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

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.“

Oxymoron – the birthplace of brilliant

Jeanine McDonnell, daughter of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, says that her mother has a “mild obsession” with another man.

Mild lives in detergent adverts. Obsession gets draped around designer perfume. Put the two words together however and you get something that’s… well… kind of interesting. It’s refined and yet ever so slightly dirty. It’s an oxymoron, and in politics, oxymorons get a bad wrap.

Politicians will cry “oxymoron” in the same way that English footballers cry “foul” – usually as a cheap way to distract the referee.  The president, for example, was excoriated from the right for the oxymoron of “Leading from behind”, while Sarah Palin took a rough-ride from the left when she mentioned “Conservative feminism”.

Look past the mockery though and maybe there are some interesting ideas being deliberately driven into the shadows by that accusation of the “O” word.

What would a Conservative Feminist actually be like? And how about if stopped to give “Leading from behind” a little of the consideration that John Boehner clearly doesn’t want us to?

Is the cry of “Oxymoron” meant to embarrass us into burying ideas before they’ve even taken their first steps?

Oxymorons aren’t fouls. They’re verbal spice. Oxymorons gave us the most delicious phrase in the English language – “sweet and sour’, which became especially flavourful when combined with the oxymoronic “jumbo shrimp”. Does double the oxymoron equal double the delicious? Definitely maybe.

Oxymorons ever so slightly screw with accepted realities. They slam the right combination of the wrong words together in such a way that can open up whole new lines of thought. Entrenched political interests usually dislike new thoughts, and maybe that’s why oxymorons launch witch-hunts.

Let’s take the phrase “religious freedom”. To a non-believer this is a clear oxymoron – the prescribing of life based on religious dogma is far from freedom. To a believer however, life lived by religious code is not only the direct path to freedom in this world, but also in the next.

Oxymorons tamper with established meanings in a way that can deliciously subversive and that’s why proscriptivists of all stripes hold them in such contempt.

So, long live Conservative Feminism, and here’s to Leading From Behind. Oxymoron is the glorious birthplace of brand-new concepts. The next time you hear somebody levelling the political charge of “OXYMORON”, then find out what it is they’re attacking, and give that very concept some extra thought.

You might find that they’re trying to distract you from something rather interesting.

How to handle an ambush? With respect

In fairness to Representative King, he was trapped. Two determined DREAMers, Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, had him cornered – completely hemmed-in, half-way through a hamburger.

 

 

It was a political ambush, and in deciding to stand and fight, King had lost before he’d even started. The whole idea of a political ambush is that it’s lose-lose for the ambushed. You either try to justify your opinions in an unjustifiable context, or you high-tail it out of there. King’s dining companion, Senator Rand Paul, very astutely did just that. Correctly identifying the approaching iceberg, Paul crammed his burger down his throat and scuttled for the lifeboats.

What made this event newsworthy however, was King’s apparent contempt for the two people in front of him, and here’s where he compounded his troubles by going on the offensive — offensively.

Early in the video, as Andiola makes her case as a DREAMer, King states to her “You’re very good at English, you understand what I’m saying.” Shortly afterwards he repeats this, as if trying to emphasize that maybe she didn’t get it first time around:

“You understand the English language, correct?”

Of course she understands the English language. So the question has to be asked, why did the Congressman feel the need to state the bleeding obvious, and to state it twice?

The answer is that he was attempting to do two things at once – both of which were ugly. The first was to belittle his opponent through false praise: “You’re very good at English.” All such statements come with a suppressed ending that contains the words “….for a….”.

So, let’s run the full statement, and it would sound something like “You’re very good at English for a……….” Many endings could be dropped into that box, but maybe for the best guess, we should turn to how Andiola herself felt the need to reply on the video:

“I was raised in the United States….”

