first to face this test. Our communications ancestors competed in the (literally) screaming markets of the ancient world. They developed a fix for the problem. A simple and elegant and beautiful fix. Whether you are writing or persuading or presenting, it’s time to bring it back.

That fix was a simple system of word-structures designed to take your message and lift it clear it of the noise.

Your message needs to be the one that’s heard. Your message has to stand-out. In the words of the Roman genius Cicero, a message needs to have ‘brilliant lights’. Lights to capture the eyes and imagination of an audience. To win you must wow. The Ancients left us a full tool-kit to do just that.

We’ve developed a simple system to put that toolkit right back into your hands. That toolkit is Dirty Rhetoric.

Dirty Rhetoric is a selection of 53 rhetorical techniques designed to light up your message. As the name implies – we’ve designed it to be quick and dirty – no rhetoric classes required. Just pick-a-card and boost your message.

I hope I’ve piqued your interest. Today we launch Dirty Rhetoric on KickStarter. Go here to find more information on how Dirty Rhetoric can help your message.

We have an exciting schedule of communications activities planned to help us launch Dirty Rhetoric, ranging from webinars through to ‘Peter’s Podcasts’ –  highlighting the uses of rhetoric in topical politics and product launches and maybe even the occasional pop-song.

I’d be delighted if you would join us for the ride. It promises to be fun!

Let’s break-out of that echo-chamber. It’s time to be heard!

Rhetoric Made Easy – Bringing Back the Magic

2000 years ago our Greek and Roman presenter-ancestors left us an awesome inheritance — the formulae for magic. They left us scrolls and manuscripts full of magical word-spells. Spells that help us to bond with an audience. Spells that create indelible soundbites. Spells that let us influence an audience’s perceptions of scale and logic and argument. And those spells have always been there for the taking! We know them in today’s world as “rhetoric”.

The snag? 2000 years of dust, detours and occasionally deliberate destruction had turned rhetoric into a tangled mess of ancient names and obscure descriptions.

Someone needed to re-write the spell-book and that’s just what we set out to do.

Partnering with Gavin McMahon and his sensationally creative team at New York’s leading transformational change and communications agency, fassforward consulting group, we’re now close to liberating the long-lost power of words — for presenters big and small.

And today, we’d like to show you for the very first time what it is that we’ve come up with.

It’s quick, it’s dirty, and our pilot sessions are showing that presenters, from Jersey to Johannesburg, just love it!

Want to know what we’ve got? Just click this link!

Speaking tips from Taylor Swift

Photo credit: Sarah Barlow / Billboard.com

Taylor Swift’s new album ‘1989’ contains three ideas to stir-up your writing and your speaking.

Listen to the songs and you’ll notice that Swift doesn’t just sing those lyrics – she acts them. There are nuances and inflections that she milks with the precision of an actress. That scope for drama, and irony, and occasional comedy tells us there are things going on inside the words of the songs that are worth a closer look.

Swift uses metaphor and simile but what makes her lyrics interesting are three unusual techniques designed to make things sound weird — to mix things up.

Clashing Contexts

“‘Cause darling I’m a nightmare, dressed like a day-dream”

It’s my favorite lines from ‘Blank Space’. How often do you see the words nightmare and daydream so close together. They’re a clash. They don’t belong in the same sentence.

Here’s another one, this time from ‘I Wish You Would’:

“Band-aids don’t fix bullet-holes”

Little tiny band-aids — good for covering a paper-cut — but worthless when set beside a bullet-hole!

And finally, another personal favorite, once again from ‘Blank Space’:

‘We’ll take this way too far,

It’ll leave you breathless

Or with a nasty scar’

Those first two lines contain gushing, emotional language – ‘way too far’ and ‘breathless’. You would expect the words that are used to describe that scar to be just as rushing. Words like ‘livid’ or ‘vicious’ or ‘lethal’. But no – it’s a ‘nasty’ scar.

That’s how you describe an injury to a small boy! “Ohhhh… what a nasty cut. Where’s that bandaid?”

Mixing phrases up creates surprise in your audience, and surprise always grabs attention.

Flipping Cliches

Cliches are tired, over-used phrases and pop songs are packed with them. You can tell it’s a cliche if you offer someone the first few words and find that they can complete the phrase.

For example, complete the two following cliches: ‘Built to…….’  and ‘Fade………’.

You probably came up with some variant on ‘Built to last’ and ‘Fade away’. Taylor’s versions through give us ‘….built to fall apart.’ and ‘Fade into view.’ She’s taking cliches and giving them unexpected endings. Those endings spike our interest.

