33
0 Day1 Reading Excerpt
There are times when you are talking to people who you know are resistant to what you have to say. One often talks about speeches being meant to persuade. It's not my belief that they often change people's minds in the act of being spoken; they usually just move people from dead center to a position that they are ready to go to.
We're in Ahmadabad, India; the year is 1924. Gandhi has been publishing material for Indian youth about his idea of Satyagraha — nonviolent, passive resistance — and has been accused by the occupying British government of sedition, a capital crime.
Gandhi was trained as a lawyer. He's used to courtrooms — so you'll see that in part he is focusing on the primary target of his speech, the judge. But Gandhi is aware there is another, and for him more important, audience: the Indian people; the millions who had been following his printed words and who would now follow the speech through the newspapers.
Day2 Reading Excerpt
In the following excerpts, you can see that this is a speech with no introduction. We are moving into the heart of things with his very first words:
"Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith. But I had to make a choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered has done irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips.
I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King's person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system."
Day3 Reading Excerpt
"I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appear to me to be the highest duty of a citizen."
That's a great speech. Notice one is directed at the judge: I am here, cheerfully, to accept "the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appear to me — and obviously to his people — to be the highest duty of a citizen." The two audiences, the two tones as it were, are both there.
The tone is very reasoned: he is giving a fair assessment; he is not asking for mercy. He recognizes the role of the judge and what the judge must expect; and that reasonable tone is, in fact, part of his defense.
Day4 Reading Excerpt
He's making it easier for the judge to commute this sentence from death to some sort of penal servitude, and that is indeed what happened. It's a masterpiece of a speech, but it is, I think, one that better than most shows us a speech presented at two different audiences and very clearly satisfying both.
Ask yourself in advance, "Who is my audience?" and adapt your speech to address them particularly and directly.
Your tone, your language, and your examples should all be chosen with a specific audience in mind.
Always be courteous, respectful, sympathetic, and mindful of your audience's comfort.