The second goal of Representative King was dog-whistle politics – encoding a message so that, hopefully, your own side sees what’s going on but nobody else does. Initially this worked – within minutes a crowd forms around Andiola and Vargas yelling “Go home”. Unfortunately, just as for Paul Ryan back in March, the trick went wrong, thanks to the wonders of the internet and viral videos. Not only did Rep. King’s side notice, but we all noticed!

For political communications, two major points leaps out of this experience:

1. Rand Paul got it right. This was an ambush, and a good ambush is designed to be no-win for the victim, so the only way out is the way that is least damaging – retreat. If however, that route is blocked to you, maybe for example by the fact that your dinner companion is already desperately scrambling for the life-boat, then rule two comes into play – be respectful.
2. Be utterly respectful. Do not sneer, do not attempt coded dog-whistles, do not belittle. At one stage King almost achieved a come-back via a neat segue onto the topic of presidential decrees, but at the last minute he couldn’t resist what at the time must have felt like the easier route: He sneered, he dog-whistled, and he belittled.

That’s what put the fire into the story.

In the end though, this is also a story about the well put-together ambush. Recent election cycles have seen politicians retreat farther and father away from genuine engagement with voters. Town-hall questions are no longer genuine questions — they are hand-selected mini-speeches designed to burnish the talking-points of the candidate.

Politicians have only themselves to blame for ambush-interviews — if they won’t give voters genuine access in more conventional settings, then the politically active will force access in less conventional, burger-based settings, and those settings are genuinely going to be no-win.

The Straw Man Fallacy

by Peter Paskale

As the big bad wolf will gladly confirm, it’s way easier to blow-down a house of straw.

And so it is with arguments. An argument made of straw is easier to demolish than one that’s made of stone. Why would anybody therefore want to build themselves such a poor and flimsy straw-bale argument?

Precisely because they want to blow it down. All by themselves.

It’s such an accepted strategy within communications that is even has a name – The Straw-Man Fallacy, and it’s why NRA commentator Dom Raso is claiming gun rights should be extended to blind people.

Mr Raso is an awesome speaker. He’s also highly credible, and that’s important for the success of a Straw Man Fallacy, because the straw-man involves tricking your audience.

Mr Raso’s argument is that blind people are being denied their Second Amendment rights to carry guns, and on the basis of his evidence, and putting my own views on guns to one side, I would have to say that I agree with him. To deny blind people the same rights  as the rest of us would be discrimination unfairly based on a physical disability. This however, is where the straw-man comes in, because the Gun Control Act of 1968 makes no mention of blind people.

While the Act does list various groups who are prohibited from carrying guns, blind people are most definitely not amongst them.

Mr Raso therefore, has powerfully won an argument against a case that doesn’t exist, and that doesn’t exist for the very reasons that he cites in his video. It’s all rather odd and circular, but done for a reason, because creating a Straw Man Fallacy is only stage one of a larger communications strategy:

Step One: The straw-man

Let’s say that blind people represent group A. Mr Raso’s straw-man has now led you, the audience, to inaccurately believe that blind people are unfairly discriminated against under the Gun Control Act.

Step Two: The demolition

Our speaker now builds a powerful case for why that is wrong. He creates a compelling argument, against an illusionary target of his own creation.

Step Three: The extension

If Mr. Raso can prove that Argument A demonstrates unfair prejudice, then we as an audience become pre-inclined to believe that maybe groups B & C are also being prejudiced against.

Step Four: The precedent

While Argument A was an illusory straw-man, groups B & C will be real. The successful straw-man however, will have created a precedent under which it can now be successfully argued that groups B & C, who are genuinely listed under the Gun Control Act, should also be able to carry fire-arms.

Maybe I’m being Machiavellian again, but usually when a speaker invokes a straw-man fallacy, it’s step one. Showing how easily you can blow down the house of straw is only a prelude to panicking the occupants of the house of stones into quitting the building with  less of a fight.

Mr. Raso makes a fabulous case, and I believe this is the prelude to something bigger.

Janet Yellen’s Double-Bluff of Darkness

by Peter Watts Paskale

Speaking slowly and clearly is the best way to help someone to understand you, right?

