Having displayed your good manners and successfully connected yourself to the event and the audience, you have earned the right to claim their full attention. This is the moment to do it. You may lose them later, so now is the time to play what Americans call a ‘grabber’ – something arresting, compelling, dramatic which at the same time supports your key message and sets up your main themes. So in the plan write down now:
Beginning Grabber Main themes
The grabber can be almost anything – a joke, an anecdote, a quotation, a fantasy, a visual aid, a hyperbole, a startling fact or statement. This is where you might well exploit your local knowledge – after they have accepted you. To make it work, you should be able to deliver it without reading anything. If your speech is topical and the media are present, you may have to tailor the grabber to their needs, rather than the live audience. Print journalists need a headline and the first two paragraphs of a story. Broadcast journal- ists need a clip which they can use in a news bulletin. Both categories are almost certainly working to deadlines: do not keep them waiting for the ‘story’ in your speech. If you do, it may not be reported. If the media are going to be present, use as your grabber the one sentence which you want to be remembered from your speech. It may mean using something you would far prefer to place elsewhere. If Lincoln had been televised at Gettysburg his media advisers would have made him open with ‘Fellow countrymen, we highly resolve that government of the people, by the
people, for the people shall not perish from the earth’, rather than leaving it until the end.
In any circumstances, a grabber should normally be short, and remember par- ticularly that if your grabber is a visual aid it needs to disappear when it has done its job. If you leave it with the audience it grabs attention away from you. In our Truman example, the speaker has got an each-way bet on her grab- ber. Her research might providentially reveal that Truman spoke at the host town in his famous whistle-stop election tour in 1948. If so, she might quote contemporary news reports of his visit and the response he got. This would be a very effective, sustained grabber, especially if the reports men- tioned local people who are still alive or still have families in the town. Failing an actual visit, a different piece of research could produce a differ- ent, much shorter grabber. Did the town vote for Truman in 1948? Then the speaker might say: ‘In 1948, this town changed the world for ever. It voted for Harry Truman in the presidential election.’
If the research shows that the town voted against Truman, she could spin this information around to produce another short grabber. She might say some- thing like: ‘Harry Truman loved this town, even though it did not vote for him. He loved all towns like this. He was born in one and grew up in it and went back to live there when he left the Presidency. He once called towns like this the “strong centre of America”. He did an immense amount for this town. In fact he changed its life for ever, along with America’s and the world’s.’ Any one of these three beginnings should flatter the audience and make them sit up. So here is what they might look like in the plan:
Beginning Grabber
1. R? Truman here in 1948. Reports. R? Local names in reports OR
2. R? Truman wins here in 1948. Town changed history OR
3. R? Truman loses here in 1948. T loved town anyway, loved all towns like it, small town himself, changed town for ever + US + world
I mentioned that debates are different. If you are replying to another speaker you should not completely ignore what he or she said. The opposi- tion may have made some headway with the audience – eliminate this before you ask for their full attention. Separate this demolition job from the grabber. You do not want people to think about the opposition when you go for your big moment.
As number 2 or below in a debate, the plan for your beginning should there- fore look like this:
The Beginning
Demolish opposition Grabber
Main themes
Having grabbed their attention, you will now tell your audience what you are going to tell them. This is where you will set out, as simply as possible, the main themes of the speech.
Try to hit the magic speech-making number of three. If you have more than three themes, collapse them into three. There is always some way of doing this. For example, a recent survey of American business executives1identi-
fied six distinct styles of business leadership: ‘coercive’ (do what I tell you); ‘pacesetting’ (do as I do, now); ‘coaching’ (try this); ‘democratic’ (what do you think?); ‘affiliative’ (how do you feel?); ‘authoritative’ (let’s do this together). Suppose you want to make a speech about them. If you stick to these six as major themes you may find yourself running out of time and there is a good chance that some will not lodge in your audience’s mind. But without too much effort you could organize them in three groups of two. You might achieve this with three colourful, and memorably alliterative, images. Coercive and pacesetting might go together under the heading of The Platoon Sergeant, democratic and affiliative might be grouped under The Politician, coaching and authoritative could be The Parent.
In the Truman speech example, the speaker has no difficulty organizing three main themes. Here’s how they look on her plan:
1 ‘Leadership that gets results’, Daniel Goleman, Harvard Business Review’ March–April
2000. Presented and analysed in Working With Americans by Allyson Stewart-Allen and Lanie Deneslow (Prentice Hall Business, 2002), Chapter 6.
The Beginning
Grabber (1) OR (2) OR (3) Main themes
1. How Truman changed the USA R? impact on town 2. How Truman changed the world
3. The Truman model of leadership.
These main themes are definite choices. They will not be changed. Although she has flagged up the need to research what Truman did for the host town, the result will illustrate theme 1, not replace it with anything else.
These were by no means the only possible choices as main themes. She might have approached the subject chronologically, say (1) Truman as care- taker 1945–1949; (2) President in own right 1949–1950; (3) In decline 1951–1953. She rejected this idea because it was less suitable for her objec- tives in the speech.
A supreme merit of planning your speech in this way is that it forces this kind of discipline on you. It makes you reject unsuitable ideas. We shall see this again in the Middle section, but it is especially important to use the dis- cipline now in choosing the main themes. They are the fundamental archi- tecture of the speech, and if you get them wrong your speech will be badly built.