Exchange of Realities

We all know how popular making speeches can be. Need to inspire your subordinates? Make a speech. Trying to get a belief of yours across to a group of people who haven’t quite come to agree with you? Make a speech. Attempting to demonstrate to your foes that surrender is their best option? Set up a nice, flashy projection system that puts your image somewhere all of them have to see it and then—you guessed it—make a speech.

But a speech is useless if it’s not well-composed. Gamers can get away with this by letting their dice do the oratory; writers can summarize what happened in the speech without actually explaining what was said. They’re valid workarounds. On the other hand, to really get a character across as an excellent speaker, it helps to be able to show as well as tell—to get across the voice she uses when she performs her exceptional feats of oratory. Besides, you never know when you’re going to need a speech even in the real world.

Here are some tricks for getting a speech to engage its audience.

Pay attention to perspective in your speeches; it makes more of a difference than you might think. Most people, when addressing a large group, default to “you”. It’s logical—what other than second person plural would you address a group with? And there are uses for “you” as the pronoun of choice. When you’re trying to set yourself apart from your audience, “you” is the word you want. I find it most useful for tearing down a group (“Though you are many, numbers alone will not grant you victory over me”), or for building up a group’s confidence in the work they do without you-as-leader (“From this day forth, this nation and every nation will remember you”). On the other hand, when what you’re looking for is solidarity, like when you’re trying to recruit people to a cause, you’re going to want something a little more inclusive. That’s where “we” comes in; it makes it clear that you’re going to be doing all these things you say alongside them, that you consider yourself one of them (or them to be your in-group, or both). “We” can also be used to soften criticism, or to take partial responsibility for where the group has gone wrong. Consider the difference between the following two sentences: “You broke this, it’s your job to fix it!” and “We broke this, and it is our duty to fix it.” Doesn’t it change the feel and the meaning?

And speaking of different ways to get people to use a new strategy, even correcting people can be made better by word choice. “You’re wrong” gets the point across, sure, but it’s also prone to alienating people, particularly if you’re not going to follow it up with why the audience is wrong, and it’s bad for morale. On the other hand, consider “You’ve been doing [X] well, but it alone is not enough.” Translation: You’re doing good, but you can be doing better. And if you segue into how, and deliver that in first-plural rather than second-plural, with “we” instead of “you”, then not only are you pointing them in the direction of a better approach, you’re also implying to them that they’ll do better with you than without you.

Know who your audience is when composing a speech for them, and be ready to play to them, particularly if you want to establish yourself as in-group. Local in-jokes, little details from the field, taking advantage of the rivalry between two groups to paint yourself as an ‘us’ rather than a ‘them’; it’s all fair game, and it can all be used to your advantage, sometimes all at once. When I was going to college at the University of Puget Sound, I got to observe this in action at a political rally—not only were there references to the university’s history and an emphasis on local pride and priorities with regards to keeping the Sound clean, but there was a strong focus on remembering that Tacoma was not just an extension of Seattle.

Don’t talk down to your audience if you can help it: there’s nothing quite as annoying as condescension. If you’re using infantilized vocabulary, slowly explaining concepts that everyone already understands, or otherwise being obvious about dumbing down your speech, they’re going to be rightly irritated. But going the other way is counterproductive as well; who’s going to be inspired by something he doesn’t understand? Find a middle ground, and stay there.

While they aren’t going to hold up a speech on their own, any combination of these tricks should create a better connection between speaker and audience. Have you ever seen these in action? Did they work for you?