I have spent the past few weeks learning how to write. Yes,
almost 40 years after leaving school I have been making a proper study of the
English language, this time without looking out the window or passing notes at
the back of the class. The experience has made me realise that the tools with
which to add engagement and impact to your communication are more plentiful
than I thought. Like any good tool, though, they only work to best effect with
some technical knowledge and plenty of practice!
I started by participating in an excellent PRCA webinar on
grammar. Reassuringly, I found I was up
to speed in this area, but it has already proved invaluable to some of the PR
Apprentices for whom I act as Assessor. Next stop was the book The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth and this has opened my eyes to the detail and depth of principles that
I had simply absorbed by osmosis over the years.
Much to my personal delight, Forsyth starts his book by
standing up for Alliteration. Far from sneering at it, as some do, he suggests
we should embrace it, just as both Shakespeare and Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby, Pickwick Papers, A
Christmas Carol) did. Alliteration, he says, makes your words memorable,
with the result that they are believed. Hence ‘it takes two to tango’, even
though it takes the same number to waltz and we go ‘the whole hog’ rather than
the full pig.
As a presentation skills coach who is always urging people
to deploy the ‘Power of Three’, I was pleased to read about Tricolon – ‘I came,
I saw, I conquered’. Having always said that it’s about rhythm - two is not
enough and four (Tetracolon) is too much information, I was reminded that you
need a ‘Rising’ Tricolon to make the Power of Three truly powerful. And by the
way, did you know that Obama’s short victory speech contained no less than 21
Tricolons?
To make a proper three-some here, I can also report that the
discovery of ‘Litotes’ has caused me to re-think slightly my exhortations to
avoid negatives – because they need to be unscrambled before they can be
understood. While politicians have used Litotes to good effect, the most
memorable example is probably Tom Jones’s ‘It’s not unusual’. However the extreme
use of Litotes by the Japanese Emperor in 1945 has served to underpin my
anti-negatives stance. Having been hit by two atomic bombs the Emperor announced:
“The war situation has developed, not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”.
Other gems from The
Elements of Eloquence include: Diacope: ‘Bond. James Bond’; Syllepsis – one
word used in two incongruous ways: think Jagger and “she blew my nose and then
she blew my mind”; and Anaphora - using the same word at beginning and the end,
as Paul McCartney did in ‘Yesterday’.
One of the charms of the book is the many musical references
that Forsyth uses alongside extracts of great literature. As he says: “I do not
believe that The Beatles had any idea what Andiplosis was, any more than I
believe that the Rolling Stones knew about Syllepsis. They knew what worked,
and it did”.
So it’s not about being clever and knowing all the technical
terms, but there is much to be gained from a bit of pro-active study if you
want to give your language a lift. As for how this relates to business
presentation skills, I always say that your opening and closing are the two
most important parts of any presentation. In order to make them important to
your audience as well as yourself they need to be scripted.
Finally, there’s another musical link that led me to The Elements of Eloquence – it came as
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