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TransCanada chief uses rhetoric to lay the blame on rhetoric

A well structured sound-bite is guaranteed to win you headlines.

TransCanada president and chief executive, Russ Girling, knows this. Here’s what he had to say about last week’s decision not to go ahead with the Keystone XL Pipeline:

“Today, misplaced symbolism was chosen over merit and science — rhetoric won out over reason,”

Take a quick scan of the resulting coverage and you’ll notice that…

The Dirty Rhetoric Guide to Horrifying Writing

As times of the year go, Halloween is terrible. Wonderfully terrible. Ghoulishly terribly. Fantabulously terrible.

I like Halloween!

So – while I head off to prepare my pumpkins, allow me to leave you with this little offering inspired by the literary heights of horror. How do authors put shivers down our spines?

Re-blogged from Make A Powerful Point — it’s our Dirty Rhetoric Guide to Horrifying…

It’s time for Dirty Rhetoric

A hundred-thousand voices screaming into an electronic echo-chamber. Welcome to modern communications. Your idea must be heard, but how?

We’re not the first to face this test. Our communications ancestors competed in the (literally) screaming markets of the ancient world. They developed a fix for the problem. A simple and elegant and beautiful fix. Whether you are writing or persuading or…

2000 years ago our Greek and Roman presenter-ancestors left us an awesome inheritance — the formulae for magic. They left us scrolls and manuscripts full of magical word-spells. Spells that help us to bond with an audience. Spells that create indelible soundbites. Spells that let us influence an audience’s perceptions of scale and logic and argument. And those spells have always been there for…

Speaking tips from Taylor Swift

Photo credit: Sarah Barlow / Billboard.com

Taylor Swift’s new album ‘1989’ contains three ideas to stir-up your writing and your speaking.

Listen to the songs and you’ll notice that Swift doesn’t just sing those lyrics – she acts them. There are nuances and inflections that she milks with the precision of an actress. That scope for drama, and irony, and occasional comedy tells us there are…

Amplification rhetoric. Getting words to go LARGE!

by Peter Watts Paskale

Scale, as any filmmaker will tell you, is all about the optics. And good storytelling, as any thriller-writer will tell you, is all about scale.

Treating words like camera-lenses and arranging them in a specific sequence plays directly with an audience’s perception of size. Whether you want the audience to perceive something as being bigger or smaller, the ability to…

by Peter Paskale

“It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men“

One of Mae West’s celebrated phrases. Along with “Come up and see me some time“, to read these words is to hear the sinuous drawl in which they were delivered.

West was a Queen of the soundbite. She was also a Queen of chiasmus — a little rhetorical device that adds style to any presentation or piece of…

by Peter Paskale

Thanksgiving morning, and if you’re lucky enough not to be in the kitchen wrestling a turkey, then maybe you’re reclined in front of the TV and watching the floats glide down 6th Avenue.

Thanksgiving is one of the most uniquely American holidays. The day is heartwarming and kind. It’s a day when we eat and drink and watch old favorite movies and cheer in front of afternoon…

Alliteration Alert: It’s election time!

by Peter Paskale

How do you choose which candidate to vote for? I’ll bet you go into the booth, earnestly scratch your head, and muse:

“Now which of these candidates do I most fervently disagree with? Ah – yes – this guy or gal – they really upset me! I’ll vote for them!”

No? You don’t? Why in that case you must be voting for a candidate that you agree with! It sounds like you might even be…

Seven speech-techniques powering Obama’s UN Address

by Peter Paskale

Powerful speeches contain powerful content. For that content to shine though, it must be mounted into a powerful structure. Barack Obama’s speech today at the UN General Assembly contained both.

Much analysis will be given over to the content of that speech, so let’s take a moment to examine the structure. Let’s…

Obama speech underplays strikes against ISIL

  by Peter Paskale

It wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t even an address. It was a book report.

Speaking todayon the White House lawn as Marine One spooled up it’s engines behind him, President Obama tripped-up the media. What was billed as a ten minute speech on last night’s Syria actions against ISIL,  was delivered in just 3 minutes 11 seconds. Obama was already striding back to the White House door…

can I get a little hate?

Peter:

Over the years, I’ve killed my throat. Or toughened it up – it all depends on your perspective.

You see the thing is – I love spice. Whether it’s black pepper, cayenne pepper, or chilli pepper, I’ll incorporate it into recipes in some of the most surprising, and occasionally inappropriate ways. Just ask anybody that I’ve ever made hot chocolate for.

Over the years though, my taste buds…

Oxymoron – the birthplace of brilliant

Jeanine McDonnell, daughter of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, says that her mother has a “mild obsession” with another man.

Mild lives in detergent adverts. Obsessiongets draped around designer perfume. Put the two words together however and you get something that’s… well… kind of interesting. It’s refined and yet ever so slightly dirty. It’s an oxymoron, and in politics, oxymorons get…

Five architect’s jewels for your next presentation

by Peter Paskale

Dramatic business presentations don’t require drama. They’re better off without it. Drama is showy and blowy and overstated. It instantly puts the audience on their guard.

Award-winning Canadian architect Sanjit Manku recently described a project that he’d undertaken on behalf of the French jeweller and perfumer Van Cleef & Arpels. His description pulls us gently into a…

How to handle an ambush? With respect

In fairness to Representative King, he was trapped. Two determined DREAMers, Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, had him cornered – completely hemmed-in, half-way through a hamburger.

    It was a political ambush, and in deciding to stand and fight, King had lost before he’d even started. The whole idea of a political ambush is that…

The Straw Man Fallacy

by Peter Paskale

As the big bad wolf will gladly confirm, it’s way easier to blow-down a house of straw.

And so it is with arguments. An argument made of straw is easier to demolish than one that’s made of stone. Why would anybody therefore want to build themselves such a poor and flimsy straw-bale argument?

Precisely because they want to blow it down. All by themselves.

It’s such an accepted…

Janet Yellen’s Double-Bluff of Darkness

by Peter Watts Paskale

Speaking slowly and clearly is the best way to help someone to understand you, right?

Wrong. Speaking slowly and clearly, and especially speaking slowly and clearly in a monotone, is the best way to throw someone’s concentration off. And that’s the technique Federal Reserve Chairman, Janet Yellen used this week when attempting to throw Senator Elizabeth Warren off-balance…