It’s a simple technique to copy. Find a list of cliches online and play with the endings.

For example, could a lazy person be described as ‘Up at the crack of lunchtime’?

Cliches delivered straight, are boring. Cliches modified are fun!

Confusing Senses

Swift’s final musical twist takes our senses and churns them up. It has us hearing colors, or seeing sounds, as in:

‘….screaming color’ and ‘Kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats’.

It’s called synesthesia, and takes a little getting used to but is worth the effort. The next time you want to describe a sound for example, ask yourself what color the sound might have been. If you want to describe a smell, ask what yourself texture it had. If describing a texture then wonder what flavor you would associate with it. When you play with your senses, you play with your descriptive power.

Over the months to come as tracks from ‘1989’ continue to be released you’re guaranteed to hear people humming the tunes. If you enjoy playing with words and ways to arrange them, spend some time with Taylor Swift.

 

Re-printed from my article of February 13th, 2015, in the Huffington Post

Amplification rhetoric. Getting words to go LARGE!

by Peter Watts Paskale

Scale, as any filmmaker will tell you, is all about the optics. And good storytelling, as any thriller-writer will tell you, is all about scale.

Treating words like camera-lenses and arranging them in a specific sequence plays directly with an audience’s perception of size. Whether you want the audience to perceive something as being bigger or smaller, the ability to manipulate perceived scale is as much a part of the presenter’s arsenal as it is the filmmaker’s.

Picture the scene. It’s bedtime, and your children are eager for a story. Which description of the villainous giant will get the kids more rapt:

“Jack fought a big giant”, or……

“Jack fought a giant. Not a big giant. Not a massive giant. Not a vast giant. He was a ginormous giant.”

In that second version, the giant is super-scale. He looms in the children’s imaginations, and that’s because you’ve guided them to observe the giant through a telescope of enlarging adjectives, and your subject now appears magnified at the end of it.

Couldn’t we have saved some time and just gone with “He was a ginormous giant”? No we couldn’t, because in this example, ‘ginormous’ itself is also being magnified through all the adjectives that lead up to it. By itself, ‘ginormous’ has no comparison point to lend it scale. It just becomes another random description.

Scale in speech and writing really is all about the way that you arrange the optics of your words.

Here are two examples – the first of which is from British comedy series “BlackAdder”:

“This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you’ve got a moment, it’s a twelve-story crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying ‘This Is a Large Crisis.”

And here’s one from Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, describing an unfortunate couple of weeks for the US House of Representatives:

“What has happened…. has been less a stumble than a pratfall involving the legislative equivalent of a banana peel, flailing arms, an upended bookcase, torn drapes and a slide across a laden banquet table into a wedding cake.”

The same technique works for numbers. President Obama, justifying a high-cost investment, once asked an audience to consider what America’s infrastructure needs would be “a year, two years, five years, ten years from now”. The audience, looking through an ever increasing series of numbers, would have then subconsciously carried the trend forward… “20 years, 50 years, 100 years”. The president’s budget request, put against such an unstated timeline of 100 years, would have seemed all the smaller by comparison.

Whether you’re writing or speaking, when you want your audience to visualise something, borrow from the art of the filmmaker. Ask yourself what scale you want the audience to assign to that object and line-up your shot with care.

Get the right verbal optics and giants can become midgets while midgets become giant.

 

Re-printed from my article of January 30th, 2015, in the Huffington Post

How to do Chiasmus

by Peter Paskale

“It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men“

One of Mae West’s celebrated phrases. Along with “Come up and see me some time“, to read these words is to hear the sinuous drawl in which they were delivered.

West was a Queen of the soundbite. She was also a Queen of chiasmus — a little rhetorical device that adds style to any presentation or piece of writing.

Mae West isn’t alone in her crush on chiasmus. Take a look at these:

• With my mind on my money and my money on my mind
• I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me
• I meant what I said and I said what I meant
• All for one and one for all

That’s with thanks, respectively, to Snoop Dogg, Winston Churchill, Horton the Elephant, and the Three Musketeers — and I’m willing to bet that this is the first time in recorded history those four names have ever appeared together on the same list.

Chiasmus is when two lines of text, or two adjacent phrases, are symmetrical — “I meant what I said – I said what I meant“. The human brain just loves things that are symmetrical. The more symmetrical a thing, the more we see it as intrinsically attractive. It even reaches to our assessment of human beauty — the more symmetrical someone’s face, the more beautiful we believe they are.

