Do Great Speaking and Writing Matter?
Let me take you back 74 years to a desperate time in the UK: September, 1940 to May, 1941. Imagine you’re a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force flying against Nazi bombers who are trying to blast Britain into submission. In the RAF, your life expectancy is just four weeks. With great skill and sacrifice, you and your squadron miraculously stop the Germans from invading your homeland. The Prime Minister wishes to express the nation’s gratitude.
Which of the following makes the sacrifice worthwhile?
a) “You’re doing a heckuva job.” or b) “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Now let’s go back 153 years to a desperate time in the US: July, 1861, near the start of the American Civil War. Imagine that you’re Sarah, the 24-year-old wife of a judge turned soldier, Sullivan Ballou, who has gone off to fight for the Union cause. He writes a letter, one that he fears will be his last. Which of the following conveys deeper devotion?
a) “I’ll think of you when I die.” or b) “When my last breath escapes me on the battle field, it will whisper your name.”
The skilful deployment of the spoken and written word is not limited to love and war. You wouldn’t know it to look at the graceless exchange we now call communication. In our breathless world of emails, SMSing and tweeting, words are keyboarded or thumbed into expedient life; flicker from one screen to another before dying by deletion.
It doesn’t have to be like this. I recommend the following three steps:
1. Teach public speaking in primary and secondary school
We all enjoy a good speech but much of what we hear today is just reading aloud. Whether they’re using scripts or teleprompters, it’s apparent that many local and international leaders in government, NGOs and business just didn’t get started early enough. Practice makes perfect, or at least much better. Let’s start the necessary training in this vital life skill much earlier. Public speaking needs to be taught -- and practised -- with the same intensity that schools devote to athletes. They may not reach the level of a Winston Churchill, but our students deserve to be trained to deliver their thoughts with conviction and authority.
2. Send handwritten notes
Such is their rarity, handwritten notes will be treasured long after emails have disappeared into the ether. Take advantage of this fact! Handwritten notes are superb for thanking, consoling and expressing affection. They are unlikely to transmit a virus and cc.ing is impossible. Because they take more time to write, even the most awkwardly worded note touches the recipient’s heart at a deeper level. They might even end up in somebody’s pocket.
Holiday postcards qualify too. They certainly take longer to reach their target, but postcards (literally) hit home and get displayed because they’re addressed to individuals; travel blogs are for the anonymous internet masses.
My favourite postcard of all time arrived several years ago and features a Lufthansa jet flying through unknown airspace. The message is from a former student who wrote to tell me how much he enjoyed being in my history class over nearly 30 years ago. The day I received it I pinned it to my office wall. I still see no reason to take it down.
3. Improve your writing by reading
Just as it’s impossible to walk through fine sand without getting a grain or two inside your shoes, so the reading of fine writers leaves a mark on your own prose. Biologists might call it osmosis; for the rest of us it means reading until words become part of who you are.
Abraham Lincoln’s formal schooling may have lasted a mere 18 months, but he pored over biographies, read voraciously from the plays of Shakespeare and knew the King James Version of the Bible well. A friend called the adventures that thrilled Lincoln in the Arabian Nights “a pack of lies.” “Mighty fine lies” was Lincoln’s response. “My best friend,” he claimed, “is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.”
By the time he became President, Lincoln’s appreciation for the structure and cadence of the English language was so keen that the final words of his masterful Gettysburg Address -- “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” – still resonate with global force.
Andrew Taylor is the Principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in Gaborone, Botswana. His email address is: . Maru-a-Pula’s website is: