Speech – The Art of Speaking
In our suite of articles on persuasive texts, we next move to consider the oral genres that, from an early age, are an integral part of the school curriculum. The three main genres are debate, argument and persuasive speech. Prior to reviewing these genres, we offer the following consideration of what it is to speak both by origination and, equally, what we have made or, perhaps, downgraded the art of speaking to be.
What is it to Speak?
There is a widely acknowledged decline in pre school children’s capacity to speak, with an accompanying rise in speech-based programmes in the foundational year of primary school to upskill and compensate for the loss of verbal expression.
The decline has been attributed to many factors including the lack of daily conversation between carers and their infants and the rise and rise of screens that has brought emphasis to parallelism in life, rather than to engaging with each other in a dynamic, two way or more, interaction. Parallelism is a coined term to describe those situations where each person is absorbed in their own screen as they sit or stand alongside each other with little to no personal engagement. Children are innately clairsentient and naturally experience the world holistically, and themselves as being in relationship with everyone and everything. This parallelism is a brutal dismissiveness and undermining of this capacity, as well as starving children of opportunities to express from this innate foundation. We tune our young away from intimacy with their surrounding world and into a world of contrived fantasy based on electronic pixilation, where their introduction to speaking comes through animation figures on a screen.
Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Observing the ever reducing conversations in our daily life, we cannot but be struck by the deterioration of speech into a set of exclusively functional exchanges or, equally, a series of denigrations about others who appear different to us. Our conversations are most often exchanges about ‘bread’, commerce, what we want or don’t want, what we like or dislike, who we like or dislike.
In his plays, William Shakespeare clearly presents two distinctive types of speech: one being the rhythm and flow of words moved in the metre of iambic pentameter with its profoundly settling effect on the reader or listener; the other the coarse, staccato utterings of the masses that usually grate on the senses.
Our current expression through speech is more akin to the latter, rather than to the linguistically rich and vibrationally inspiring tenor of the former. How did this happen with our speech and why? Have we lost appreciation for the beauty of our expression?
The ‘Christmas Effect’ of Oratory and the Downgrading of Daily Speech
We have a devaluing and a lack of appreciation in our day to day lives of the power of what it is to speak. Equally, we have a picture of what an orator is, yet an orator is simply a person who speaks. However, our picture confers the perception that an orator is something grand, something separate to us, usually associated with someone wearing a toga in the senate of Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece. This picture disbars us from claiming the fact that we are all equally orators every time we open our mouths to speak. Simply, we say we are not that and yet we are.
What, then, is the quality of our own daily oratory?
We also remember and glorify ‘history changing speeches’ like those made by Martin Luther King and President John F Kennedy in his ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ speech. We see and affirm these speeches as ‘special’ and as key instigators of change within society. They are remembered because of their impact on many people – for good or ill.
Why is it that we have allowed oratory to become an exercise in submission to a singular way, rather than being the capacity for all of us to claim the power of expression and the expansion of intimacy that can occur through our day to day exchanges in speech?
Christmas only happens once a year applies equally to many other potentially significant speeches at formal occasions like weddings and funerals. However, whilst we attribute importance to the protocol speeches delivered on these occasions, they are constricted by a series of expectations of what can be expressed. The possibility of expressing in true, inspired oratory is again undermined by the demand for conformity.
The historical perspective reveals how we have allowed oratory and the art of speaking to be categorised into two major types, the formal and the informal. From here, there has been a collective valuing of formal speech and its genres, with ‘everything else’ relegated to the side-lines of casual speech and hence, of no significance. This then arises the question - -
Why are we not valuing the capacity of speech as an instrument of true expression to be exercised in absolutely every aspect of our lives, bar none? Why is formalised speech elevated above every other expression, when in truth, each expression, can be of profound value and significance?
Permission to Speak Freely
Why do we place differential value on the formalised versions of speech expressed by parliamentarians, motivational speakers, politicians, newsreaders, CEOs, teachers and principals, university lecturers, scientists, researchers and, above all, experts?
The English genre movement in education refers to the differing levels of ‘intimacy’* in each text type. Delivering a speech, as opposed to speaking per se, is perceived as formal and therefore, distant in terms of personal intimacy.