Wrong. Speaking slowly and clearly, and especially speaking slowly and clearly in a monotone, is the best way to throw someone’s concentration off. And that’s the technique Federal Reserve Chairman, Janet Yellen used this week when attempting to throw Senator Elizabeth Warren off-balance during a financial hearing.

What the Fed Chairman was attempting to bury was the fact that the Federal Reserve is struggling in its duty to audit the disaster-contingency plans of major banks, their so-called “living wills”.

Listen to Chairman Yellen’s responses to Senator Warren’s questions and you’ll hear long multi-syllable words. She never misses the chance to use a complex phrase when a simpler one would have done just fine. You’ll also hear lengthy pauses – there’s a hint of “I’ll say this slowly so that you can all keep up”. We’re seeing a double-bluff approach to slipping something past the audience. One part of the bluff uses language designed to confuse, while the second attempts to make the audience feel dumb about not understanding.

The technical term is “skotison”. It comes from an ancient Greek word that means to darken something, or to obscure, and it’s a perfectly honorable part of a public-speakers weaponry.

It’s the same approach that you’ll have heard described as – “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”, and the technique that delivered Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal “known knowns…. known unknowns… and unknown unknowns…” By the time the press had finished disentangling the syntax, Rumsfeld had invaded Iraq.

Elizabeth Warren however, responded in the only way that you can to a skotison – she challenged it:

“I’m sorry Chairman, I’m just a little bit confused….”

The skotison strategy relies on the assumption that your opponent will be either too proud or too intimidated to admit to their confusion. Elizabeth Warren however, is neither, and proudly admits that the argument has lost her completely. It’s interesting to wonder what the effect might have been had the Washington press corps shown the same instincts at that Rumsfeld press conference.

The more senior an individual, the more we can reasonably expect them to know how to make themselves clear. If therefore we find ourselves confused, there’s a high probability that it’s because the other party intended us to be so.

It’s one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book. If your opponent is using the skotison double-bluff, then remember the fable of the Emperor’s new clothes, state “Hang-on a moment, I’m a little confused”, and it will be miraculously revealed that your opponent has no argument.

Rand Paul at Berkeley: Why his speech worked

by Peter Watts

Senator Rand Paul is a hero. Or at least that’s how several of the nation’s news organizations would have it. Just for once though, we’re not talking Fox News. The San Francisco Chronicle for example rejoiced with this morning’s headline: “Republican Rand Paul fires up a Berkeley crowd”, while the New York Times compared him with Ronald Reagan, who found Berkeley such a tough audience that he sent in the National Guard.

All the applause would suggest that Senator Paul heroically entered a lion’s den and then persuaded the occupants to roll over and have their tummies tickled. To an extent, that’s just what he did, but this wasn’t a miracle. This was rhetoric at it’s best. Lessons can be learned!

Lions on Leashes

First of all, the audience was tightly controlled. Paul set a clear title for his Berkeley appearance and it was calibrated to the interests of the audience: privacy. He could pretty much guarantee that so long as he kept to the prepared script, the audience would keep a respectful silence. The problems were always going to come with the Q&A.

When we got to the questions however, what did we get? Pre-selected (for which read “heavily vetted”) questions. There was nothing there to open up any embarrassing civil-liberties type areas. Indeed, several of the questions such as “If elected President, would you curtail Executive Power” were directly chosen to enable the speaker to polish-up his credentials.

Millennial Momentum

Millennials are deeply suspicious of state authority. Paul’s chosen topic offered perfect synchronization. Throw in frequent references to cellphones, the web, and the threat posed by a snooping government, and rapt attention was guaranteed. Rand Paul is a clever, and thoughtful speaker. His isolation of this one particular aspect of Libertarian belief was where he and his audience would overlap. The audience were enthralled. So much so that they didn’t notice the giant logical chasm – and opportunity – that Paul was delicately tip-toeing around.

