Archive for October, 2005

Sound.

It’s the SOUND of the words, as well as the sound of the voice that makes more impact than you might think. It’s one of the things that separates the great speakers from the rest of the pack. Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. realized the power that the sound of their words carried. You aren’t’ limited to listening to their speeches to feel that power – you get a good dose of it by just reading their remarks.

Great speakers use poetic and literary devices to create powerful aural effects with their words. They are really very simple to incorporate – try them yourself:

• Repetition. Echo phrases or sentences throughout an address. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” is a perfect example of this device.
• Assonance. Repeat stressed vowel sounds, such as in “Four score and seven years ago…”
• Parallelism. Pattern words to create rhythm. The “Rule of Three” fits this category: “Friends, Romans, Countrymen…”
• Onomatopoeia. Use words that sounds like what they denote. “Bang” sounds like a bang. “Splash” sounds like a splash.
• Alliteration. Repeat of consonant sounds – “Peter Piper picked a peck…” Of course, not every word in a series needs to begin with the same consonant, but it must be “visible” enough to carry an emotional context along with it. A good example is a speech Churchill gave during World War II: “The battle of Britain is about to begin…Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear…”

If you’ve been to a Decker course, you know that communicating effectively means making contact. Our SHARP principles allow you to hit a chord with your audience – driving your point of view home, and making your communication experience memorable.

SHARP: Stories, Humor, Analogies, References, Pictures

Zig Ziglar’s success as a motivational speaker and author can largely be attributed to his use of SHARP principles – in one speech he used verbal pictures to make some pretty boring statistics come alive.

A key point in Ziglar’s message was that success requires a solid foundation. To illustrate this, he told of a recent visit to the Calgary Tower and his recount of the structure’s history. “It is 626 feet tall,” Ziglar said. “That’s two football fields plus 26 feet. And of its 12,000 tons, 7,000 of them are underground. With a solid foundation, you too can rise to great heights.”

He painted another vivid word picture when he told the audience that the average twenty-year-old has seen one million TV commercials. That huge statistic was made to seem even more enormous when he continued, “…that’s 50,000 per year…1,000 per week.”

All of Ziglar’s analogies, examples and statistic supported his point of view. They were easy to absorb because he made them understandable. He used analogies that the audience could easily “identify” with.

Make sure that make contact with your audience – use SHARP principles to create a communications experience!