Category Archives: Communication Skills

Revising History

Posted on by

Lincoln CroppedThe president’s long lanky body swayed back and forth as the coach hit every pebble, stick and gopher hole on the road to Gettysburg. His massive hands held the quill and envelope tightly as he anxiously worked on the opening of the speech he was expected to give at the memorial ceremony in just over an hour.

“80 or so years ago…”

Nope.

“About 90 years ago, give or take…”

Uh uh.

The coach lurched and the presidential head slammed into the roof. After recovering his senses, Lincoln put quill to paper with an inspiration, words that would echo through generations and outlast empires.

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

OK.  It probably did not happen quite that way. In fact, it was nothing like that. At the summer public speaking workshop, we will study some great American speeches, including the Gettysburg Address.

Spoiler Alert! Lincoln did not write the speech hastily on the road to the memorial. That’s a legend that somehow fits our historical impressions of Lincoln as a folksy, wise, and humbly brilliant person. No doubt he was all of those things, but he also left few things to chance.

Lincoln apparently told a reporter several days before the speech that he had completed a draft but was still working on it (according to the late William Safire’s excellent doorstop of a tome, “Lend Me Your Ears”). Historians have documented revisions made between drafts.

The truth should not diminish Lincoln’s greatness. He knew he needed a plan. He knew the first draft needed revision. He knew that every word carried the burden of history.

It’s the same process of thoughtful discernment, planning and revising that we teach in our public speaking and essay workshops. Each student is a potential Lincoln.

“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
-Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Getting to Know Me

Posted on by

Business Handshake Before GlobeHello.  My name is <Brief and to the Point>. My friends call me <90 Characters>. Pleased to meet you.

Introductions are on my mind. I’ve been writing several recently. Each one had its own rules (which I’ll come to in a moment). The commonality, though, is that good introductions require us to communicate a great deal of information in just a few words.

In my day job, I write speeches for corporate executives. A certain speech was to be delivered as a conference keynote address in Taiwan. It is an international conference drawing executives from around the globe. To minimize language issues, the organizers asked that the executive supply the introduction. This particular executive is not one to dwell on past accomplishments so a lengthy reading of a resume was out of the question. I had about two short paragraphs to communicate the essence of the executive’s accomplishments, the connection to the conference theme and foreshadow the nature of the speech. Each word had to do a lot of work.

Yet, that seemed easy compared to a couple of social media situations in the last few days. I recently joined groups that encouraged introductions. The introduction would sit next to my picture on a website and communicate to potential business contacts who I am and why someone might want to know me. This is the way a lot of business starts today. The introduction’s goal is to position yourself in your field and explain why people should want to talk to you. You get about 90 characters to do that. Every letter has a lot of work to do.

Introducing yourself is a skill. For every person we meet, we get one chance to do it right. The amount of time and space we get to do it is shrinking. It is no exaggeration to suggest that those who introduce themselves well will have an advantage in life. That is why students in our Public Speaking workshop start by introducing themselves several times in slightly different situations. They start by shaking hands and introducing themselves casually and work their way up to making an introductory speech about a defining aspect of their lives.

As the ghost of Christmas present said to Scrooge, “Come and know me better, Man.”

When They don’t Know it’s Education

Posted on by

words2 copy“Your kids use words even I don’t know.”

We’ve heard that comment from numerous people over the years, starting when our kids were still in single digit ages. Versions of the statement come from aunts, uncles, neighbors and even English teachers.

It’s not magic or even education, really. It’s fun. Encourage your kids to have fun with words and they will. Only later will they suspect that it was really a clever ruse to expand their vocabularies.

It’s more than just fun, of course. The number and variety of words your kids hear growing up is correlated with academic achievement.

So start young. Read aloud to your kids and use a variety of good books. Include classics from Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein where the rhythm and inventiveness of the words matter. That will prime them for stories that you make up on the spot and let them finish.

“Then he opened the door, and do you know what he saw there?”

“A giraffe.”

“Exactly. A giraffe. A big giraffe with a funny name. Do you know what it was?”

“Englebert.”

“Uh, yes. Englebert. Englebert the giraffe. From Dusseldorf. He was on his way to the train station…”

From there, you can graduate to rhyming games around the dinner table.

“I put the broccoli on your plate.”

“Are you sure it’s not a skate?”

“No but if I move it here I think it is checkmate.”

“Enough of this. Time for dessert. I can’t wait.”

