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000:05 Day1 Reading Excerpt
Over the first three lectures of this part of our course, this middle part on crafting your speech, we've been considering big questions of structure and overall form. What I want to talk about today is something that we agreed wasn't very appropriate to those logical arguments that were the focus of our last lecture: painting pictures in words.
I think the best person to introduce us to the concept of painting pictures in words is Tecumseh. He was a great Indian leader of the Shawnee tribe, a war leader during their wars against the United States in the early 19th century. Tecumseh, more than any other speaker I know — and he was very much part of a longstanding oral tradition — shows us how powerful images, pictorial language, concrete examples, and even imagined dialogues can be.
In 1811, he was trying to rally the Indian tribes, and he's talking to them — the Osages, and later the Choctaws and the Chickasaws — about the importance of Indian unity. Observe the vividness and concreteness in his speech:
"Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pocanet, and other power tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun. ... Sleep no longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in delusive hopes. ... Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?"
01:57 Day2 Reading Excerpt
With this kind of very pictorial language, Tecumseh is holding the interest of his listeners in two very specific ways: One is when he gives you a very concrete example that is a real-world example of something that he sees is going to happen. He doesn't just tell you, "We shall be defeated by our enemies and lose our land, and will we not then have this problem of our tribal lands and all of our revered tombs of our ancestors being desecrated?" He wants you to feel it: "Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?" This is powerful. A simple prediction that there would be trouble ahead or there would be desecration of land doesn't carry this kind of power; and this is what ultimately rallied the tribes behind him to join in a unified effort to save Indian land east of the Mississippi River.
02:56 Day3 Reading Excerpt
But what I really am impressed with in Tecumseh is his genius for picking metaphors. A metaphor is a figural piece of language, a figure of speech, where you use one image to represent another. He talks about how these peoples walk the same path, slake their thirst at the same spring, sit around the same council fire — they are actually sitting around that same council fire at the moment. He calls on a lifetime of experience; the walking the same path, the slaking the thirst at the same spring are metaphors for being all one people. Tecumseh is putting them in terms you can picture, images that you can easily remember and hold in your heart that seem to call on a commonality of experience and really enhance, really reinforce his meaning.
That's a metaphor; but there's also the simile where he's saying one thing is like another. In that beautiful roll call of the dead tribes — where are they? where are the Pocanet; where are the Mohican? — he ends with an extraordinary simile worthy to come out of the Iliad or the Odyssey, which are a pair of books full of similes: it's the moment where he says, "They have vanished … as snow before the summer sun." To make it a metaphor, he would have said, "They were the snow before the summer sun"; the simile is "as snow" or "like the snow." In either case, we are getting the richness, the power of that image to give new life, and a much longer life, to the thought that's embedded in Tecumseh's words. To me, he ranks with Lincoln among the greatest American orators of the 19th century.
04:58 Day4 Reading Excerpt
Take-Away Points:
1. Focus the attention of your listeners with words that create images in the mind.
2. Use poetic language to make your words easy to recollect and more evocative of memories, of feelings, of shared experience with your audience.
3. In logical arguments or technical explanations, use metaphors to help your listeners "see" a problem or a situation more clearly than they would with an abstract, non-metaphorical explanation.
4. Don't mix your metaphors, and make sure your metaphors are appropriate for the particular occasion and audience.
5. Make abstract observations and principles vivid to your listeners by adding concrete, easy-to-picture examples.
6. Energize your presentation by imagining dialogue and dramatic confrontations.
7. Apply images and vivid language when you are speaking from the heart.
