Oratory techniques 1 (by Michelle Lowe and Ben Graham, abridged)

Language has some control over our thoughts because it is so powerful. You have to look at the way language is used to manipulate. Think of the sway a great public speaker can have over his audience. There are many techniques that are used by public speakers to interest their audience and make their argu­ment convincing. Max Atkinson, who has studied these devices in depth, calls them "CLAPTRAPS", because speakers use them to get the audience participating by clapping, cheering, booing, etc.

The most effective claptraps he identified are:

1. List of three: "The past with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies..."

"These cruel, wanton, indiscriminate bombings". "Killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children..."

2. Contrastive pairs: "you do your worst, and we will do our best..."

3. Positive evaluation of us: "The people of this mighty impe­rial city ..."

"Little does he know the spirit of the British nation, or the tough fibres of the Londoners".

4. Negative evaluation of them: "The Nazi war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and trying down a dozen countries... the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery".

But there are literally hundreds of other devices, many of which have been used, written about and studied since classical times. Although they may not all draw applause, they do contrib­ute to making the speaker more believable, authoritative and per­suasive. They make a speech / piece of writing more powerful.

Here is a small selection:

1. Repetition of words for effect: "We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air".

2. Alliteration: "The dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery".

"We will mete out to the Germans the measure, the more than the measure, that they have meted to us".

3- Onomatopoeia: "... the Nazi war machine with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers..."

⁴- Metaphor: "What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world... He has lighted a fire, which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe.

5. Simile: "The Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawl­ing locusts..."

6. Highly emotive language: "German troops violated the fron­tiers ..."

"He hopes ... that he will terrorize and cow the people of this mighty imperial city".

7. Rhetorical questions: "You ask, what is our policy? I will say: it is to wage war by sea, land and air". "You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: it is victory..."

8. Use of negatives and double negatives: "From this nothing will turn us — nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang". "We ask no favours of the Enemy. We seek from them no compunction.

Here is a speech for you to analyze. Try reading it aloud. See, which of the above-mentioned rhetorical devices are used in the speech.

WINSTON CHURCHILL London, 18 June 1940