The Lost Art of Great Speechmaking

Writing in today's London Guardian, Simon Schama laments the loss of great political speechmaking in the digital age. His focus is mostly on British oratory, but applies the critique also to the US:

Tony Blair's epideictic performance at the Labour Party conference last year won admiration even from his foes, but by and large the digital age is cool to rhetoric and, as the enthronement of the blogger suggests, prizes incoherent impulse over the Ciceronian arts of the exordium and the peroration.

State of the Nation addresses to the US Congress - that theatre of sob-sisters and ra-ra patriotism - most usually confuse passion with sentimentality, and since they are worked up by industrial teams of speechwriters, lack one of the elements thought indispensable to great oratory: integrity of personal conviction, the sound of what Cicero, following the Greeks, called ethos.

The robotically choreographed antics in which Democrats and Republicans alternate standing o's every five minutes is the opposite of the free-spirited audiences Cicero had in mind submitting themselves to the persuader's art.

True public eloquence presupposes a citizen-audience gathered into a republic of listening. But our oral age is i-Podded for our customised egos, an audience of one. Headphone listening seals us off, cuts connections.

The good news is that the great art of speechmaking is still taught. Case in point: this semester I am teaching a course called "Foundations of Speech Communication." In the course, students learn about the theories of rhetoric espoused by Aristotle, Cicero, and others. The course assignments include composing manuscript speeches that make use of the traditional "arts of rhetoric" including the development of appeals based on personal character (ethos), emotion (pathos), reasoning (logos), urgency (kairos), and more. Much time in the course is spent on using creative language (schemes and tropes).

Foundations of Speech Communication is a junior level course required for all Communication majors. Who knows, the next Churchill might be enrolled right now.