How the Virtue of Eloquence Became a Vice | Brian Snee | TEDxWCC
[Music] good morning everyone morning wow thank you uh Mark Twain once said this there are only two types of speakers those who are nervous and those who are liars I I bet some people in the front would agree with that uh if I were to ask you what this means you would probably tell me that public speaking makes everybody at least a little bit nervous it does and that anybody telling you otherwise is probably lying I don't doubt that that's exactly what Mark twne meant when he said this back then but I would submit that there's a different way that we can interpret this today it's an idea that I find fascinating and frankly more than a little frightening it's why I'm here today uh eloquence is the ability to speak clearly and sometimes to speak beautifully it's a skill few possess I don't uh for that reason for more than 2,000 years eloquence was regarded as a civic virtue it was valued um especially in Democratic societies where sometimes individuals have the right to stand on the red carpet and speak for themselves and occasionally we have the responsibility to speak up for others when the Roman philosopher quintilian tried to define the ideal citizen back in his Roman Republic he came up with with this the Good Man speaking well we need to update this of course to the 21st century so we'll say the good person speaking well but I think the point still stands what quintilian was trying to say I believe is that being good wasn't enough that's a great start no doubt but you needed to be able to share that goodness you needed to be able to share your ethical ideas your moral philosophies the ideal citizen the ideal in a participatory culture was both a good good person and a good communicator the two were largely Inseparable now I would tell you that this is as true today as it was back then but not everyone agrees with me and in recent years I've been shocked to find just how many people disagree today it's not at all uncommon to see eloquent speakers rejected because of their eloquence they're called insincere we're told that they're dangerous that they can cast a spell on us with their words the problem with this one of them anyway is that when you run away from an eloquent speaker sometimes you run towards somebody who either cannot or will not explain their ideas and their intentions with anything even close to Clarity never mind eloquence it's a problem that's persisted for quite some time um here's an example of someone known for his eloquence I'd like to think that Abraham Lincoln was loved in his day for his lyricism when he called us to be the better angels of our nature and I bet that a later generation was moved by Ellena Roosevelt and her metaphor when she said it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness and I remember in my lifetime being reassured by Ronald Reagan when he told us that the victims of the Challenger space shuttle disaster had slipped this early bonds of Earth to touch the face of God the point at least for me is this plain speech is not necessarily more honest speech if I wanted to stand here and lie to you today I could and I could do it with big words or small ones I could do it with simple sentences or far more complex structures there isn't necessarily a relationship between the two and I think it's a really dangerous assumption for a society to make that the less Talent ented Communicator is necessarily the more honest and trustworthy Communicator now just to be clear I'm not here to advocate for Flowery speech that's all style and no substance uh I'm a big fan of plain simple and direct right that which has more to do with Clarity than confusion not every public utterance needs to sound like it was written to later be etched in stone surely nothing I'm saying now will be but ask yourself this have you ever known a great society in the history of the world in which the ability to use language well has been regarded as a character flaw and yet that might be where we are today this probably matters more to me than it does to a lot of people not because I think I'm an eloquent speaker but I teach communication to college students I've been doing it for almost 25 years and of all the things I teach the class that I love the most is this won't surprise you public speaking it's the one class in which I get to stop talking and my students really get to start they appreciate that as well but more importantly that's the class where they start to find their voice and when you find your voice you find yourself and it's really only when you at least start to find yourself that you can then go out into the world and give anything to anyone else it's a lesson that I've been teaching my students for a long time but in recent years I've had to wonder what will the world do with them you know my best and My Brightest who are artic and sometimes eloquent will they be rejected by the world that I'm sending them out into I'm not sure anymore The Dilemma I'll admit is not entirely new I started with Mark Twain you know him for his writing but he used to give a lot of speeches and sometimes he even gave speeches about giving speeches those probably weren't his most inspired moments but one of the bits of advice that he would offer to would be speakers was something like this if you're capable of giving the perfect speech don't because your audience will be suspicious of you that's reassuring to us today I suspect he would actually suggest plan a few mistakes rehearse them a fumble here a stumble there that will lead your audience to believe that you are finding the words in the moment that you're not too scripted and therefore he knew the audience would assume you're speaking from the heart but if we look at some of our greatest leaders we can see that they were loved in part for their eloquence if these great communicators were alive today would we reject them because of their eloquence I fear we might and if I'm right you have to ask where then are we headed as a society at some point in your life I hope you've read Lincoln's Gettysburg Address maybe you've heard Kings I have a dream these are not cautionary tales of what to avoid right they're models of eloquence to which we should Aspire we should all be so lucky to be half that good at least once in our lives and yet Society doesn't these days necessarily encourage that Mark Twain also said this the right word may be effective but no word has ever been as effective as the rightly timed pause my Modest Proposal today is this I'm going to ask that at some point each of you pause and ask yourself if the ideal citizen that quintilian described so long ago is really all that different than the ideal citizen we need today the citizen that we would like to be and that we need one another to become the good man or woman speaking well we cannot in my opinion reject the virtue of eloquence precisely because it is the eloquent speaker who inspires the rest of us to be virtuous it's the eloquent speaker who succeeds when she calls us to be the better angels of our nature we live in complicated times where things move quickly but I think words matter perhaps now more than ever including and especially the ones that stir the mind and the Heart uh if I could leave you with just one bit of humble advice it would be this when you have the opportunity to do so speak up speak out and don't be afraid to speak well thank you [Applause]