Style In Political Speeches: "Tricolon"
"Tricolon" is the placement of three items in a list. Tricolon has been popular in Western culture from the time of the Greeks. Using tricolon is so common with us that we use it automatically, and since it satisfies both the speakers and of the listeners, it is ubiquitous in public speaking. Here are examples of tricolon in speeches delivered at the national conventions of the Republicans and Democrats.
Barack Obama: ... more Americans are out of work... More of you have lost your homes... More of you have cars you can't afford to drive...
Barack Obama: ...on health care and education and the economy...
Barack Obama: [that old, discredited Republican philosophy:] Out of work? Tough luck. You're on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps -- even if you don't have boots. You are on your own.
John McCain: that strategy succeeded, and it rescued us from a defeat that would have demoralized our military, risked a wider war, and threatened the security of all Americans.
John McCain: I know how the military works, .../ I know how to work with leaders who share our dreams.../ I know how to secure the peace.
John McCain: We need to change the way government does almost everything: from the way we protect our security to the way we compete in the world economy; from the way we respond to disasters to the way we fuel our transportation network; from the way we train our workers to the way we educate our children. There seems a required formula for ending a political speech. McCain: "Thank you, and God bless you, and God bless America." Obama: "Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America." Hillary Clinton: "Thank you. God bless you, and Godspeed."
Don't avoid tricolon as overused. It satisfies a strong expectation in your listeners. Use it in your own speeches.
Pairing Opposites In a Speech
Antithesis is the placement of contrasting ideas close together,
particularly in the same positions of parallel phrases or clauses.
Antithesis is both easy to use and forceful. There are a number of
examples in the speeches presented in the Democratic and Republican
national conventions.
John McCain: I will cut government spending. He will increase it.
[Double antithesis: "I" vs. "He" and "cut government spending" vs.
"increase it." ]
John McCain: My tax cuts will create jobs; his tax increases will
eliminate them. [Double antithesis: "My" vs. "his" and "create jobs" vs.
"eliminate them." ]
John McCain: Now, my opponent promises to bring back old jobs by wishing
away the global economy. We're going to help workers who've lost a job
that won't come back find a new one that won't go away. [Two examples:
"my opponent promises..." vs. "We're going to..." and "a job that won't
come back" vs. "a new one that won't go away."]
Barack Obama: Individual responsibility and mutual responsibility...
Hillary Clinton:...change in this country must start from the ground up,
not the top down.
Hillary Clinton:[We don't need] more of a government where the
privileged come first and everyone else comes last.
Antithesis is popular, powerful, and easy. Try it yourself.
Style in Political Speeches: "Anaphora"
Dr. King's "I have a dream..." or Winston Churchill's "We shall fight them..." are both examples of the use of "anaphora." Anaphora occurs when you begin each of a sequence of paragraphs, sentences, clauses, or phrases with the same word or words. Anaphora is to speaking what bullet points are to writing.
The speeches at the national conventions give many examples of the use of anaphora.
Barack Obama: America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend.
Hillary Clinton: No way. No how. No McCain.
Hillary Clinton: I will always remember the single mom .../ I will always remember the young man .../ I will always remember the young boy .../ I will always be grateful to everyone ...
Hillary Clinton did violate the rule to replace bullet points by anaphora in her speech: "But we don't need four more years of the last eight years./ More economic stagnation.../ More high gas prices.../ More jobs getting shipped overseas..." and on for several more. I'll bet in her script these had bullet points. In the CNN transcript, they were translated into paragraphs of sentence fragments.
John McCain: ... I understand who I work for. I don't work for a party. I don't work for a special interest. I don't work for myself. I work for you.
John McCain: I know how the military works,.../ I know how to work with leaders.../ I know how to secure the peace.
John McCain: I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency, .../ I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea,...
Try adding anaphora to your own speeches. It is easy and powerful.
Labels: anaphora, national conventions, political speeches, rhetoric, speech, style
TRICKS FOR USING TRIPLES
It's important to speakers to make their words memorable. Readers can always go back and reread a passage if they don't remember what it said, but listeners cannot go back and re-listen. Listeners will easily forget what was said before while listening to what is being said now. To have an audience remember your point, it is important for your words to be arranged in a memorable fashion.
Often you will need to give a list of things. The easiest way to make a list of items memorable is also one of the most effective. Use three items in a list unless there is some good reason to do otherwise, preferably three different aspects of what you're talking about. This technique has been known since classical times under the name tricolon.
But simply putting three things in a list does not do everything you need. It works best if the three items are linked in some way. For example, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." --Churchill
In the spirit of tricolon, here are three tricks for making the three items in a list more powerful:
Use alliteration, the repetition of initial consonant sounds, particularly in stressed syllables. You can find candidates for this just by looking in a thesaurus. Suppose we want to use a triple to say, "It was a time of joy." Here's what I found in under two minutes in a thesaurus:
"It was a time of gaiety, gladness, and glee,"
"a time of blessedness, beatitude, and bliss,"
"a time of ecstasy, exuberance, and exaltation."
