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.

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!

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.“

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.

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.

Five architect’s jewels for your next presentation

by Peter Paskale

Dramatic business presentations don’t require drama. They’re better off without it. Drama is showy and blowy and overstated. It instantly puts the audience on their guard.

Award-winning Canadian architect Sanjit Manku recently described a project that he’d undertaken on behalf of the French jeweller and perfumer Van Cleef & Arpels. His description pulls us gently into a lost-world of couture and design. We start to believe that we’re actually there, amongst a  glamorous global elite. Manku, as you’ll see in the video, uses two tools to achieve this. One of them comprises, to be sure, some impressive post-production work on the video itself, but the second is a good basic use of some concealed jewels of presentation technique.

Manku uses five of these techniques. For future presentations, think of yourself as the central jewel in the middle, and of these techniques as being the setting-stones that can make you shine.

Don’t shout it from the rooftops

Never shout. Manku uses a quiet delivery that draws us into his words and into his world.

The louder your voice, the more an audience will lean away from you. Experiment with reducing your volume just slightly, and you’ll notice how audiences lean-in, and become more focussed.

Use repetition

“Something that we love to do and that we love to explore in our own work.”

“..always evolving….always about creativity……. always about making something”

Repetition techniques are the foundation of public-speaking. On one level, it’s always good to repeat your main themes, but on another level, little micro-repetitions create rhythm and soundbites.

For example – “…government of the people, by the people, and for the people” came to be Lincoln’s most famous quote because of that repetition on the phrase  ‘the people”.

Criss-cross your terms

“…the lives of some of the women who have touched Van Cleef, and how the artists of Van Cleef have touched other people’s lives”

The heart of this phrase is ‘people who have touched Van Cleef and how Van Cleef has touched other people’. It’s the same structure that you might recognise from ‘I work to live – I don’t live to work’.

The phrase picks up its memorability from the cross-over. If I was to create one right here and now, I might say something like “I write for enjoyment, and I hope that you are enjoying my writing”.

Can you create something similar for your next presentation?

Say what something’s not

“…..they’re not objects – they’re emotional pieces.”

“…we hope that we don’t make walls or ceilings or objects either….”

The technical term is apophasis, and it’s when you define the topic by defining what its not. This is especially useful if you need to re-frame somebody’s view of the world. For example: “You’re not looking for the product that is the fastest nor the strongest nor even the most powerful – you’re looking for the optimal balance between all three.”

Overdo the ands and ors

In that previous example, we heard about “walls or ceilings or objects”. There’s one more ‘or’ in that sentence than is quite normal, and it’s a deliberate technique called polysyndeton. By replacing the commas in your lists with lots of ands or ors, then you make the list seem bigger – more powerful.

So, instead of telling your client that you’re going to “improve speed, power, and performance”, tell that that you’re going to “improve speed and power and performance”.

Powerful presentations don’t blast away at the audience like miners dynamiting a cliff. Great presentations finesse the audience, and that depends on the occasional phrases you choose, and the volume at which you use them.

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.