Another inspirational conference from the UK Speechwriters' Guild, in association with the European Speechwriter Network. All hail to Brian Jenner for continuing the good work. Today's proceedings, ably chaired by Phil Collins, aimed to explore the international dimension of speechwriting. But another theme that emerged during the day was the relationship between words and physical expression. Edmée Tuyl crystallised the theme in her unusual and provocative presentation, Dancing on Words. Edmée trained as a ballet dancer before becoming a speechwriter; she asked us to consider how we might express words and phrases by physical movements - much to the embarrasssment... Continue reading

These are some notes based on my session at the International Speechwriting Conference, held in London on 16 May 2013. Download Alan_Barker_Three_modes_of_appeal Thanks as ever to the redoubtable Brian Jenner of ESN and the UK Speechwriters' Guild for making it all happen. I'm also running The Essentials of Speechwriting for ESN on 6 June. You can book here. Meanwhile, here are some highlights of the session. Any speech is made up of three key elements: speaker, speech and audience. Aristotle suggested that speakers persuade audiences using three modes of appeal, based on those three elements. Ethos persuades by the appeal... Continue reading

A colleague has just asked me about readability statistics. People don't always find them on Word; and when they do find them, they don't always know what they mean. So here's a quick guide. First, find your statistics. In Word 2007: When you have opened a Word file, with lots of text in it, go to 'Review'. Click on 'ABC Spelling and Grammar'. In the dialogue box, click the 'Options' button (bottom left). In the next box, tick the box marked 'Show readabiity statistics'. Click 'OK'. Now run the grammar check. At the end of the process, a set of... Continue reading

This is quite a long post. But I've broken it into six manageable chunks, as you'll see. Scroll your way through: you'll soon see how it's organized, and you'll find what you're looking for. The best presentations live in the minds of their audience. Many of us, however, have to present on dry, abstract topics. We know we have to bring such subjects to life; but how to do it? Slides? Maybe. But computer-generated slides have been sold as aids to make the presenter's life easier. And that's not the objective here. The objective is to make the audience's life... Continue reading

Helen Sword: Stylish Academic Writing Harvard University Press, 2012 £16.95 ISBN: 978-0674064485 This is a guide for the willing. If you seriously want to make your thesis, dissertation, paper or journal article more readable, you'll find plenty of inspiration here. “Elegant ideas,” says Helen Sword in the preface, “deserve elegant expression.” She subscribes firmly to the style-and-substance view of language, established by Aristotle with his distinction between logos (a text’s content) and lexis (its style), and Quintilian with his separation of res from verba. Erasmus would feel at home with this book. Style, according to this approach, clothes ideas. Ms... Continue reading

On 28 February, I ran 'Inspirational Speaking for Leaders', a session at the Management Fair run by the Directory of Social Change. You can download the notes here. Download DCS_Inspirational_Speaking_for_Leaders Continue reading

A client asked me yesterday about 'top-down thinking'. They are currently booking courses on the subject from an (unnamed) consultancy. A little light surfing found this excellent summary of the approach. It's essentially Barbara Minto's Pyramid Principle, and none the worse for that. I use elements from this approach in a lot of my own work. I like its rigour and the robust rules that underpin it. Of course, effective writing requires more than just top-down thinking. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I? Continue reading

When Star Trek's Mr. Spock wants to transfer information to – or gain information from – another Vulcan, he performs a mindmeld. (He can mindmeld with other species, including humans, but it’s not always so successful.) By touching hands or skulls, Spock can download or upload information faultlessly between brains – error-free, and unclouded by emotion. It's a fantasy of perfect communication. Who hasn’t dreamed of being able to pump information effortlessly and completely from their head into another’s? But mindmelding, even in the fantasy civilisation of the Vulcans, comes with a heavy price. It can cause mental instability and... Continue reading

How to Solve Almost Any Problem is beginning to garner reviews; and so far, they've been good. Here, for starters, is the review in the October issue of Elite Business, an online magazine. (Go to page 14.) (Thanks to Scott English for allowing me to reproduce this review here.) And here's the review in the September issue of Start Your Business. I'll add further reviews to this page as they arrive. The book now also has five Amazon reviews: you can access them here. Continue reading