So symmetry captures the eye, or the ear, of an audience, just as a radio advert did to me yesterday when I heard the slogan of a tax advisor “working hard for hard workers“.

Building chiasmus into writing or speaking provides an instant style-boost, but the technique looks difficult. When you first try to create your own chiasmus, confusion creeps all over you. I know. I’ve been there. So, a few ideas to de-mystify the tool of chiasmus:

Chiasmus needs only to be roughly symmetrical
Chiasmus is essentially two phrases, side-by-side, where the second phrase loosely reverses the first. Loosely! It does not need to be a mirror-perfect reflection. So, whilst “Tea for two and two for tea” might be a letter-perfect model – it’s not one to copy.

Keep in mind something more like “‘Instead of landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock would land on them.”

The reflection is loose. It’s flexible rather than perfect — in fact it’s perfectly flexible.

Chiasmus can agree, or disagree. It really doesn’t matter
Make a web-search for chiasmus and you’re going to meet JFK’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country“, and this can lead you to believe that as well as mirroring each other, the two phrases must also counter each other.

Not true. The two sides of a chiasmus can agree or disagree — it doesn’t matter. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he“.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery
The best route to a confident chiasmus is to copy! Copy and mangle and do it with happy abandon.

Let’s take Horton the Elephant and see what we can build out of “I meant what I said and I said what I meant”:

• I like what I do and I do what I like
• If you read what you love, then you’ll love what you read
• See the friends you enjoy and you’ll enjoy the friends that you’re with

Keep a lid on it
Beware of inflicting a chiasmus-overdose on your audience. Limit it to just one per article or speech.

Have a go!
Chiasmus looks scary on first sight and that can stop us from experimenting with a fabulous tool for fabulous soundbites.

Don’t be afraid to start-out by copying chiasmus examples. It’s the best way to start and will guarantee that your speeches get noticed, which is important, because in the words of Mae West:

“I’d rather be looked over, than overlooked.“

Why Giving a Thanksgiving Toast is Like the Macy’s Parade

by Peter Paskale

Thanksgiving morning, and if you’re lucky enough not to be in the kitchen wrestling a turkey, then maybe you’re reclined in front of the TV and watching the floats glide down 6th Avenue.

Thanksgiving is one of the most uniquely American holidays. The day is heartwarming and kind. It’s a day when we eat and drink and watch old favorite movies and cheer in front of afternoon football. It’s a day when we come together as friends and families to celebrate, and to enjoy happy traditions.

One of those traditions however, is the Thanksgiving toast, and for the family member assigned the “honor” of making it, composing that toast can seem more than a little stressful.

Fear not. Whilst watching the Macy’s Parade, you witnessed a floating formula for the perfect Thanksgiving toast.

First, there needs to be a giant Snoopy – that’s something traditional. Then there needs to be a nod to whatever the latest hot children’s character is – that’s something contemporary. And above all, the whole thing needs to be wrapped around in a general feeling of childlike sentimentality – and that’s something heartwarming.

Something traditional. Something contemporary. And something heart-warming — the three essentials for your Thanksgiving toast.

First off – the traditional

This is the easy bit — it’s the most formulaic. There are three things you need to do.

Recall tradition

Express gratitude for the family and friends coming together to celebrate the holiday.

Mention those no longer with us

Are there any significant people who have departed this world in the past year? — GrandPa or GrandMa, Mom or Dad, or Great-Aunt Ethel. It might seem counter-intuitive to mention the dead when you’re aiming for happy, but Thanksgiving lunch is a meal where the dead are present. Those who would once have been at the table but are with you no longer, will be in everyone’s hearts. They need a mention, and the living need to hear those names.

Thank the chef

Move from the dead, straight back into the living. There’s going to be someone vaguely panting, with red-chafed hands and hair awry. Someone who has spent the whole morning stressing in the kitchen. Focus attention on this person, and look them firmly in the eye as you thank them for their labors.

Next – The Contemporary

This bit is slightly trickier. What are you giving thanks for? Everybody present will, hopefully, have something this year that they are proud of, or feel that they would like to mention. This is the moment for audience participation. In our family, we go around the table and everybody says a few words about what they, personally, have been grateful for this year.

Don’t however, just drop this question onto your unsuspecting audience. An awkward silence will be guaranteed to follow. You need to give them warning, so use words such as:

“There have been so many wonderful things this year. Let’s have everybody share just a few words about what they’re thankful for this Thanksgiving.”

