Before I do believe on what’s goes on our life. That there is no one controlling our life and destiny. Till I had found a religious blog which enlighten my thoughts in so many different ways. With the Dave Hunt website, my eyes are now open with so many ideas and thought that would give me reason to live and help me understand why we are here in this life.

In discussing clarity, we talked about the importance of amplification in speeches. Although it may seem contradictory, you must also be concise, even while you are amplifying your ideas. You must make your points quickly and efficiently. Follow the advice on speaking given by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his son James: “Be sincere . . . be brief
be seated!”
Long-drawn-out speeches lose audience interest. They kill the impulse toward action in persuasive speeches. A concise speech helps listeners see more clearly and feel more powerfully.
To achieve conciseness, work for simple, direct expression. Thomas Jefferson once said, “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” Use the active voice rather than the passive in your verbs: “We want action!” is more concise—and more direct, colorful, and clear—than “Action is wanted by us.”
You can also be concise by using comparisons that reduce complex issues to the essentials. Sojourner Truth, a nineteenth-century human rights activist, once had to counter the argument that society should not educate African Americans and women because of their alleged “inferiority.” She destroyed that then-powerful position with a simple parable: “If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have a little half-measure full?”
The goal of conciseness encourages the use of maxims, those wise but compact sayings that summarize the beliefs of a people. During the Chinese freedom demonstrations of 1989, a sign carried by students in Tiananmen Square, “Give Me Democracy or Give Me Death,” adapted Patrick Henry’s famous maximum, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Sadly, the Chinese authorities 1s took them at their word. In Colorado, demonstrators at a nuclear plant carried a sign reading “Hell No, We Won’t Glow!”—a variation on a chant often heard in anti—Vietnam war rallies of the 1960s, “Hell no, we won’t go!” And, to reinforce his point that we need to actively (and audibly) confront the problems of racism, sexism, and homophobia, Haven Cocker- ham, vice president of human resources for Detroit Edison, said: “Sometimes silence isn’t golden—just yellow.”40
As these examples suggest, maxims can have special power in attracting mass-media attention. When printed on signs, they satisfy the hunger of the press for visual messages. Their brevity makes them ideally suited to the rigid time constraints of television news. Of even greater importance, maxims evoke cultural memories and invite identification. When the Chinese students adapted Patrick Henry’s maxim and displayed the goddess of liberty, they were in effect both declaring that they shared American values and appealing for our assistance in their desperate struggle. When their cause was crushed, many Americans felt the injustice in a personal way, and the resulting tension between the Chinese government and our own lingers to this day.

Color refers to the emotional intensity or vividness of language. Colorful words are memorable because they stand out in our minds. Those who use them also are remembered.
During the 1996 presidential primaries, each of the contenders was searching for a way to capture the imagination of voters and to stand out from the pack. In such a contest, those who use language colorfully have an advantage. Patrick Buchanan moved from a long-shot candidate to a leading contender at least partially because of his skill with words. Early in the campaign, Steve Forbes gained a lot of attention through an advertising campaign in which he proposed a flat tax. Senator Phil Gramm, a candidate who later withdrew from the race, criticized Forbes on the grounds that his plan would favor the wealthy by eliminating taxes on dividend and interest income. About the flat tax Gramm said, “I reject the idea that income derived from labor should be taxed and that income derived from capital should not.”
A nice use of contrast, but look how Buchanan expressed the same idea:
“Under Forbes’ plan, lounge lizards in Palm Beach would pay a lower tax rate than steelworkers in Youngstown.” Later he added that Forbes’ plan had been drawn up by “the boys down at the yacht basin.” While Gramm’s words are a study in abstraction, Buchanan’s language is both colorful and concrete. The use of the animal metaphor, “lounge lizards,” is striking. So is the use of contrast, setting the “lounge lizards” and the “boys down at the yacht basin” against the steelworkers, Palm Beach against Youngstown. It’s sloth and privilege against character and virtue, and we know which side Buchanan is on. These colorful symbols reflected his commitment.
Colorful language paints striking pictures for listeners. Notice how Leslie Eason made Tiger Woods come alive in the speech of tribute she made in her Vanderbilt class:
Mothers with daughters of a certain age (mine included) describe him as the son-in-law they’d like to have. Six foot two, a hundred fifty-five pounds, smart—Stanford, remember. Clean-cut in his creased khakis. Curly hair, gorgeous teeth. Skin the color of what they used to call “suntan” in the Crayola box. And rich. Very rich.
He’s the very opposite of the gangsta boys in the hood. Boys who wear their pants hanging below their belt as though they were already in the penitentiary. Next to them he’s prep school and Pepsodent.
When you use colorful language, your audience will find you to be interesting as well. Your ethos will rise as your listeners assign you high marks for competence and attractiveness. For all these reasons, color is an important standard as you develop your capacity to use language.