However, if casual speech has no value, then it too is devoid of intimacy because, being so casually dismissed as insignificant, immediately disbars those engaged from any depth of intimacy because the exchange is seen as having scant value or as being worthless.
The inescapable conclusion seems to be that there is an across the board block on the expression of intimacy itself, and equally so a block on expressing intimacy through the medium of speech. If language is the richest expression medium on this planet, why have we been accepting an impoverished usage of it, acting as muted beggars, who recycle only what has been promulgated by experts, or anything that is a popular, trending, mass social media communication?
*Intimacy here refers to the relative depth of relationship and the level of formality
The Etymology of Oratory
Historically, there was a bastardisation of the meanings and definitions of the words oratory and orator. Etymologically, the definitions of oratory as referring to the exclusiveness of formal speech were late arrivals, layered over the original meaning. It was only recently in the 1580’s that formal speaking became about public speaking and the art of eloquence (1).
The linguistic lineage of the word is contested, however, in simplest terms, it refers to the activity of speaking and also to that of ‘praying’. The significance and meaning of speaking and praying have become variable in definition, based on the source of reference i.e. whether we are exclusively accessing the lower mind and mental planes or sourcing the depths of our essence.
Under the jurisdiction of the lower mind, we have collectively elevated oratory to be above speaking, making it about the range of one's vocabulary and the capacity to glorify the lower mind, to express via flowery phrases and layers of complexity and expertise, laced with the cleverness of intellectualism. This has then come to be the justification for the elevation of oratory as being exclusive to a minority, who have been assigned to be the voices we all listen and attend to based on their roles as speakers and orators, the deliverers of what is to be circulated and accepted as true, normal, current or appropriate.
Interestingly, and as many of us are well aware, the majority of those who have been assigned these roles as the orators and speakers in society, often either have others write their speeches for them, or use extensive calculation and preparation, often quoting many other experts to back up what they are going to present as being irrefutable truth or evidence. Whilst the demand is that experts access multiple sources to justify their claims and findings, ultimately they are accessing just one source, namely the lower mind or intellect.
We are thus all accountable for the quality of what is circulated as oratory and as scribed versions of truth, endorsing both with our tacit consent and the belief that this is entirely normal and completely acceptable.
Equally we have dressed down, even suppressed, the simplicity of language sourced from our essence to express the truth.
In spite of the readily observed fact that, from infancy, children express a range of feelings and communicate through vocalising, thereby demonstrating an innate ease with expression through sound, as a society, we tend to instantly take out the shears and prune back this potentially humungous capacity into a reductionist set of prescriptive formulae that we then define as daily speech and ‘special’ speech. The result: a wholesale bonsai-ing of expression through language is imposed upon our young. The ongoing continuation of this has collectively reduced us all to these narrow categories of speaking and the differentiation into casual speech and formal genres.
In this way, our speech has become trivialised and is used lacksadaisically. When we speak from our essence, there is a vitalising effect on both the speaker and on the listener. Both are enriched by the quality of energy that comes through the speaker and offered to the listener. This differs markedly to the stimulation of a motivational speech or the dullness of casual conversation. When we engage in what we see as trivial speech, there’s a flatness as though we have vacated our body and are being run as an automaton or a puppet with no vitality - literally to speak of.
A Forsaken Power
What is the true power of each and every person’s speech and their responsibility associated with this? These declining standards of literacy are also seen in the way in which we express daily. In line with this downgrading of the power and responsibility associated with speech, the capacity to deliver truth and inspiration to an audience via true oratory, has similarly been bastardised to be the manipulative force behind the influencer and the persuader.
We have been using speech to separate ourselves from each other and even from our own bodies, rather than the true use of speech, which is to express and celebrate what we all are innately.
Instead, as we shall see with what has become of debate and argument, we have been using speech to sabotage, undermine, attack and even annihilate each other. This abuse of speech causes us to withdraw from our innate intimacy with each other.
Ultimately, the significance of speech as presented to our young in education needs to be a restoration of its true and original value and purpose of expressing the depth and unity that we are.
(1) Oratory: Search online etymology dictionary (no date) Etymology. Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=oratory&ref=searchbar_searchhint (Accessed: April 24, 2023).