“What you do on your cellphone is none of their damned business”

This line was used twice, and to applause each time. Rand Paul passionately believes that nobody, just nobody has the right to interfere with you and your phone. Except….. the curious amongst us would love to know how that adds up if you are using your phone for some sort of gay dating purposes. If the phone company should manifest devout Christian views, would they have a right to cut you off? After all, Rand Paul also believes shops should have the right to turn away LGBT customers.

This vital question was left unasked, but then again, all the questions had been vetted anyway.

Academic Style

Something that I do personally enjoy about the Rand Paul style is his love of history. He speaks in an academic style – hence he sometimes rambles – and this address was full of quotations from what to many would have been obscure sources:

“Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England,
as I trust shall never be put out.”

Only Rand Paul could get away with Tudor history in a modern American political speech, quoting Archbishop Cranmer’s famous last words as he and the unfortunate Ridley became human barbecue on Bloody Mary’s sixteenth century execution pyre. Again, the quote was perfectly chosen. It’s an academic quote, and this speech was being given in an academic setting to an audience of high academic style. At once the quote supports Paul’s message, and flatters the audience. It winks and insinuates “I’m clever, and I know you’re clever. Let’s both be clever together.” The lions of Berkeley just rolled over and purred. Daniel himself could not have done better.

A Feinstein Love-Fest

Paul went out of his way to pour praise onto a lady with whom he would not normally share much political currency, Senator Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein’s significant if dull speech of the week before came in for substantial praise, right down to Paul’s account of how he walked across to the Senator to congratulate her on it. Again, the Lions purred their approval. Why?

Senator Feinstein is from California. Berkeley is in California. What the audience responded to was the political equivalent of a speaker standing up to praise the home-team. “Go 49ers!!!” It was another subtle little aside, that was calculated to please.

Paul endorsed Snowden!

Almost The absolute heart of the spell however was Rand Paul’s continuous flirtation with Edward Snowden. The first reference came a mere three minutes into the speech, tucked neatly beside Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Paul almost seemed to be flirting with the subject, until out of nowhere, we found ourselves in a comparison between the wrongdoings of Snowden and what Paul perceived to be the wrongdoings of NSA Director, James Clapper.

This strange dance of logic led to the statement that “If Clapper is innocent, then Snowden is innocent.” What just happened? Did Rand Paul declare Edward Snowden innocent? The audience certainly seemed to think so, and responded warmly. In actuality though, Paul did no such thing. He merely posed an interesting question that allowed the audience to gleefully assume that Rand Paul shares their views. Yet more approving purring.

Full marks to Senator Paul. This was a masterful assessment of the audience, and a message fine-tuned to their viewpoint.

There were so many ways in which this appearance at Berkeley could have gone wrong. So many topics where speaker and audience could have clashed. So many difficult questions that could have been asked. Not one of them came to pass. Many are seeing Daniel emerging unscathed from the lion’s den having performed some form of political miracle. Look a little closer though and you’ll see the natural results of a good speech, a well planned message, and above all, a flattered audience.

Cathy McMorris Rogers and the SOTU response. Yoda or Jindal?

It’s the most unenviable job in politics: delivering the response to the President’s State of the Union address.

A high-wire act performed over circling sharks, the number one goal is simply to avoid coming out of it as chum. To emerge merely a chump can be considered success.

The problem is that everybody remembers when it all goes wrong, but few remember when it goes OK. Bobby Jindahl’s train-wreck in 2009, and Marco Rubio’s water-bottle moment in 2013 both leap to mind, whereas Mitch Daniels workmanlike performance in 2012 has fallen off the radar.

If delivering the SOTU response is a plum handed to rising stars, then it’s a Hunger Games of a plum. Most of those chosen are going to wind-up pulp.

Delivering a successful refutation is never a job for the angry. An angry, fired-up politician with an axe to grind and a name to make, Bobby Jindal for example, will fall straight into the trap of attempting a sweeping refutation of everything that the President just said. Striding to the microphone, they’ll hurl the metaphorical bowling ball of their indignation down the alley and hope for a strike that sends the President’s pins a’flying.

