cac.ophony.org

One of my students said to me the other day that she did not want to watch the presidential debates anymore because the only thing you see is a repeat of the message again and again. And she thought the “whole Joe thing is just the last straw, I mean is everyone named Joe?” It is true that through the three debates we have seen the central messages of each candidate come back time and again and the use of in-depth argumentation seems to be less of a sticking point. We have also heard of Joe Six-pack, Joe Biden, Joe McCain, (John’s brother), Joe who can never fill his gas tank to full, and Joe the Plumber. The student has a point.

Yet even in the constant repetition of a name, Joe, or of a concept, Joe is Everyman, there are two fundamental teaching points on public speaking and oral presentations that I hurried to tell my student. The strategic use of repetition in a public talk is often taught as a way to create emphasis and drive a message home. But it is also directly related to the afterthought a speaker desires the audience to experience later. A speaker is trying to lodge in the memory of the audience a significant point or image that will recall the message. But it is not as easy as many students and political strategists seem to think.

One can repeat the name Joe, again and again and believe that the audience has a collective cultural memory that will link Joe to our own lives. We will get it and think about it afterwards. Student speakers will very often repeat that some entity is a “major player” or they forever call the audience “You Guys” again and again. In almost the exact same way a political speechwriter is supposing that the audience has a collective memory and we will get it, so does the student. But what we do know about cultural memory is that language is the tipping point. Audience members in contemporary culture relate to language in more segmented groups then ever before. From text messages to gender titles the audience associates words with different significance and receives messages very differently. So Joe, for some, is remembered as Everyman but for others he is not even real. Even for Joe himself there is doubt as to his place in collective memory, his real name apparently is Sam.

So the first teaching point is do not stereotype your audience, and the second teaching point is if using repetition in a public presentation bring into play many different words that imply the same thing and retell the concept in different ways. This is more likely to advance a collective afterthought in our modern and varied audience and initiate reflection that does relate to the message.