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CHAPTER 1

How Did We Get Here?

I’LL BEGIN WITH A BRIEF HISTORY OF HOW we got to the rather sorry state of public speeches and presentations we find ourselves in today. Trust me; it’s important to help you understand why kinesthetic speaking is so vital to success in the modern, post-television era.

The Ancient Greeks invented public speaking because they had to.

The idea that ordinary people should stand up and deliver public presentations began with the Ancient Greeks. In their legal system, the opposing sides were expected to speak for themselves in court. Around this dire necessity, a whole lore of public-speaking tips and advice developed. Soon enough, the plaintiffs and defendants began to hire expert rhetors (think lawyer) to speak for them. The field of rhetoric grew up in response to this need for private citizens and their representatives to speak clearly, cogently, and powerfully in public settings where a lot was at stake.

At the same time, political figures found the need to speak on matters of public moment, much as they do today. Both these strands of public speaking led to the creation of a good deal of advice on how to give great presentations, and some classic speech examples. Much of this body of rhetorical knowledge is still useful today. The Greeks have left us with excellent, detailed advice on how to recognize faulty arguments, how to create elegant tropes, or turns of phrase that will move listeners, and how to structure a persuasive speech that works in front of an audience.

In addition, they gave some very practical advice on how to deliver a speech. Since we have no direct knowledge of what the best Greek speakers actually sounded or looked like, the practical advice is limited to a few concepts and stories.

Demosthenes, for example, was a noted Greek public orator who began with what must have been sloppy pronunciation or perhaps a speech impediment. He practiced his speeches on the beach when no one else was around, taking smooth pebbles from the sand and putting them in his mouth. Once he could speak clearly with pebbles, he removed them and found that he quickly became known for the clarity of his delivery.

That technique has come down to us today, and there are still speech coaches who recommend that their “mush-mouthed” students practice their speeches holding a pencil between their teeth or the like. It remains a good idea for people who have difficulty enunciating clearly in public settings. But, of course, it’s not the whole story, as we shall see. Far more confusion is generated by speakers whose verbal and nonverbal communications are inconsistent, or who present their material in confusing and poorly structured ways, first annoying and then alienating their audiences.

To succeed in a presentation, you have to reach your audience with both head and heart.

Public speaking is a mixed genre of human activity. It involves both intellectual and emotional content. It demands both clear thinking and good technique. It uses both the brain and the body. Most important, it is both prepared and given—it exists in both theory and practice. You can’t “think” a speech. For it to be a speech you must have an audience, and you must give that audience the presentation. The Greeks understood this. Their analysis of what it takes to be a great speaker pays attention to both story structure and performance in the broadest sense. What follows will use many of their insights, still powerful two thousand years on.

Thus, we can pass relatively quickly over most of the ensuing two thousand years of rhetorical history and come to the modern era. In the Renaissance and after, the ancient Greek models were considered the acme of public speaking and followed closely. Since much of the university curriculum was based on the Greeks and the Romans, when it wasn’t based on the Bible, there was little innovation in public rhetoric. Demosthenes’ name, for example, was still a byword for excellence in delivery well into the first half of the twentieth century.

Through the Victorian era, public speaking drew inspiration from the ancients.

The Victorian enthusiasm for most things classical kept Greek and Roman rhetoric at the forefront of the field of public speaking throughout the period. While there was rapid change on many other fronts, from agriculture to transportation, in presentations the Victorians were tradition-bound. By 1900, for instance, little had changed in the basic understanding of public oratory since the Greeks except that a collection of conventional gestures, designed to convey emotion, had slowly evolved and become codified in self-help books for speakers and actors, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. No doubt the Greeks had gestures of their own; it’s just that we have no clear record of what they were.

But we do have a record of some of the gestures that were thought appropriate since the mid-1700s. Indeed, some of them are still used in a modified, naturalized form today. When you see someone put his hands in front of his mouth in shock or horror, for example, that is the modern version of a gesture conveying horror that has been around since at least the Victorian era, and probably much longer.

