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.
CHAPTER 2
What to Do? The Audience-Centered Presentation Process
WE ENDED CHAPTER 1 WITH A call for an audience-centered rhetoric for the twenty-first century, one that would respect the audience’s need to come to a decision in real time. We’ll begin at the most important place: the content.
How do you shape the content of an audience-centered speech? Much that is useful has been lost in our evolution to casual, conversational speakers. Public speaking must be more than merely conversation on your hind legs. Have you ever listened hard to a real conversation between two other people? If you’re not looking directly at both parties, it can be almost impossible to follow. Conversations are full of stops and starts, incomplete thoughts and utterances, and references to body language such as gestures, facial expressions, and what the nonverbal communications researchers call emblems, or gestures that have specific coded meaning in particular cultures. It’s a messy business.
Public speaking is structured conversation.
Content must be given to the audience in a way that recognizes the audience’s need to absorb information through an aural genre with limited opportunities for feedback of the kind that conversation provides. That is not to say that there is no feedback in public speaking—there’s actually plenty. But because most public speaking is more or less scripted, the speaker is limited in the amount of attention he can give to feedback, and limited in the ways in which he can respond.
Think