Dribble in words they do not understand and they will ask about them. Why wouldn’t they, it’s a game after all? Creating curiosity about words and then satisfying it – or the old trick of letting them look it up themselves – gets them engaged with words. It’s like giving them a new ball. They will want to metaphorically throw it again and again.

Another game we play – and those who have been students with Cicero’s Academy™ will recognize this one – is word association. You start with one word and see how many words you can come with that are like it. Usually, it starts with just synonyms, essentially replacing the word with others of similar meaning. But, you will eventually start broadening from the original word or find a bridge term that takes the stream of words in a new direction. Throw in some words of your own to expand their vocabulary further.

As your kids get older, the games can get more sophisticated. Another game we play in workshops is holding a conversation entirely via questions.

“How are you today?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Why are you so grumpy?”

“Have you ever gotten up on the wrong side of the bed?”

“Don’t you hate it when that happens?”

Try this. It is not easy to do on the fly. You have to actually think about what you’re saying and transform declarative sentences in your head into their equivalents in questions – all within the time span of a normal conversation. It teaches dexterity and agility with words, syntax and sentence structure.

In other words…make it fun and you give them more than just a vocabulary. You give them a lifetime of learning.

Developing Ideas Against the Clock

Posted on by

ClockYou probably know that pseudo-science/pseudo-philosophy question about the tree falling in the forest. You know, the one that wonders if it made a sound if no one was there to hear it? We wrestled with a version of that question in our recent “Essay Writing for High School and Beyond” workshop.

If an idea does not affect the world, does it have any impact at all?

In the workshop, students prepped for the SAT essay exam, the Advancement Placement essay exam (“Good news, students. In this one, you get to write three essays against the clock. Won’t that be fun?”) and the college admissions essay. It was a great bunch of students. They worked hard each day and a few times they left needing a nap. Over the course of two weeks, students received feedback on at least eight essays. One of those essays was scored directly using the SAT rubrics and process so they could get a sense of where they would rate on that college admission scale.

This workshop enjoyed high demand, so much so that we had to cap attendance and then we let one sneak in after an impassioned plea from a mom. We will schedule this workshop again in October, see the Fall Schedule for further details.

But, back to falling trees and the impact of ideas…

In the workshop, we spent a lot of time focused on ways to develop ideas, both across the essay as a whole and particularly within paragraphs. These essay exams are geared toward testing critical thinking, an ability to work with concepts, tracing them from the abstract level into the details of real-world experiences or phenomena and back again. Students are expected to see patterns and argue the meaning underlying those patterns, demonstrating that the patterns exist with examples taken from a text or simply from their own experiences or observations. Two issues are key: 1) explaining the idea, and 2) showing it at work in an example.

With 11 students each writing one to two essays a day, we were able to identify three core problems in idea development:

Floating upwards – Ideas remain abstractions, never touching ground in the real world with concrete examples. A thought might receive some critical treatment, but only in the abstract, one concept contrasted with another on face value.  Examples – or their shadows – might be mentioned along the way, but it is a “touch and go” approach, not a safe landing at a destination.

Floating down – Ideas are asserted without definition and the writer moves quickly from the abstract to a list of examples that are not developed. The writer presumes that the relevant point of each example is obvious and the reader is left to sort them out minus any details. Having exhausted his or her examples in the list, the writer has nowhere to go for the rest of the essay.

Floating sideways – Ideas come fast and furious in a stream of consciousness that does not stop to develop any one idea. The writer is no doubt intelligent and comfortable in the world of ideas. But, the reader is left to swim with the current in hopes of finding a concrete handhold somewhere downstream.

We addressed these deficits in idea development in a variety of ways. We gave them a model to follow as a template. Students were given back their essays with a paragraph identified for re-writing with that model. We also discussed strategies for developing examples and using them strategically.

We not only critiqued their writing, we focused on strategies for getting the building blocks of an essay onto the paper and then developing ideas. We find that students do not put enough effort into the pre-write phase of writing, that time when you are just brainstorming and looking for patterns in thoughts and examples. Mastering the pre-write phase is an integral part of success in timed writings, perhaps ironically so since you do not have much time to organize your thoughts. The faster you can get your ideas out of your head and organize them, the sooner you can assemble them into an essay. To just sit down and start writing against the clock is a recipe for a wandering diatribe that never develops an idea to its fullest. However, you have to embrace the pre-write as part of the writing discipline before you can do it quickly.

This hard-working group of students left bleary-eyed some days.  However, they also got comfortable enough to help each other build ideas or flesh out personal experiences for a college admissions essay.

We hope to see them all again.