Party conference season PowerPoint prize competition

Having given a talk on using objects as visual aids at last year's UK Speechwriters' Guild conference (a version of which was posted HERE), I ran a competition inviting readers to suggest what object each of the three main party leaders could/should use to impress the audience in their party conference speeches (entries HERE, results HERE).

This year, to the horror of some, my subject at the same conference was 'In praise of PowerPoint: is there life after death from 1,000 slides?'.

So here's this year's party conference season competition:
All you have to do is to suggest a PowerPoint slide (or PowerPoint show of no more than 3 slides) that any of the three main party leaders could use to impress the audiences during their 2011 conference speeches.

You're welcome to make suggestions for 1-3 of the the main party leaders, but the judging will be based on quality, not quantity.

Prizes
1st: signed copy of Lend Me Your Ears.
3rd: signed copy of ВЫСТУПАТЬ ЛЕГКО (Russian version of Lend Me Your Ears).

How to enter
In 'Comments' below or email (via 'View my complete profile' on the left).

Closing date:
48 hours after the completion of David Cameron's speech at the Conservative Party Conference.

For inspiration:

In praise of Brian Jenner & the UK Speechwriters' Guild

I've often said that professional speechwriting is a bit like robbing banks.

It's a job that's done in isolated secrecy. You can't boast about your successes. And you certainly can't rely on your clients to go around telling their audiences that someone else had written the speech for which they're being so warmly congratulated.

So those of us who've just got back from the 3rd annual conference of the UK Speechwriters' Guild in Bournemouth owe a tremendous debt to its founder, Brian Jenner, for bringing together 60+ of us to meet up and exchange notes with others involved in this obscure and clandestine occupation.

With delegates from at least 9 countries in Europe and North America, it's now become a truly international gathering.

An added bonus this year was a Strictly Come Dancing style UK Business Speaker of the Year Award on the eve of the conference.

And, as in previous years, Brian also deserves our thanks for his genius for pulling unlikely rabbits out of his hat - by which I mean his ability to unearth relevant and entertaining speakers - like Fred Metcalf, who's jokes have won laughs for an extraordinary range of celebrities, ranging from John Major to David Frost and Morecambe and Wise (and prompted yet more laughter from those of us who heard him speak yesterday).

If you weren't there, you can see what you missed HERE.

If you're not already a member of the UK Speechwriters' Guild, you can find out more about it HERE.

You can also keep up with what Brian Jenner's getting up to next by following him on Twitter at @beachwordsmith.

What do Liberal Democrats expect from the 'return' of Dr Death (aka David Owen)?


Mark Pack has just revealed news of the 'surprising return of David Owen to top-level Liberal Democrat thinking' (HERE).

Surprising, yes, but I don't know if 'return' is the right word for someone who left the Labour Party to form a new one (the SDP) that would be ruled by one-member-one-vote, only to ignore his own party's majority vote to merge with the Liberals in 1988.

Had he not done so, he would almost certainly have become leader of the new party, and would have spared Paddy Ashdown and the Liberal Democrats the disastrous (though temporary) consequences of continual backbiting from the Owenite rump SDP - not to mention the near-bankruptcy resulting from Lord Sainsbury's decision to divert his cash to the said rump (before bestowing it on the Labour Party).

Nor do I know if Owen's 'return' will include a speech at the Liberal Democrat conference next week. But I do know that, if it does, the audience shouldn't holding its breath for an inspiring performance.

Rhetorical Denial
Although David Owen was never a particularly brilliant orator, he was not only capable of using the occasional rhetorical technique, but also went in for what I've referred to elsewhere (see below) as 'rhetorical denial' (see below).

Dour though his delivery in the above clip (from an Ask the Alliance Rally in 1987) may be, he does at least manage to end it with a three part list.

Mark Pack reminds us of Owen's depiction of the SDP - with a rather neat alliterative contrast - as the 'tough but tender party'.

And he used another alliterative contrast at the start of the 1987 general election, telling us the 'reason not rhetoric will win this campaign.'

It didn't, of course, not least because Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock were still making powerful speeches at large rallies during that particular campaign (see previous post) - unlike the Alliance, which had opted for a new style of Q-A campaigning.

Hopelessly boring and uninspiring though it may have been, the Q-A format has, alas, become the dominant form media coverage of political communication in the UK.

On that basis, Owen may well have been ahead of his time. But it remains to be seen whether or not his 'return' will do any good for the party he so vehemently refused to join.

Related Posts

Our Masters' Voices Then & Now

This morning, I was at Exeter University for the EPOP (Elections, Public Opinion & Parties) annual conference, where I gave a paper under the above heading.

In the not too distant future, I'll be posting a written version of it with a fuller story behind the video clips than it was possible to present in a 15 minute slot.

If you were there and would like to watch the clips again, here they are.

If you weren't, you might like to watch them anyway and guess what I might have been talking about - which, if you're a regular reader of the blog, shouldn't be too much of a challenge.


Since this appeared, the fuller story has now been posted HERE.

Curtain imagery from Winston Churchill and John Major

Looking through video clips for a conference presentation, I came across one that I've often quoted as an example of how effectively a simple metaphor can be used to get a point across.

