Rhetorica Update Vol.3 Issue 4.
Getting personal can be the highlight or ruin of a speech. Here are two positive cases.
1. Self-deprecation warms the intentionally dull
Apposite disclosure of something personal is an overlooked way to make speeches more interesting, memorable and satisfying.
Nick Warner, the head of Australia’s Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), achieved cross-Asia news coverage for a rare speech he recently gave to the Lowy Institute.
I watched it on live TV, hoping for graphic insights into espionage, terrorism, people smuggling and weapons of mass destruction.
What I heard was utilitarian and anodyne. ASIS sounded like any other bureaucracy, with its “corporate collaboration”, “risk management” and “robust accountability processes”, etc.
I was about to tune out, when Warner said, “…forty years ago — after I left university and as a long-haired and scruffy youth — I went to an interview…to join ASIS. It wasn’t much of a process and I wasn’t much of a candidate.” Like me, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph found this notable and gave it direct quotes.
Earlier, Warner had apologised for sniffing and coughing. “I’m the spy that came in with the cold,” he said. This quip also made it into mainstream news, at no loss to his brand.
If Warner’s aim was to engender rapport and trust, he succeeded; his speech was strengthened and freshened by his brief, self-depracating asides.
2. Passion and believability
It is 49 years this August, since Martin Luther King Jr made his momentous Jobs and Freedom speech in Washington (cue next year’s 50th anniversary remembrances).
Several things made the speech consequential: quarter of a million souls gathering; the intensity and timing of the issue; the location under Lincoln’s “symbolic shadow”; and King’s incisive rhetoric and plangent delivery.
Yet what do we remember?
“I have a dream… “, uttered nine times in the one speech.
If you can remember more, it is most likely: “… that my four little children…”
King tied his personal dream to public ideals and realities: the American “creed”; the “red hills”, “vicious racism” and “sweltering oppression” of Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama; and Bible faith. Yet what we remember is the intensely picturable, personal “… my four little children”.
The plight and desire of oppressed black Americans was King’s too. It was personal.
With due respect to Benjamin Franklin: relevant, interesting and measured personal disclosures are well said and well done.
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