Clarity comes first on our list for good reason: Unless you are clear, your speech will fail from the outset. This may seem obvious, but it is often ignored! Many speakers lapse into jargon, using technical language before an audience that doesn’t understand it. Technical vocabularies are necessary for specialized communication in many professions, but when speakers use these vocabularies with listeners who may not understand their meaning, problems are sure to arise. “Positive vorticity adjective” may be a perfectly useful expression at a convention of meteorologists, but for general audiences “It’s going to rain” would be much better. Speakers who fall into the jargon trap forget how much time and trouble it took for them to acquire a technical vocabulary, so they don’t bother to translate the unusual terms into lay language. Therefore they march happily forward into a jungle of unfamiliar verbiage, leaving their bewildered listeners lost behind them. The cost can be more than confusion.
Closely related to jargon are words that are needlessly overblown. A notorious example occurred at the Barnum museum, when sign makers wanted to tell visitors how they could leave the building. Rather than a simple arrow with “Exit” over it, these wordsmiths came up with “To The Egress.” There’s no telling how many visitors left the museum by mistake, thinking that they were going to see that rare creature—a living, breathing “Egress.”
While misunderstandings may result from such innocent incompetence, at other times jargon can seem purposely befuddling. Some speakers like to satisfy their egos and intimidate others by displaying their technical vocabularies. The parent of a student in Houston received a message from the high school principal regarding a special meeting on a proposed educational program. The message read:
Our school’s cross-graded, multi ethnic, individualized learning program is designed to enhance the concept of an open-ended learning program with emphasis on a continuum of multi ethnic, academically enriched learning, using the identified intellectually gifted child as the agent or director of his own learning. Major emphasis is on cross- graded, multi ethnic learning with the main objective being to learn respect for the uniqueness of a person.
The parent responded:
Dear Principal: I have a college degree, speak two foreign languages and know four Indian dialects. I’ve attended a number of county fairs and three goat roping s, but I haven’t the faintest idea as to what you are talking about. Do you?
While some people seem to take a strange joy in not communicating, others ma try to hide the truth behind a smokescreen of techno babble that is closely related to the problem of euphemism we discussed earlier. Public television commentator Bill Moyers warned an audience at the University of Texas against the dangers of such jargon:
If you would . . . serve democracy well, you must first save the language. Save it from the jargon of insiders who talk of the current budget debate in Washington as “mega policy choices between freeze- feasible base lines.” (Sounds more like a baseball game played in the Arctic Circle.) Save it from the smokescreen artists, who speak of “revenue enhancement” and “tax-base erosion control” when they really mean a tax increase. . . . Save it from .. . the official revisionists of reality, who say that the United States did not withdraw our troops from Lebanon, we merely “back loaded our augmentation personnel.”
Fearing what might happen if audiences actually understood their meaning. such speakers attempt to hide behind cloudy technical language. In contrast, ethical speaking is clear and direct.
One way to achieve clarity is through amplification, in which you rephrase ideas to emphasize or clarify them. Providing important bits of. information and giving examples that compare and contrast are other ways to amplify an idea. In effect, you tell listeners something, then you expand and repeat what you are saying. Observe the techniques of amplification at work in the following speech sample, in which each sentence expands and repeats the meaning of the sentence that precedes it:
The roadrunner is not just a cartoon character that makes a fool of
Wile E. Coyote. It is a member of the cuckoo family and state bird of New Mexico. Still, the cartoon roadrunner and the real roadrunner
have much in common. Both are incredibly fast, real roadrunners having been tracked at ground speeds over 15 miles per hour. Neither
takes to the air to chase prey or escape a predator. Both look rather
awkward as they run, with strides up to 2ô inches long—a real feat for a bird that is only 24 inches long with over half its length in its tail.

The

Even if your listeners share an identity, they still may not be ready to act. What might stand in their way? For one thing, they may not be convinced of the soundness of your proposal. They may not trust you, or they may not think that they can do anything about a problem. Action requires energy, commitment, and risk.
Your words must convince listeners that action is necessary, that your ideas are sound and well motivated, and that success is a realistic hope. Anna Aley, whose speech is printed in Chapter 13, wanted her audience to help improve off-campus housing conditions for students at Kansas State University. In her speech, she painted vivid word-pictures of deplorable and dangerous off-campus housing, supported by both factual materials and personal experience. She also reminded listeners of their group membership— they were all students, responsible for one another’s welfare:
What can one student do to change the practices of numerous Manhattan landlords? Nothing, if that student is alone. But just think of what we could accomplish if we got all 13,600 off-campus students involved in this issue! Think what we could accomplish if we got even a fraction of those students involved!
Anna then offered specific proposals that her listeners might support— proposals that did not call for great energy or risk on their part; in short, she made commitment as easy as possible. Finally, she concluded her speech with an appeal to action:
Kansas State students have been putting up with substandard living conditions for too long. It’s time we finally got together to do something about this problem. join the Off-Campus Association. Sign my petition. Let’s send a message to these slumlords that we’re not going to put up with this any more. We don’t have to live in slums.
Anna’s words expressed both her indignation and the urgency of the problem. Her references to time—”too long” and “it’s time”—called for immediate action. Her final appeals to join the association and sign the petition were expressed in short sentences that packed a lot of punch and encouraged the impulse to action. Her repetition of “slumlords” and “slums” motivated her listeners to transform their indignation into action.
Anna also illustrated another strategy that is important to the language of action. You must be able to depict real-life dramas that reveal what is at stake and challenge listeners to take on certain roles. Such scenarios draw clear lines between right and wrong. In the words of an early union organizing song, the audience may be asked, “Which side are you on?”9 Be careful, however, not to go overboard with such techniques. Ethical communication requires that you maintain respect for all those involved in any conflict. As both speaker and listener, be wary of melodramas that offer stark contrasts between good and evil. Such depictions usually distort reality.
The power of language is great, ranging from shaping perceptions to inciting action. How can you harness this power in ways that are both ethical and elevating? We have already pointed out some of the ways as we illustrated the power of words. Now we cover these special techniques in more detail.