In a previous post, I offered ten top tips for writing emails. Here are ten more, putting email in context: how to think about email as one communication channel among many. 1. Sharing information is not communicating. 2. Busyness is not an excuse. 3. Use all communication channels efficiently. 4. Tell everyone at the same time. 5. Don’t use email to give bad news. 6. Think about your reader’s communication style. 7. Understand before being understood. 8. Complex words make complex communication. 9. Be yourself. 10. Search for feedback and give feedback. My thanks to Sebasien Wiertz for writing the... Continue reading

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking, Fast and Slow Penguin Books, 2012 £8.99 ISBN: 978 0 141 03357 0 Daniel Kahneman is a behavioural economist. He’s spent decades studying the effects of social, cognitive and emotional factors on the decisions we make – economic and otherwise. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he shares some of the insights of his work in decision science: to stimulate, as he says, “watercooler conversations” so that we can better understand the systemic errors of judgement and choice that humans are prone to. What has all this to do with rhetoric? Aristotle tells us that rhetoric concerns “things... Continue reading

Planning is the process of preparing, making and managing change. We’re here, now; and we want to be somewhere else, at some point in the future. So we can ask four questions. Where are we? Where do we want to be? How could we get there? What limits our options? We use plans to create new things: a cake, a new product, a work of art. So the first question might be: what do I want to create? The more clearly we can answer that question, the clearer the plan. So what makes for a clear goal? If we’re solving... Continue reading

Thanks to Joe Dager who tweeted this. It's by Michael Evanchan, who hangs out in Chicago, and has a neat website and blog. Continue reading

Thanks to Nick at the London Assembly and Veronika at the Victoria and Albert Museum for inspiring me to write this post. And thanks to the redoubtable Richard Nordquist for some of this material. I’ve linked to one of Richard’s pages below. "In the first place,” wrote Mark Twain, “God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made proof-readers." If editing is like servicing a car, proofreading is like cleaning it. When we’re editing, we’re fine-tuning the text; when we’re proofreading, we’re removing all the errors to make it look good. And, just as when we’re cleaning the windows,... Continue reading

Watching the Olympic cycling from Box Hill this afternoon, I noticed the word and worked out that it meant ‘the main pack of cyclists in a race’. And fairly obviously French. (How many other words in professional cycling are French, I wonder?) The word’s intriguing. Its original meaning in Middle French, according to the OED, is ‘a little ball, especially of thread’. French then imaginatively applied that image to a small group of soldiers in the 17th century – and gave us the word ‘platoon’. (That –on suffix in French usually suggests something small.) Walter Scott uses ‘peloton’ in the... Continue reading

Stephen Miller: Conversation: a history of a declining art Yale University Press, 2006 £20.00 ISBN: 978 0 300 12365 4 Between 1724 and 1726, Daniel Defoe compiled a guide to the newly united kingdom of England and Scotland. In A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, he rates the towns and cities he visits, in part, on the quality of their conversation. His highest rating goes to Greenwich, which, he says, possesses “the best air, best prospect, and the best conversation in England.” These things mattered in the eighteenth century. Stephen Miller wants conversation to matter again. He... Continue reading

I’ve been wondering whether I should post this. Be warned: what follows is a rather dense (and long) analysis of a sermon. Yes, really. I watched with interest Dr Rowan Williams speak at the Jubilee service on Monday, 4 June. (I was really watching for the magnificent music, and caught the sermon by the way...) I have enormous respect for Dr Williams; and the theme of his sermon warmed my heart. But I couldn’t help feeling that there was a point when the congregation almost visibly switched off. And I could feel it happening myself. What was going wrong? Could... Continue reading

