Understanding Public Speaking

A Learner's Guide to Persuasive Oratory

Braj Mohan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000007152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Comunicazione e public speaking

Public speaking is a much coveted yet difficult art. This book illustrates the use of various linguistic devices and persuasive strategies with examples from the speeches of powerful orators in history. It systematically draws on the various approaches to public speaking and persuasive discourse to present new insights and techniques.

The volume:

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• Critically examines strategies of persuasive oratory.

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• Draws on extensive investigation of a corpus of famous public speeches in history.

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• Focuses on the needs of those who want to brush up their public speaking skills.

The volume will be a key reference for aspiring civil servants, lawyers, business and corporate professionals, and politicians. It will be of great interest to scholars of linguistics, and political and business communication.

1

Introduction

Public speaking is a valuable art. It can change people’s thinking and thereby affect their attitudes and beliefs. A skilled orator can convert an unruly mob into a serious and disciplined audience and motivate them to undertake a meaningful course of action. In a sense, the art of persuasive oratory enables orators to control and guide people’s thoughts and actions. Due to this, public speakers, who are capable of using language persuasively and strategically, easily get leadership roles in social, political and professional spheres.

History records the contribution of orators to various social and political revolutions all over the world. On numerous occasions, persuasive oratory has been used to share ideas, seek public support, mobilize people, and bring about much-needed changes in socio-political situations. Great orators, such as Swami Vivekananda, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and Martin Luther King Junior, brought about positive changes in society by creating awareness among their people about human values and social justice.

In the modern era of democracy and globalization, the art of public speaking has become even more desirable. People’s skill in oratory can lead them to positions of prestige and power. Technological advancement in the field of media and communication has rendered oratory far more effective than before. Given the widespread popularity and easy accessibility of mass media, such as television and internet, orators can now reach a far larger audience all over the world, which was not the case a few decades ago. But this fact has brought the orator greater responsibility. Now a speech does not vanish into thin air the moment it is delivered. It can now be recorded, shared, stored and analysed, and it impacts not just the immediate audience present at the venue of speech but also the extended audience spread all over the world. All this necessitates sufficient caution and carefulness on the part of the orator.

Since oratory is an art of language and a special genre in oral communication, it is important to understand the nature of language and process of communication. Language is a primary means of communication that helps people share information and negotiate meaning. Craig defines communication as a “process of expression, interaction, and influence, in which the behaviour of humans or other complex organisms expresses psychological mechanisms, states and traits and, through interaction with the similar expressions of other individuals, produces a range of cognitive, emotional, and behavioural effects” (Craig 1999:143). In his definition, Craig recognizes that communication influences people’s emotions, thoughts and behaviour.

Communication involves four basic elements: sender, message, channel and receiver (Berlo 1960). The sender or encoder of the message has an idea and wants to share it with the receiver and decoder of the message. The encoder encodes the idea using a language. Language has appropriately been called a coding system because it is a symbolic system of aural and/or visual codes. Then the encoded message is transmitted through a channel, also called medium. The message is received and interpreted by the decoder with the help of his/her knowledge of the language of the message. After this, the receiver sends back verbal or non-verbal feedback and the cycle of communication is complete. In the process of feedback, the sender become the receiver and the receiver becomes the sender; therefore, communication is a cyclical process.

We need to understand that communication can be successful only when the encoder and the decoder share the language in which the message has been coded otherwise the message will not be interpreted and communication will fail. The encoder’s ability, attitude and emotions along with paralinguistic and extra-linguistic factors, such as pitch, tempo and body language, affect the transmission and interpretation of a message. The decoder’s ability, motivation, attitude and emotional state also affect the interpretation of a message. The effectiveness and functionality of the channel is crucial in determining the quality, quantity and effectiveness of a message. All these conditions apply to public speaking, which is an important genre of oral communication. A public speaker should use a language and vocabulary that his/her audience understand. Factors related to transmission such as microphone, interpersonal distance and loudness of voice should also be carefully considered. The speaker should be extra careful in the use of the factors that show his/her attitude and emotions such as pitch, tempo, loudness and body language. Audience feedback in the form of applause, shouting or silence needs to be carefully analysed during speech as it gives the orator clues about how the ideas proposed in the speech are being received by the audience.

According to Halliday (1975), language serves seven basic functions: instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative and representational. We use the instrumental function to express needs and get things done, the regulatory function to regulate people’s actions and behaviour, the interactional function to make contact and form relationships with others, and the personal function to express our feelings, opinions and individual identity. These functions satisfy our physical, emotional and social needs. The next three functions help the speaker come to terms with his/her environment. We use the heuristic function of language to gain knowledge, the imaginative function to imagine and tell stories, and the representational function to share facts and information. Some other linguists, such as Roman Jakobson and Geoffrey Leech, also talked about functions of language but considering the focus of this book and constraints of space I will leave them undiscussed.