These gestures were important because of how speeches were delivered until the advent of radio and television in the midtwentieth century. It’s important to understand that public speaking was a form of mass entertainment. Most speeches were delivered without amplification to audiences in large halls or outdoors. As a result, a style of speaking developed that involved grand rhetoric, big, dramatic gestures, and voice projection. Most speakers followed the Greek models for how to structure a speech, and those speeches often lasted for several hours.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was a now-famous exception. The speech was barely noticed in the press reports that followed. It was over so quickly that, legend has it, the photographer didn’t even have time to get a picture. He was still setting up his camera when Lincoln sat down, already finished. Most of the press focused instead on the long speech by Edward Everett that followed Lincoln’s. Everett spoke for two hours, an acceptable length for a funeral oration of the day. He used as his model Pericles’ funeral oration on the death of the Athenian soldiers who fell during the Peloponnesian War against Sparta, which had become over the years the accepted paradigm for all funeral orations.

Like much that was excellent about the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the formal generic demands of the funeral oration were largely forgotten after World War II—until President Ronald Reagan reinvented the genre for his brilliant speech on the Challenger disaster in 1986.

Typical of nineteenth-century oration too was William Jennings Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech, which he delivered more than six hundred times around the country to large, enthusiastic crowds in his failed presidential campaign of 1896. Bryan was arguing for a combined gold- and silver-based monetary system and against a gold standard—a relatively arcane economic argument that pitted the common people against the moneyed interests of the day. Bryan’s voice thundered and his arms flailed in grand style; he could ignite a crowd of two thousand, making his voice heard with careful breathing and other projection techniques honed over a lifetime of public oratory.

But the physical techniques Bryan employed to reach such a large crowd unamplified are not the only things that are different than today. Our ideas about content have also changed. It’s worth looking briefly at the very end of Bryan’s several-hour speech to understand the differences.

It is the issue of 1776 over again. Our ancestors, when but three millions in number, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation; shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends, that will never be the verdict of our people. Therefore, we care not upon what lines the battle is fought. If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Try to imagine a crowd of two thousand farmers leaping to their feet, roaring approval for several minutes, and you’ll have some idea of the effect Bryan’s speech had everywhere he went. How does the rhetoric seem to your ear and eye? Overly formal? A bit pompous? Note how it is designed to spread out the key concepts with enough words in between to get the thought out. It simply took the sound waves of Bryan’s voice a little while to travel out to two thousand people and be heard and understood. Hence, when Bryan asks a rhetorical question (“shall we, their descendants … declare that we are less independent …?”) he is careful to answer it, so that no one in the audience is in any doubt about the correct response. Nowadays, answering an obviously rhetorical question like that would sound excessively pompous.

Note also how Bryan ends most of his sentences with strong words that can be shouted or projected on an “up” note. Today, we’re more casual, but back then, the first need was to be heard. If your voice trails off, people will lose the last few words, and then often the sense of the whole phrase. That’s why Bryan says, “we care not upon what lines the battle is fought.” To our ears, the phrasing is old-fashioned, but for Bryan, the key words (“care not,” “lines,” “battle,” “fought”) are spaced appropriately and end with a strong verb that ties the whole phrase together. It’s phrasing appropriate for shouted oratory. Moreover, it’s composed for the most part of simple, short words that have wide, powerful meanings. Bryan well understood his audience—its strengths and its limitations.

In the twentieth century, technology changed public speaking permanently and profoundly.

Since the advent of amplified sound and later television, the genre of public speaking has changed enormously. Oratory evolved from a shouted genre to a spoken one. Then, beginning in the 1950s, when we took to watching our public discussions on television, public speaking became an intimate genre.

Therein lies the dilemma for most speakers today. Instead of watching a speaker address us from a distant stage, we invited Walter Cronkite and a host of imitators into our homes. With the television screen framing his head and shoulders, Cronkite appeared to be talking to us from a few feet away, within a space we usually reserve for chat about fairly personal matters with people we trust. The close personal contact (or the illusion of it, at least) made us feel connected to Cronkite and other television figures. They became implicitly trustworthy in our minds.

