A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a short speech at a large event. At only 2-3 minutes, the remarks had to be necessarily brief, and I struggled to come up with a way to incorporate all the necessary content while conveying something interesting within the time limit. I ended up with a decent, engaging, if not especially innovative, speech, which was well-received and for which I was given several compliments. In my mind, it was merely adequate, without offering anything to make it distinctive.
Maybe it could have been more distinctive if I’d had this thought before the speech, instead of about two hours later: I should have treated the speech like poetry. Not in the sense that I should have been on stage tossing out rhyming sequences in iambic pentameter, but in the sense that I should have taken the time and deliberation to make each word in the speech as deliberate and weight-bearing as possible. After all, we were just discussing in a previous post the way poetry is a vehicle for density of information, a method by which to induce maximum impact with minimal length. The same techniques can surely be applied to short speeches.
Two major obstacles may undermine this notion. First, there is the problem of expectations. Especially in the kind of speech I was tapped to deliver, the audience does not expect to approach the remarks with the same attention and inquiry they might bring to a poem. Part of the reason the poetic form is effective is because it conveys, quite separate from the text itself, a set of expectations for the audience, so that they will be prepared from the first line, or even from the title, to engage in the deep-thinking, slow-paced way necessary to fully appreciate the multidimensional meanings of poetry. If I tried to pack significance and allusion into each syllable of a speech, when the audience isn’t expecting that kind of information density, I suspect most of them would miss most of what I was trying to convey.
These matters of managing expectations could be addressed, perhaps by starting off with a particularly compelling line or statement to capture more focused attention and signal to the audience what’s coming. More challenging is the medium’s transient nature. To derive the full impact of a poem, I usually must take time to linger over each line, rereading or relistening to sections and to the poem as a whole to extract the many layers. This is impossible to replicate with a speech. The audience can’t go back and reread or rehear what I said – at least, not in real-time. I suppose they could if the speech is recorded, but that somewhat defeats the point, and dramatically reduces the number of people who will receive the speech’s message.
This might all be an exercise in me missing the point of these sorts of short speeches. I rather doubt I was sent out to deliver this speech because anyone wanted me to deliver some transformational, massively impactful message. In fact, they (being the people who tapped me to give it) would probably be rather displeased if I said anything really meaningful, instead of some mildly engaging platitudes. In another setting, though, I think there’s value to being able to take a little better advantage of such short speaking fora.
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