Use anticlimax of length, ending the list with a shorter phrase, to give the list a punch, as in "gaiety, gladness, and glee" and "blessedness, beatitude, and bliss." We expect climax, increasing importance or length of the items. Anticlimax gains attention by violating that expectation.
Use anticlimax of importance for humor: make the first two items significant or serious and the final item trivial and light.
"Due to the blizzard
50,000 households lost their electricity;
cities and town across three states ran short of food, fuel, and medicine;
and I didn't get my newspaper for two whole days."
Using three items in the list goes a great deal of the way, but making those items fit together is important to get the most use out of tricolon.
I've been selling mostly Unitarian Universalist T-shirts at CafePress. They're in
theUU section of my witty self-expression shop there. The overall
witty self-expression shop is up one level from there.
A popular design is the flaming chalice with, though you can't see it clearly here, a map of the earth wrapped around the chalice. Also, it has serious flames, not just a piddling candle.
The flaming chalice, by the way, is a kind of a folk symbol. It started, I believe, with the Service Committee and spread through the congregations.
There are more standard representations of the chalice, so broad and shallow that no one could drink out of it. Many UUs with their individuality like the less common designs.
My, my, my. I haven't been all that enthusiastic about posting now have I?
I have been recently putting T-shirt designs up on the web.
Most of the sales have been to Unitarian Universalists . I have a portal page for them at
http://www.toolsofwit.com/wittyselfexpression/UU/index.htmlAt CafePress.com, where most of my sales are occurring, the URL is
http://www.cafepress.com/wittyexpressionAt Printfection.com, the URL is
http://www.printfection.com/wittyselfexpressionMy main page leading to them is
http://www.toolsofwit.com/wittyselfexpression/
Irony
An Eastern Block comedian, returning from a trip to the West, was asked, “I hear that capitalism is dying.”
“Yes,” he said. “It is dying very beautifully.”
There is a theory that one of the driving forces in our species' developing intelligence was the need to detect deception. How could you ever test a theory like that? How would you go about trying to disprove it? Evolve a new intelligent species? But this does help explain the pleasures of irony, saying the opposite of what you mean.
Since our existence depends on getting what we need from other people, we use words for that purpose. Truth is only one of the techniques available to us. Speaking does not consist of packing up ideas in sentence boxes and listening is not unpacking them. Words cause events in minds. A beneficial event is more to be desired than a cool conveyance of fact.
The other side is that we need to protect ourselves from other people's attempts to verbally manipulate us, and so we are practiced in seeing beneath the surface. We delight in irony, both creating and understanding it.
Consider the following:
"It is now late January, and some people are deciding they can't live up to their New Years resolutions. Rubbish. Just consider those teenagers who are vowing sexual abstinence. They are so successful that they don't need to learn anything about protection. They already have the only perfect protection. If they can keep their resolutions perfectly, with their hormones flowing, then surely any adult can keep a New Years resolution."
Does anyone really think I'm talking about New Years resolutions?
Beyond giving the listener the opportunity to solve a pleasant puzzle, irony makes it possible to say things that you can’t say straight. It’s hard to get people to listen when you say you hate something. That’s not playful. People don’t want to get sucked in. Instead, say you love it and elaborate ironically. That is playful. People can enjoy that.
Irony comes with risks. There are some irony-impaired individuals who don't get it. They will get upset with you even though you are supporting their ideas because you seem to be speaking against them. They don’t like the explanation: they are dull.
Similar are those who are “earnest,” intense and serious. They are the bane of all humorists. Perhaps they get a sense of their own significance from their association with "important" issues. Lightness is therefore a personal attack on their importance.
Although you can't do anything about the dull or the earnest, there are ways to communicate ironically with others. In a speech, you can use tone of voice to indicate you're being ironical. The big risk comes if the speech is ever transcribed. Tone of voice does not survive putting on paper unless you can insert brackets "[voice dripping with irony:]".
For writing, the best option is to make the assertions so exaggerated that the reader finally thinks, "You can't possibly mean this seriously."
The “tropes” are the rhetorical devices that play with the meanings of words. Irony is considered one of the master tropes.
WHY DO PEOPLE GROAN AT PUNS?
People laugh at jokes and groan at puns. Why the difference?
A possible reason can be found in Marvin Helitzer's book “Comedy Writing Secrets. He proposes a joke needs all of the elements indicated by the THREES acronym:
TARGET - what the joke is about.
HOSTILITY.
REALISM - people have to accept the basic premise of the joke.
EXAGGERATION - on the other hand, strict realism isn't funny.
EMOTION - the joke must engage the listener's feelings.
SURPRISE - the sudden twist of perspective at the end.
(Some people object to the "target" and "hostility" parts. They say, "I think jokes should be nice." People who think jokes should be nice don’t get laughs.)
What about puns? They miss out on several aspects of jokes. Typically, they don't have a target, or even a topic. They are only about the word play. They lack hostility and they do not engage the listeners’ emotions. With all those things against it, it’s not surprising a pun doesn’t get laughter.
The same kind of word play you use for a pun can inspire delight if it is a clever turn of phrase summarizing some point. The classic example is a radio ad campaign for a savings and loan company where each commercial ended, "Call our loan arranger, and pronto."