In this seemingly intimate space created by television, the oldfashioned approach to the delivery of public presentations—the large gestures, the sweeping phrases, the carefully spaced concepts—was obviously out of place. What we needed instead, and what we gradually got, was the personal conversation appropriate to this cozy environment. Unfortunately, we also forgot a good deal of what remains profound about the Greeks’ understanding of public rhetoric, especially its content and structure, in our need to become modern. Slowly, the illusion of physical closeness conveyed by television created in all audiences an expectation of intimacy, both spatial and emotional, from a speaker.

This phenomenon is why we all have the slightly eerie feeling that we know our celebrities. It’s because we have let them into our living rooms, and more important, our personal space. We watch them talk to us conversationally from a few feet away, seemingly in our kitchens, our living rooms, our family rooms, our bedrooms.

Today we have a mismatch between public-speaking custom and audience expectations.

Most public oratory—especially business speeches and presentations—has never entirely caught up with the audience’s changed expectations. Our speaking styles have indeed become more conversational, but speakers in public spaces haven’t learned to deliver the physical closeness that mirrors the linguistic closeness on television.

Moreover, the candid personal disclosure that we have grown to expect when we are seemingly so close to a televised speaker hasn’t become part of public presentations for the most part—especially, again, in business presentations. After all, no selfrespecting CEO is about to pattern his or her presentations after the intimacy of Oprah.

We’re left today with some clumsy disparities in public oratory. There is the disjunction between the trappings of traditional public speaking—the podium, the large auditorium, the stage, the lighting—and a style of discourse that is now more conversational than declamatory. Even more significant, a yawning gap exists between an audience’s ingrained expectations, shaped by a half-century of watching television, and the behavior of most business, educational, and governmental speakers. Even in the relatively intimate setting of a small conference room, the typical speaker is kinesthetically disconnected, though he or she isn’t physically distanced from the audience. Instead of occasionally moving toward the audience to establish a personal connection, speakers usually move back and forth between the podium or projector and the screen in a weirdly hypnotic, solipsistic form of what could be called presentational dance. They might as well be talking to themselves. The audience sits watching in suspended animation through this faux-kinesthetic routine until the question-and-answer session at the end, when attendees are offered a brief chance to move and perhaps to speak.

Also, while the speaker’s tone may be more conversational these days, the audience’s intuitive expectation of a personal message delivered at close range usually goes unfulfilled. With the lights turned low so that slides can be seen, with little kinesthetic stimulation from the speaker, and with little opportunity for the audience to respond in turn, the crowd will gradually tune out. The overall, if unintended, effect is to disconnect the speaker from the message, the message from the audience, and the audience from action—the main reason for the oratorical effort in the first place.

In a word, it’s boring. And it’s boring because medium, style, and message no longer connect. We expect intimacy, like what we see on television, and instead we get poorly structured, unemotional corporate-speak.

Indeed, given the skewed evolution of public-speaking content and delivery against the backdrop of the enforced intimacy of modern media, the wonder is that speeches are ever interesting at all. The few speeches that do manage to ignite an audience’s passion are exceptions to a dismal rule of mediocrity.

How can we change this sorry dynamic? By learning (from, first of all, the Greeks) to develop content that is appropriate to the aural genre of the presentation, by rehearsing it to find the kinesthetic moments—the opportunities for connection with the audience—and by learning how to deliver it in a kinesthetic style that is compelling for audiences today. By developing, in short, the audience-centered rhetoric needed for the twenty-first century.

Remember

 The Ancient Greeks invented public speaking out of a need to argue legal cases.

 Public speaking is a mixed genre of human activity—it involves both head and heart, theory and practice, understanding and performance.

 Through the Victorian era, public speaking drew inspiration from the ancients.

 In the twentieth century, technology, including radio and television, changed public speaking permanently and profoundly.

 Today we have a mismatch between public-speaking custom and audience expectation.

 We need a new rhetoric for the twenty-first century—an audience-centered rhetoric.