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
