Transcript Style as strategy: making your words memorable (or forgettable)

The Art of Memory
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Tony Judt, famous historian, paralyzed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, invents,
composes, and remembers without writing. He describes it in a way that is exactly
like classical rhetoricians – he has a room, he composes bits, and puts them in
drawers in a desk in the room, etc. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Trials-of-TonyJudt/63449/
By last February, Judt could no longer move his hands. "I thought it would be
catastrophic," he recalls matter-of-factly. How would he write? He discovered that a
lifetime of lecturing—often without notes and in complete sentences and full
paragraphs—had trained him to think out loud. He can now, "with a bit of mental
preparation," dictate "an essay or an intellectually thoughtful e-mail." Unable to jot
down ideas on a yellow pad, Judt has taught himself elaborate memorization
schemes of the sort described by the Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence in his
1984 book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Like Ricci, a 16th-century Jesuit
missionary to China, Judt imagines structures in his head where he can store his
thoughts and ideas. The basic principle: Picture entering a large house; turn
left and there is a room with shelves and tables; leave a memory on each
surface until the rooms fills. Now head down the hall into another room. To
retrieve your memories, to reconstruct a lecture or recall the content and
structure of an article, you re-enter the building and follow the same path,
which should trigger the ideas you left behind.
The “psychodynamics” of
kindergarten learning
• In kindergarten, abstract geometrical concepts
are personified (Ricky Rectangle, Suzy Circle,
Tommy Triangle, etc.) and students are given
rhymes to help remember how to draw these
shapes. (definitions = hard to remember)
• When learning how to draw numbers, (which
may seem easy to us, but which is a very
complex cognitive task – try memorizing how to
draw 30 kanji characters) students learn by
doing, but also by reciting rhymes that help
“store” the knowledge in memory.
• Alisha, aged 4, learning how to draw
numbers:
• Advertisers are very good at making audiences
remember, at imprinting messages on the ear.
Consider the JINGLE, which uses rhyme,
rhythm, and prosody to get us to remember.
• Can you think of some jingles? (‘takes a lickin’
but keeps on tickin’) Some studies of memory
suggest that in the past kids memorized poems
and songs, now they are more likely to
remember jingles, ads and logos.
How to encourage forgetting?
• “It's commonly understood by psychologists - and ad
makers - that if a person is presented with a list of things,
he/she is more likely to remember items at the beginning
and at the end of the list than items just past the middle.
For example, if you are asked to hear, then recall, a list
of 10 foods, chances are best that you'll forget the sixth,
seventh and eighth foods. So, while drug-makers abide
by the law and present important side effect information,
it's no surprise that they nearly all follow the same
format: putting benefit information in the first half of the
commercial, side effect information just past the middle,
then benefit information again at the end. Sometimes the
ads employ crafty timing or visual distraction to
deemphasize the risks. Sometimes they do so simply by
using complex language.” [or skilful reframing, as with
“habit forming”]
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1806946,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
Style as strategy: making your
words memorable (or forgettable)
• Politicians like to use figures of speech
that will help audiences remember them that “imprint” themselves on the ear.
• In the current election cycle, the trope du
jour was antimetabole (an-tee-meh-TAboe-lee), a rhetorical device in which
words are repeated in transposed order
(political speechwriters call it “the
reversible raincoat.”)
Examples of antimetabole
• "I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An
elephant's faithful, one hundred percent!" Dr. Seuss,
Horton Hatches an Egg.
• “Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you
can do for your country.” JFK’s
• "The absence of evidence is not the evidence of
absence." Carl Sagan
• "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice
to our enemies, justice will be done."-- George W. Bush,
9-20-01.
• "Who sheds the blood of a man, by a man shall his blood
be shed" (Genesis 9:6)
Recent speeches: top trope =
antimetabole, top theme = change
• "In politics, there are
some candidates who
use change to
promote their careers.
And then there are
those, like John
McCain, who use
their careers to
promote change."
• "We were
elected to
change
Washington,
and we let
Washington
change us."
• "People the world
over have always
been more impressed
by the power of our
example than by the
example of our
power."
• "He has brought
change to
Washington, but
Washington
hasn't changed
him” (describing
his running mate,
Biden)
• "In the end the true
test is not the
speeches a
president delivers,
it's whether the
president delivers
on the speeches."
• "Freedom
requires religion,
just as religion
requires
freedom."