The language of persuasive oratory uses several of the above-mentioned functions of language simultaneously for creating desired impact. Here I would like to add that language is not just a medium of communication through which information is shared objectively; it also has some subtler political and discursive functions. It can be used to affect the perception, beliefs, attitudes and actions of the masses. Through strategic use of language, discursive power and ideologies can be created, propagated and exercised. Through language, existing ideologies and discourses can be demolished and new discourses and ideologies can be established. The discursive power of language that enables the powerful to subjugate and oppress others can also enable the oppressed to resist such subjugation and oppression and win their emancipation if they learn how to wield this powerful weapon.

Those who know how to use the subtle tool of language use it for achieving various social, political and personal goals. Smart practitioners of language, such as politicians, lawyers and orators, acquire a lot of power, prestige and prosperity and exercise tremendous influence upon others through the strategic use of language. These practitioners of language know what to say, when to say it, to whom and how to say it. A public speaker needs to use language more strategically and persuasively than any other practitioner of language due to the high level of seriousness and special challenges associated with oratory and that’s why proper training in public speaking is required.

Public speech is different from other genres of communication in terms of its nature, manner and strategies. Each genre uses language in a specific way according to the subject matter and purpose in terms of textual structure, form of argumentation and level of formality (Crystal 2003:201).

A public speech is different from an interview in the sense that interviews are interactive in nature and the speaker’s responses are often guided, interrupted and modified by professional interviewers, while a public speech is mostly one-way communication in which the feedback from the audience comes only in the form of applause, silence, shouting, etc. There is a greater power difference between the orator and the audience in a public speech than between an interviewer and an interviewee. A public speaker generally has sufficient control over important factors, such as the time and place of the speech, the microphone and the content of the speech; while in a political interview, these aspects are sufficiently within the control of the interviewer. Therefore, the language and discursive strategies in a public speech are essentially different from those in an interview. Similar is the case with group discussion, which is also marked by frequent interruptions, rebuttals and rejoinders, unlike public speech which is more or less a monologue occasionally interrupted by applause.

Public speech is essentially different from written discourse, such as essays, stories and political pamphlets. It relies more upon context and paralinguistic and extra-linguistic cues for its meaning, whereas written discourse relies upon the words on the page for its meaning. Spoken discourse has the benefit of presence of the speaker and the hearer at the same time and place, while written discourse is meant to be read and interpreted in the absence of the writer in distant places and times. Therefore, spoken discourse including public speech can communicate the encoder’s intention more effectively as the important elements, such as pitch, pace, pause, intensity, time and place, assist the orator and the audience in negotiating meaning in an effective way. A strategic pause or a slight change in pitch can significantly change the meaning of an utterance unit in a speech. Written discourse does not have these complexities of spoken discourse as orthographic systems do not have so many notations for expressing numerous subtle attitudes, moods, feelings and emotions of the author. Due to this reason, spoken and written discourses differ significantly from each other in language and style. Public speakers, therefore, use persuasive strategies in their public speech not only at the level of lexicon and syntax but also at the paralinguistic level for affecting the attitude and decisions of the audience. Considering all these factors, I aim to explain both the linguistic and paralinguistic strategies of persuasive oratory in this book.

As I noted earlier, in our social and professional lives, we always require persuasive and public speaking skills to sell our ideas, promote our concepts, win friends and conquer foes. There is hardly any professional field that does not require these skills. Therefore, all those who seek power, prestige and success in their life need to cultivate the art of persuasive oratory.

Having established the desirability of cultivating the art of public speaking, we face a pertinent question: “Can people be trained to become orators?”. I would answer this question with a clear “yes”. However, the fact remains that not everybody can be trained to become everything as each skill requires some basic capabilities. The training as well as the practice of public speaking presupposes sufficient understanding of language as we cannot conceptualize, evaluate and express ideas effectively without proper understanding of language.

Those who want to cultivate the art of oratory need to have clear speech and fluency in language. They should be able to express their thoughts with significant ease, which means they should be able to say what they want to say. For this, trainee orators should have a sufficiently rich vocabulary and understanding of correct sentence structures. It is a real boon if Nature has gifted them with a deep voice and clear articulation. Some understanding of the societal norms is also desirable.