The problem is though, that until the President actually speaks, nobody knows for certain where those pins are going to be placed, or on which facts they are going to be based. This means that unless the respondent is very, very lucky, they’re going to send that bowling ball straight into the gutter, where it will land with a dull and heavily press-coveraged thud. It’s not quite the sound of tumbleweed, but dreadfully close to it, and precisely what panicked Marco Rubio into groping for that water bottle last year.

So instead of bowling pins, let’s talk sweaters. Woolen ones.

The President’s State of the Union, will be presented as a perfectly stitched garment of arguments that knit together into one broad theme.

A successful SOTU respondent does not need to shred that sweater. They merely need to pick lose a single thread and then tug just enough so that the news networks scent an opportunity and finish the unravelling before the President is even back in the West Wing.

That thread will be found in one of two seams. It might be a dubious fact that can be directly challenged, or it could be in a slightly too sweeping phrase. All the respondent now needs to do is to get a hold of that thread and use a wonderful little toy called The Yoda Argument.

Remember the famous line from Star Wars?

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering, and that way lies the dark side, young Skywalker”

A leads to B. B leads to C. C leads to D.

For a rebuttal, you use the same structure: “If A is wrong, then B is wrong. If B is wrong, then C must be wrong, and if C is wrong, then D is wrong, and that way unravels the sweater, Mr President.”

The respondent does not need to go for a kill stroke, they just need to find that thread.

It’s a big thing to ask though. The respondent needs to resist the all-or-bust temptation of the furnace-blast rebuttal, and that’s why Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers could be such an interesting GOP choice for 2013. Despite being a highly ranked Republican, they don’t let her out to speak a great deal. Her style is generally cool, and tends towards the forensic. For so long as the Tea Party demanded speakers who came with a certain spittle-flecked fundamentalism, her cooler style didn’t always fit. Hence the low profile. Her choice for tomorrow night’s performance could therefore prove to be a smart one.

Will Cathy McMorris Rogers remain forensic enough to start the SOTU unravelling, or will she fall into the trap of ages, and make a complete Jindal of it?

A presentation pointer for Chris Christie, and he can take this to the bridge

by Peter Watts

When there’s an underlaying bogey or accusation lurking behind your presentation, and you’d rather  not have that bogey become smeered all over the screen as the main talking-point of the day, should you:

a) Make your announcement, and then quietly and concisely move on, or

b) Make your announcement and then immediately mention the accusation before vehemently denying it’s existence?

A few examples:

• “Redundancies are not an indication that the company is in trouble.”
• “The product recall is not a sign of engineering issues in our other product lines.”
• “The legal action does not represent a worry for our shareholders.”

No matter how firmly those denials were made, your audience just heard:

• “Company about to fold”
• “Complete product recall of everything”
• “Dump shares before Feds arrive”

In the world of rhetoric, to deny something is to confirm it.

Governor Chris Christie has been having a spot of trouble with a bridge recently, and amongst other unfortunate statements during today’s press conference, we were treated to this:

“I am not a bully.”

Hands-up all those who now suspect that the Governor is precisely that!

There is a technique in public speaking called Paralipsis, which is to put something into the mind of an audience by denying that you want to speak of it. It’s often used in politics, for example, “I would not stoop to mentioning my opponent’s history of spousal abuse, drunk-driving, and tax evasion.”

Fair enough, but while you wouldn’t “stoop to mentioning it”, your audience are now all thinking about it! Used well it can be devastating against one’s opponents, but Governor Christie’s usage demonstrates how to neatly slam the technique into reverse and then backfire it all over your own message.

If somewhere beneath the bonfire of your presentation, little kindling flames are delicately smouldering their way across the bridge of your Presidential ambitions, then the thing you really shouldn’t be doing, is blowing on them.

What you deny, you will affirm!