As you say this, look to the person sitting beside you, and then cast your glance down the side of the table along which the statements are going to flow. Let the group know what they are meant to do. It’s also a good idea to have pre-informed that first person in the chain about what’s going to happen. That way they are ready to respond. As they are speaking, others will, in turn, be planning what they might like to say.

Finally – The HeartWarming

Two simple techniques create heart-warming:

Slow and smiling

When we become tense, as so many of us do when speaking in public, we gabble. Gabbling creates tension, and tension is the direct opposite of heartwarming. You need to slow your rate of speech just a little, and the best way to do that is to smile. If you’re smiling, then it becomes a physical impossibility to gabble. You’ll look like you’re enjoying the moment, and if the folks around the table believe that you are relaxed, then they’ll be relaxed too.

Lots of “us”. Lots of “we”. Lots of “our”.

It’s scary how often we use “I” and “my” when we’re speaking. Natural speech is more possessive than inclusive, and at Thanksgiving, it all needs to be about inclusive.

As far as you can – aim for pronouns that bring everyone together. Use “we” and “us” and “our”, whilst actively avoiding “I” and “my” and “you”.

This one small but important skill will inject more natural warmth into your speech than the finest and most soaring rhetoric.

Finally, three standard rules that apply — not just to this speech, but to any speech:

Plan what you’re going to say. Practice what you’re going to say. And keep it short! Less than 20 seconds, and it’s a little too short, but more than four minutes, and it needs some editing.

Remember those balloons in the Macy’s Parade. They’re light, and bright, and colourful. That’s what makes the parade such a much-loved tradition, and the same will be true for your Thanksgiving toast!

Alliteration Alert: It’s election time!

by Peter Paskale

How do you choose which candidate to vote for? I’ll bet you go into the booth, earnestly scratch your head, and muse:

“Now which of these candidates do I most fervently disagree with? Ah – yes – this guy or gal – they really upset me! I’ll vote for them!”

No? You don’t? Why in that case you must be voting for a candidate that you agree with! It sounds like you might even be voting for someone who agrees with your values! And that makes you, my friend, a Values Voter! And for many of us, this news will come as something of a surprise – not having been invited to that big political summit of our fellow Values Voters that took place this weekend in D.C. Maybe the invite is still in the mail?

Phrases like Values Voter and Moral Majority are badges of political honour, worn with pride by certain sections of the electorate. Look a little closer though and you’ll spot an interesting fact about these terms – they are completely meaningless.

Everybody who votes, votes on their values, and therefore everybody is a values voter.

Most people in this world are moral thank goodness, and therefore there is, of course, a moral majority.

Both labels are truisms – statements that while sounding true and occasionally profound, actually say nothing at all. So how come both of these junk-phrases have gained so much traction?

It’s because they are great political examples of alliteration – the art of taking two words that begin with the same letter and then sticking them side-by-side. Think of “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” and you’ve got alliteration taken to extremes by small children. Think of Batman and Robin – the Caped Crusaders – and you have alliteration in comic books. Think of Kit-Kat or Coca-Cola and you have it in famous brands. Think of the mainstream media and you have it in the folks who bring us the news.

Alliteration is everywhere, and it’s function is to create catchy soundbites. When used to denote groups of people however, something a little unpleasant starts to happen. That sheer catchiness creates a profoundly polarising smugness. For example, if you come to think of yourself as being part of the “moral majority”, then your neighbour who possibly doesn’t agree with you, can only be part of an “immoral minority”. If you see yourself as a part of an exclusive sect called “values voters”, then you must have a pretty judgemental view on the voting habits of the rest of us.

A good political alliteration will seize the soundbite and spice a speech. JFK knew this and used alliteration to deliver empowering phrases such as “let us go forth and lead the land we love” and “a grand and global alliance”. More recently though, it seems to be used to divide and conquer.

As we enter the final weeks of campaigning for the mid-terms and many a speech is made, let’s listen out for those alliterations and ask ourselves if this is a phrase designed to inspire the electorate, or to divide us? When we can answer that question, we start to gain insight into the true, unstated values of the candidate.

Voting on the true, interior values of the candidate? Now that’s being a values voter.

Seven speech-techniques powering Obama’s UN Address

by Peter Paskale

Powerful speeches contain powerful content. For that content to shine though, it must be mounted into a powerful structure. Barack Obama’s speech today at the UN General Assembly contained both.

