Force of nature… not my fault.

I’m your captain, leader, stay with me.

I wonder how well that works on the average person just listening to the speech.
I guess it must have some effect!

His use of ’storm’ imagery is also an example of the sublime, by using such purposeful language he is able to conjure up feelings of power within his listeners. I think that his constant use of ‘we’ and ‘our’ is an effective method of deflecting the attention from him. By moving away from the individual and concentrating on the collective, Brown is able to aggrandise the problem to a universal one that we are all suffering together and all have to work together to solve. I think that his use of short sentences and repetition make the speech much more forceful. As for his storm imagery, I think that it is rather inspiring and powerful, maybe Brown is now using rhetoric to try and motivate the public and spur on support for him.

You’re absolutely right - there’s no universal audience. Nor is there any universal speaker or universal issue. Every speech is a unique congregation of speaker, audience and issue and the speechwriter needs to carefully weigh up the merits of each before recommending any particular approach.

This is where so many speechwriting manuals go wrong. They offer sweeping suggestions, most of which turn out to be arbitrary, baseless and wrong on further examination.

The other day, someone on one of my courses said that they had been told that you should always start a speech with a joke. I was appalled! This kind of advice could be a sure-fire route to disaster. Why?

a) because not everyone can tell a joke
b) because audiences often expect something a bit more substantial at the beginning of a speech.
c) because jokes would go down like a lead balloon eg a war rally, an industrial dispute or a funeral.

There are two schools of speechwriting. The Bob Monkhouse school and the Aristotle Academy. I’m guessing Bob Monkhouse’s Speakers Handbook is not on the reading list for the MA Rhetoric course…

Simon

Many people are influenced by emotion, to varying degrees, whether they like it or not. The level to which they are influenced, though, must depend on their consciousness of it. In GB’s case here, I think many people had the perception that he was intentionally playing the pity card, to almost force them into feeling sorry for him.

This might’ve worked for some, but obviously not all. There is no universal audience and a speaker (or a speechwriter for that matter!) can never assume that there is. There are many different opinions out there, so the main, and probably most difficult, task is marrying the emotion with the moment, in order to please (or persuade) as many people as possible.

Nice blog, by the way, I enjoy reading your posts!