On being defeated in the 1997 UK general election, John Major had no choice but to resign as Prime Minister, but he was under no obligation to resign as leader of the Conservative Party.

But he did both and began his statement with the words:

"When the curtain falls, its time to get off the stage and that is what I propose to do."



I'd be very surprised indeed if anyone watching this responded (then or now) by asking "What curtain, what stage?" - let alone "What on earth is he talking about?"

Nor have I ever heard a similar response to the much more famous 'curtain' metaphor used by another recently defeated Conservative Party leader more than half a century earlier.

Having lost the 1945 general election, Winston Churchill, like so many of the prime ministers who followed him (e.g. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown) embarked on the US lecture circuit in pursuit of a few dollars. At Fulton, Missouri in 1946, he spoke of an "iron curtain" that had "descended across the continent" of Europe (for more on which, see also HERE & HERE) :


Far from prompting those who heard it to start saying things like "What curtain?" or "I haven't noticed any curtains made of iron", the metaphor quickly became part of the vocabulary in the language of the Cold War.

Recycled images
These examples are neat illustrations of two rather obvious, but nonetheless important and intriguing, facts about imagery:
  1. Whether you use a metaphor, simile, analogy or anecdote, it can be one of the most effective ways of getting your message across.
  2. The same image (e.g. a curtain falling) can be used to get quite different messages across to different audiences.
This is why my book Lend Me Your Ears includes a whole chapter on the subject (Chapter 7: 'Painting Pictures with Words') and why I invariably use examples like these when running courses.

A dictionary of reusable images?
Having heard (and/or been involved in preparing) hundreds of speeches and presentations on a vast range of different subjects, I know that a "curtain falling" is just one of many images that can be reused effectively by different speakers for different purposes on different occasions.

As my collection of these continues to grow as the years go by, I'm beginning to wonder whether there might be enough of a market for them to fill another book, working title: An Anthology of Adaptable Images.

Arabic speakers boo at names too!

"An imam leading the dawn prayer urged all Libyans to stand united and hailed the ousting of 'the tyrant Gaddafi', prompting jeers from the crowd at the mention of the former leader's name" - report about Libyans celebrating Eid on AlJazera's website earlier today (paragraph 4).

I was struck by this sentence because it represents the opposite of a technique for triggering applause that's described in my books as 'clap on the name'.

A prompt for boos & jeers too
I've noticed in other contexts, as when a crowd gathers on the pitch for the speeches and awards at the end of international cricket test matches, that naming one of the players (or umpires) quite often prompts booing and jeering.

So the fact that a name can prompt an identical response from an audience of Arabic speakers is something I'll be adding to my collection of evidence that there's something very general (i.e. cross-cultural) about the way in which audiences respond to different rhetorical techniques.

Related posts:

777: 7 Kindle books, 7 pluses and 7 minuses

I've been a fan of Amazon's Kindle ever since signing a contract for digital versions of two of my books - when I discovered that the author's share of the royalties is about seven times more than the miserable 7.5% we get from sales of conventional paperback books.

Now, having just finished reading a seventh book on a Kindle of my own, I can report on the gadget from a user's point of view.

1. Pluses
  1. My main reason for getting a Kindle was that I found the print in a book I was trying to read so small that it was almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. By letting you select the size and type of font suits you, the gadget solves the problem at a stroke (and I finished reading the said book much more quickly than expected).
  2. The screen really does make it easy and comfortable to read for long periods - compared with those on computers, iPads, etc.
  3. Very portable.
  4. Long battery life between recharging.
  5. Good connectivity with a computer.
  6. Fairly easy to convert PDF and Word documents for reading on Kindle.
  7. Spectacularly fast downloads of books from Amazon.
2. Minuses
  1. Given the ease of reading via bigger fonts, it's odd that the colour and size of the Kindle's QUERTY keyboard makes it quite difficult to read and use, especially in poor light.
  2. It's difficult to stand it up on a table without it slipping down - why it doesn't have a lever on the back for propping it up at an angle (like many portable radios) is quite beyond me.
  3. No good for reading in the bath.
  4. Although you can search backwards and forwards, it's far more complicated than flicking through a proper book.
  5. Page-turning and other buttons make it too easy to press the wrong one by mistake and get lost and/or end up in the wrong place.
  6. Pictures, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. are grouped together at the end of Kindle books, which requires much tedious manipulation if you want to refer to them while reading the text. As a result, non-fiction books are much more trouble to read than fiction.
  7. I hadn't realised that, when reading a proper book, you're constantly monitoring how far you've got and how long it's going to take to get to the end. Kindle doesn't have page numbers, but does tell you what percentage of the book you've read so far. But, if it's a very long book 1% can mean as many as 8 pages of densely packed pages - which can be more demoralising than I'd realised.
3. Verdict
There may be as many minuses as pluses, but Kindle's supreme virtue (1.1) makes all the cons seem little more than minor irritations.

I do, however, think that Amazon should be trying to do something about some of the minuses, and especially those that would be so cheap and easy to fix (e.g. 2.1 & 2.2).