Much analysis will be given over to the content of that speech, so let’s take a moment to examine the structure. Let’s understand what was powering away beneath the hood.

Here are seven of the hidden mysteries that allowed Barack Obama to deliver a barn-stormer.

Paired opposites for tension

It was the number one rhetorical technique within the president’s UN speech, and we saw it in the very first line:

“… we come together at a crossroads between war and peace; between disorder and integration; between fear and hope.”

The technique is called Antithesis, and it suspends audiences between doubt and certainty – darkness and light – peril and salvation.

Five paragraphs later and the technique appears again:

“We can renew the international system that enabled so much progress, or allow ourselves to be pulled back by a global undertow. We can reaffirm our collective responsibility to confront global problems, or be swamped by more and more outbreaks of instability.”

Throughout the speech, we were never far from a collection of paired opposites, and this maintained the constant tension and dramatic pace.

Conjunctions for power

Many speeches contains lists, and lists involve commas to separate out the items. Commas however also break the pace of the speaker. When somebody wants to build power, all those little breathing gaps cause the impact to break-down.

President Obama used a technique called Polysyndeton, which is a deliberate overuse of conjunctions. Take a look at this phrase as the president nears his conclusion:

“..no matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like, or what God you pray to, or who you love, there is something fundamental that we all share.”

All those instances of “or” are absolutely deliberate. They provide a drumbeat and allow every last element in the list to stand-out loud and proud and be acknowledged.

State your evidence and frame the argument

“Russia’s actions in Ukraine challenge this post-war order. Here are the facts.”

As the camera’s swivelled to focus on a discomfited Russian ambassador, President Obama laid out a meticulous charge-sheet against Russia’s actions in Ukraine. What the president was doing was using this evidence to frame his case – to set the parameters by which his own views could be judged.

Great minds for great majesty

Quotes are an important part of a speech. When well chosen, they provide not just another form of evidence, but also a sense of majesty – or comedy – or tragedy – depending on whom you choose. In this speech, not only did we hear quotes from John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt, both internationally respected American figures, but also a quote from Sheikh bin Bayyah of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, thereby extending that reach out to the Muslim world.

Time travel for immediacy

It’s possible to time-travel an audience in a speech, and we see it in the phrase:

“America is not the same as it was 100 years ago, 50 years ago, or even a decade ago.”

Look at the time gaps between those numbers. 100 to 50. 50 to 10. There’s first a drop of 50%, and then one of 80%. Those numbers are closing-up as time seems to pick-up speed.

The technique is Metastasis and it can be used either to stretch someones perception of time, or as the president uses it here, to accelerate it. Change is coming, and it’s coming fast!

Face down the objectors

“I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals; that America has plenty of problems within our own borders.”

Many will have been surprised to hear a paragraph dedicated to Ferguson, Missouri, but it was there for a specific reason.

For those wanting to shoot-down the president’s speech and paint him a hypocrite, it would be all too easy to point to the Ferguson riots. Such a counter-argument would, indeed, have allowed some of the power to be leeched away from the speech in the days to follow.

Obama however has blocked this by not waiting for his opponents to raise Ferguson, but by raising it himself. This is called Procatalepsis.

By seizing this counter-argument in the moment, the president allowed himself to re-frame the challenge, rather than allow his opponents to do so.

Poetry. Sheer poetry.

“No God condones this terror.”

It was the beginning of the most significant phrase in the speech, and also the one that news networks seized upon to replay in the moments as the Barack Obama stepped down from the podium.

It’s a simple phrase, but within it sits one of the most powerful tools of the speechwriter’s craft, and it comes straight from poetry. It’s an Iamb. And please – don’t misread that – that first letter is not an “L”. It’s a capital “I”. If you’re now thinking of a baby sheep, then you read it wrong. Just as you say IPhone or IPad, that word is I-amb.

When you hear the president using this phrase, listen to the rhythm of the words. The syllables are following a pattern of passive – stressed – passive – stressed. I’ll demonstrate by re-typing it, and underlining the stressed syllables:

no GOD conDONES this TERROR

Speaking in Iams isn’t easy, and unless you are a poet, it’s even tougher to write them, but when they are used, and used well, it creates one hell of a powerful phrase.

“No God condones this terror” is going to be the element of the president’s General Assembly address that is heard around the world.

This was a great speech, and beside strong content, it showed a mastery of technique.

Some in the world will now be stinging from it. Even more will be inspired.