Martin Shovel has generously allowed me to use a couple of his cartoons in one of my books, so it's only fair to offer him something in return. I've already put his website on my blogroll; here's a bit more free publicity. I love this animation. I've been banging on about the Mehrabian myth for too long; and Mr Mehrabian must be sick to his teeth of having his work misrepresented. Yet those numbers (55, 38, 7) are still appearing far too frequently. So there's obviously still work to be done. Thanks, Martin. Keep up the good work. Continue reading

Francine Prose: Reading Like A Writer Union Books, 2012 £10.99 ISBN: 978 1 908526 07 6 At the back of Francine Prose's book is a list of 'BOOKS TO BE READ IMMEDIATELY'. Like Gatsby's 'general resolves', the list gives the impression of an innocent ambition towards social and cultural upward mobility - as if this is a book offering instant cultural enlightenment. The impression couldn't be further from the truth. This book is a plea to slow down. “Because,” she writes, “one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that... Continue reading

Thanks to Sarah McCartney for drawing my attention, over a very pleasant, hot, peppermint tea, to the hierarchy of adjectives. Why wouldn’t we say a hot, peppermint, pleasant tea? According to the hierarchy of adjectives (let’s give it a bit of gravitas and call it the Heirarchy of Adjectives, why not?), there’s a rule to be followed. Take a look at this website, and you’ll find this: When using more than one adjective in a sentence you should use the following word order. Opinion Size Age Colour Nationality Material ugly short new red American woollen cheap small used yellow Korean... Continue reading

Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass Arrow Books, 2011 £7.99 ISBN: 978 0 09 950557 0 Does language affect the way we think? I find it self-evident that coherent thought is impossible without language (although many, including my wife who’s a poet and artist, don’t agree); so the reverse proposition – that our mother tongue must affect the structure of our thinking – makes sense. For linguists, however, it’s a contentious issue. Guy Deutscher seeks to clarify the matter with modest claims based on careful research. The problem is that linguists’ past claims in this area have been all too... Continue reading

Microstyle, by Christopher Johnson Norton and Co, 2011 £14.99 ISBN-13: 978-0393077407 Microstyle is the style of the micromessage: the headline, the slogan, the tweet. Christopher Johnson – who lives a double life as an academic linguist and brand consultant – sees microstyle everywhere. Look at film titles, headlines and advertising, and you’ll find it. But it emerges, also, in other contexts: on social sites and blogs, in texting and email. And microstyle is generating its own literary genres: Johnson cites the six-word story – much promoted by Smith magazine; he points to Ignite, home of the five-minute talk (“enlighten us,... Continue reading

'Words that Work' was a conference in Bournemouth on 18 May, organised by Brian Jenner of the UK Speechwriters' Guild, and Richard Spencer of A Thousand Monkeys - both of whom did a great job. I ran a session called 'Copywriting for non-copywriters'. Here's a slide version: Download UKSWG_Copywriting_slides_slideshare_v1 Actually, one of the interesting insights of a very insightful day was that the word 'copywriting' seems to be becoming rather old-fashioned. We're all writers now, as Sarah McCartney noticed. (She's decided to call herself a scribe - good idea.) Lots more interesting ideas at the conference; I'll try to cover... Continue reading

The Art of Speeches and Presentations: The Secrets of Making People Remember What You Say By Philip Collins Published by John Wiley and Sons (206 pages) ISBN 9780470711842, £14.99 Philip Collins is on a mission. Tony Blair’s former speechwriter has written The Art of Speeches and Presentations “on the assumption,” he says, “that if people were more confident of the material they had in front of them, then they might be less fearful of delivering it.” Many speakers worry about how they will perform on the podium, “but they do not worry enough about writing the speech in the first... Continue reading

A mildly amusing piece caught my eye in the Grauniad the other day, about how meetings impair your IQ, if only temporarily. Tim Dowling summarized the topline finding thus: "Research from the Virginia Tech Crilion Research Institute showed that subjects performed less well on IQ tests directly after spending time in small social groups than they did when they were alone, and even worse when their performance was publicly ranked among their peers." Given my interest in how groups think together, I dug down a bit. Among the 17 comments were some interesting points, including - thank you, Leslie Butler... Continue reading