Let's Face It

Paul Simon famously wrote and sang there are “Fifty Ways to Leave your Lover.”

Slip out the back, Jack. Hop on the bus, Gus. Drop off the key, Lee.

But, about the leaving – how do you communicate it? In this modern era, there are at least fifty ways to tell your lover you’re leaving.

Post it on Instagram, Sam. Send an email, Dale.  Just write a Tweet, Pete.

And, as difficult as it is to break up, I expect these methods – and other impersonal ways like them (think Facebook relationship status update) –  are used to signal an end.

Today, there are so many new ways to communicate, including the ones mentioned above and likely many more my contemporaries and I haven’t even heard of. We boomers come from a simpler time and fewer methods, e.g., telephones, letters, and cards. (Note:  I am still the queen of postcards.)

Oh, and face-to-face conversations. Remember those?

Communication is much on my mind as I do volunteer work for the upcoming election and as I prepare to teach a spring semester class on speechwriting at Appalachian State University.

As for the election, we have a high energy Forward NC campaign coordinator in our county. He’s working hard for the reelection of Sen. Kay Hagan. This campaign worker is so persuasive it’s hard to tell him “No.” But it’s a firm “No” I give him and anyone else when asked to make phone calls for candidates. I dislike talking on the phone with strangers, but I will canvass up and down hills and traverse confusing steps and sidewalks to talk face-to-face with voters.

Unlike on the telephone, with door-knocking you can read the person’s body language and use your own body language and enthusiasm and conversational gambits, such as “I love your garden!” to start a conversation, engage the voter, and, yes, sometimes persuade.

Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) research confirms my anecdotal evidence. According to the Yale UniversityInstitution for Social and Policy Studies, “door-to-door canvassing was the most consistently effective and efficient method of voter mobilization…the success of canvassing could be attributed to the personal, face-to-face delivery of the GOTV messages.”

Personal, face-to-face delivery brings me to speeches and their delivery. 

With all the new media and YouTube videos and more, are speeches going the way of Ma Bell and landline telephones?  

No. 

Oratory is alive and well. There’s still something to be said about “being there” and hearing a person, especially a good speaker at a big forum on an important occasion (fellow Tar Heels, think Rev. Dr. William Barber II and the crowds who gather at Moral Monday gatherings).  

Rev. Dr. William Barber II, Moral Monday in the Mountains, Aug. 2014

Standing alone in front of a room, on a dais, or on some other platform and speaking dates back thousands of years. The eloquent ones endure.  How many years ago did Martin Luther King Jr. tell hundreds of thousands on the Washington Mall that he had a dream?

Well-crafted and well-delivered speeches are still a powerful way to communicate and persuade. I’m reading Lend Me Your Ears, Great Speeches in History, compiled by word maven and former presidential speechwriter William Safire. The collection includes a speech Safire gave at Syracuse University in 1978 decrying the telephone as the subverter of good English. He told the graduates clear thought and logical argumentation requires time, preparation, and not ad-libbing by quickly responding to a ringing telephone.

Nineteen-seventy-eight:  Jimmy Carter was president and the phone company was a monopoly.  Something on your wrist, it told time.

What would Mr. Safire say today?

We cannot know since the Pulitzer Prize winning pundit and observer died in 2009.  

But, here’s what he said in his preface to the 2004 edition of his compendium. “I used to be a writer. My son, a Web site analyst, calls me a ‘content provider.’”

Today, you can be both a writer and a content provider.  Even with all the ways to communicate – content still comes first.

For speechwriters and speakers, Safire’s collection of oratory -- from exhortations to eulogies -- includes encouraging words:

“Human beings will continue to seek leadership or instruction through the speaking voice of another person who presents a position in an organized and persuasive fashion.”

An organized and persuasive fashion. That’s the point of artful speechwriting, which, coupled with great delivery, can move mountains and minds.

Let’s face it: What we need for the spoken word to remain alive and well is a new generation of stewards to care about logic and clarity. That’s one reason I am looking forward to working with young writers next year in COM 4101: Speechwriting.