The “E” of “HI TEA”: The Principle of Evoking Emotions
8 Audience Centered
Principle Five: Effective Communicators Are Audience Centered
Misanalysing His Audience: Learning from Communication Failures
Summary: The “A” of “HI TEA”: The Principle of Being Audience Centered
9 How to Communicate Like C. S. Lewis
Communicate for the Eye and Ear
Use Interesting and Varied Supporting Material
Develop a Clear Communication Objective
Communicate for the “Mind’s Eye”
Craft Effective Visual Metaphors
Master Nonverbal Communication Skills
How to Be an Audience-Centered Communicator
Select the Appropriate Communication Channel
Analyze and Adapt to Your Audience
Be an Intentional Communicator
Be a Transpositional Communicator
Be an Audience-Centered Communicator
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When the Nobel Prize winning poet, Seamus Heaney, came to the door of The Kilns, C. S. Lewis’s home in Oxford, he shouted, “I want to see the house where the Irishman lived!” Heaney grew up in North Ireland not all that far from where Lewis was raised. Ireland is a country that seems to have a disproportionate number of great writers, given the comparatively small population. Lewis thought it was in the genes to be a communicator. He once wrote, “I am an Irishman and a congenital rhetorician”1 Perhaps that is it. The Irish are simply great at communication, and there is nothing more to it: great storytellers; great at spinning a yarn, and great at holding the attention of an audience. Perhaps it is something in the water. Perhaps, it is the island’s unique combination of extraordinary beauty. The landscapes take one’s breath away. However, the beauty also coexists with the history of a people who have endured centuries of suffering. Beauty and sorrow weave the texture unique to Irish literature. Is this what Lewis had in mind when he connected his rhetorical skill to his being Irish? Whatever the case, Lewis was a brilliant communicator.
Professor Steven Beebe reveals that nobody can fully appreciate the genius of Lewis without seeing the brilliance of Lewis’s skill as a communicator. Lewis’s scholarly books like The Allegory of Love and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama are masterpieces for their ability to follow a narrative thread through such a wide fabric of material. They hold a reader’s attention for ←xi | xii→their clarity, their imaginative depiction, and their delightful winsomeness. He was certainly a master communicator as an academic. Furthermore, The Chronicles of Narnia are stories admitted into the very canons of classical children’s literature, next to likes of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson. Lewis the master communicator could tell a story to delight the hearts of children. His storytelling skills also classify his science fiction among some of the best of that genre, such as Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. How was it possible that he could communicate with such skill across such wide territory?
Lewis was also a scintillating debater. As the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club, he became what Oxford Philosopher Austin Farrer called “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter.” Lewis could stand on his own two feet and debate the best minds in Britain during the 1940s to mid-1950s. Nevertheless, his communication skills were not limited merely to oral communication; he was also highly capable when it came to debating in print. His dispute with Professor E. M. W Tillyard in The Personal Heresy is a noteworthy model of academic engagement. There are no ad hominem arguments in the book,