Since public speakers speak about things and affairs, a trainee orator should have some understanding of things and common affairs of the world. Good readers are better equipped to become good speakers. Trainee orators should develop interest in reading history, politics, economics, philosophy, sciences, culture and religion and make themselves aware of the common affairs of the world. All this knowledge helps orators form their arguments and relate them to commonly known facts in the collective memory of society. One who knows proverbs, anecdotes and cultural practices popular in society connects with people effectively and persuades them easily.

The reader needs to understand the nature, structure and strategies of persuasive oratory and how all these things have been presented in this book. Persuasive oratory aims at changing people’s thoughts and perceptions about certain things on the basis of rationality and desirability. While persuasive speakers base their claim of rationality upon strategic presentation of facts, the claim of desirability involves logical and emotional appeals. Persuasive oratory anchors itself upon three central assumptions:

1.Human beings are rational and emotional at the same time, and therefore their thoughts decisions and actions are not immune to persuasion.

2.One and the same thing can be understood and reported from multiple perspectives.

3.People’s beliefs, perceptions and decisions can be affected through the strategic use of language.

Persuasive discourse operates on the notion that people’s perception of certain issues can be influenced by language; therefore, persuasive orators rely on language to gain and retain power. For instance, political orators enforce their own political beliefs by persuading the masses to accept them as the truth. To do this, they create and propagate ideologies so that people may accept the proposed beliefs as ‘common sense’ and act accordingly out of their free will, considering these dominant ideologies as ‘norms’. Most of the time, the audience do not understand how these ideologies have been created and with what tools. They simply accept these ideologies as the objective truth. For them, it may be enlightening to know how persuasive orators, such as politicians, persuade them through speeches and how they “dramatize politics in order to attain power” (Burke 1969:393). Public speeches are among those sites where ideologies are created, nurtured and practised in the most effective way.

It is possible to identify the structural and linguistic features of a particular genre through close observation and analysis of its corpus. A sufficiently large corpus of famous public speeches has been investigated using authentic techniques (Mohan 2016) for identifying the rhetorical strategies presented in this book. Additionally, already available research on persuasive oratory and public speaking is also presented in lucid language. This book presents the salient features of persuasive oratory with suitable illustrations from authentic speeches of successful orators in history. Every effort has been made to explain each concept in clear language with effective illustration. Furthermore, this book presents theoretical material and practical tips on persuasive oratory side by side. All these aspects make this book as useful for a serious scholar as for a casual reader who wants to brush up his/her public speaking skills.

Skill in public speaking requires an understanding of the fundamentals of persuasive oratory, which I present in the following 12 chapters of this book. Chapter 2 to Chapter 6 acquaint the reader with the basics of persuasive oratory. The next six chapters, i.e. Chapter 7 to Chapter 12, demonstrate how various strategies of persuasive oratory are actually used in different parts of a public speech. The final chapter sums up the key concepts of the book.

Persuasion depends upon the audience believing in what the orator says and something can be believed only when it is understood; therefore, comprehension precedes persuasion. Study of persuasion is the subject matter of Social Psychology, whereas the study of effective comprehension and communication comes within the purview of Pragmatics. In this way, Social Psychology interacts with Pragmatics in the study of persuasive communication. With this in mind, I present some important theories and models of Social Psychology and Pragmatics in Chapter 2. In this chapter, three models of persuasion, namely the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), Heuristic Systematic Model (HSM) and Approach-Avoidance Model (AAM), are discussed and related to public speaking. In addition to these models, three theories from Pragmatics, namely Austin’s Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Theory of Cooperative Principle, and Brown and Levinson’s Theory of Politeness, are also discussed, showing how these theories relate to persuasive oratory.

Some important theories of public speaking are available in the classical literature, and understanding of these can immensely help a trainee orator. With this in mind, I wrote Chapter 3 to acquaint the reader with the contribution of classical rhetoricians to persuasive oratory. Aristotle’s three species of rhetoric, three means of persuasion and structure of public speech, and Cicero’s five canons of oratory are discussed with suitable illustrations and examples.

Persuasive oratory involves artistic and strategic use of language embellished with various tropes and figures of speech. These tropes and figures of speech are illustrated in Chapter 4. The language of public speech is not plain prose as there is something poetic about it. Chapter 5 discusses the use of words and sentence structures and various criteria of their suitability in persuasive oratory. Persuasive intentions and strategies and how they are structured in public speech are briefly discussed in Chapter 6.

In this sequence, Chapter 7 illustrates how skilled orators connect with the audience and establish their trustworthiness for effecting persuasion. Strategies of introducing and stating th...