Rhetoric and Micro-Stories: Lessons from the DNC’s Final Night
When I signed on to Facebook last night to post a glowing comment about the Reverend Dr. William Barber II’s DNC speech, I saw that a friend of mine — a fellow corporate speechwriter — had beaten me to it. I wrote her a comment: “Don’t you wish we could get our business clients to speak like that?”
I don’t mean exactly like that, of course. Unless you had a CEO who was also an evangelical Christian preacher it would seem pretty disingenuous. I was talking about the rhetorical flourishes in the speech, the clever analogy about defibrillating a heart, followed through in the repeated call “we are reviving the heart of our democracy.”
Many clients shy away from “poetical” rhetoric. And that’s a shame, because they miss an opportunity to connect with their audience on a gut level. Poetry seeps into a subconscious part of our brain, the part that also processes emotion. The part that’s linked to memory. Want your audience to connect with you emotionally? To remember what you say? I’ll bet the Rev. Dr. Barber does — and his speech did that last night.
Many corporate clients also shy away from anything even vaguely theatrical. And that’s a shame, because theatrical gestures — if they’re also authentic — can create indelible impressions. Other than the Rev. Dr. Barber’s speech, I think the single most effective moment of the night belonged to Khizr Khan, the Muslim immigrant whose son was killed by a suicide bomber while serving in the U.S. Army. Taking a copy of the U.S. Constitution out of his breast pocket, Mr. Khan offered to lend it to Donald Trump so Trump could learn what it really says.
But if you can’t pull off poetry and you’re not comfortable with theatrical gestures, what’s left? You tell stories.
And not just the extended stories — like the one Mr. Khan told about his son, or the ones the survivors of fallen police officers told about their sons or husbands. Hillary Clinton’s speech last night contained one moment that I would call a “micro-story” — a short phrase that paints a vivid picture.
Talking about making it easier for small businesses to get credit, she said,
“Way too many dreams die in the parking lots of banks.”
Fewer than a dozen words, and not a single fact or data point, but you know exactly what the situation is and how Secretary Clinton feels about it. I bet it gave you “the feels” too. That’s what makes it a great micro-story.
Yes, her speech also contained some great political zingers:
“It’s wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other.”
“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons!”
People expect zingers in a political speech, especially a convention speech, but they don’t translate well into the corporate world. Secretary Clinton’s micro-story made me sit up and take notice — in fact, it’s the only line from her speech I wrote down while watching it. That’s a device that can work well in any setting.
I often preach about the importance of storytelling. Micro-stories allow us to inject emotion subtly, to convey ideas clearly without spelling them out in mind-numbing detail. Using micr0-stories we can harness the power of language, even for our poetry-shy clients.
