The Power to Awaken Feelings
Language also can arouse intense feelings. It can touch our hearts and change our attitudes. This power is ethical when it supplements sound reasoning and credible evidence to involve us in the action urged by the speech. It is abused when speakers substitute appeals to feelings for evidence or reasoning. To arouse intense feelings in ethical ways, language must overcome the barriers of time, distance, and apathy.
Overcoming Time. Listeners live in the present. Therefore, it can be difficult to awaken feelings about events that lie in the remote past or distant future. Fortunately, the language of feeling has a time-machine quality. Speakers can use language skills to bring past and future events into the present and make them seem real.
Stories that recapture feelings from the past are often told at company meetings or used in advertisements to counter impressions that a business is too large and impersonal to care about its employees and customers. Such narratives can also establish a sense of corporate heritage and culture. In the following story, the speaker reminds listeners of one of the legends of Federal Express, a pioneer in overnight delivery:
You know, we take a lot for granted. It’s hard to remember that Federal Express was once just a fly-by-night dream, a crazy idea in which a few people had invested—not just their time and their money, but their lives and futures. I remember one time early on when things weren’t going so well. We were really up against it. Couldn’t even make the payroll that week. It looked like we were going to crash. Fred [Smith, founder of the company was in in a deep funk. Never saw him quite like that before or since. “What the hell,” he said, and flew off to Las Vegas. The next day he flew back and his face was shining. “We’re going to make it,” he said. He had won $27,000 at the blackjack table! And we made it. We met the payroll. And then things began to turn around, and Federal Express grew into the giant it is today.
This story enlivens the past by emphasizing the contrast of emotions—the “deep funk” versus the “shining” face. “What the hell” and “We’re going to make it” express depression and confidence. Such use of dialogue to express feelings recreates the excitement and brings the scene into the present. In using dialogue, the speaker steps back and lets Fred Smith voice his own feelings. It would have been less effective if the speaker had simply said: “Fred was depressed, but after he got back from Las Vegas he was confident.” Offering such a summary would have diluted the emotional strength of the scene.
Language can also make the future seem close at hand. Because language can transport us across the barrier of time, both tradition and a vision of tomorrow can guide us through the present.
Overcoming Distance. The closer something is to us, the easier it is for us to develop feelings about it. But what if speakers must discuss faraway people and places? Language can telescope such subjects and bring them close. Consider how one student used language to reduce the distance between her urban audience and her rural subject:
James Johnson has lived in Perry County for eighty-four years. He taught me some important things: why the mist rises on a lake at night, how to make the best wild blackberry jam you’ve ever put in your mouth, and how to take care of baby rabbits that are abandoned. Today, I want to tell you more about James—and about myself through him.
By focusing on concrete details involving the senses of sight, taste, and touch—the mist, the jam, the rabbits—the speaker conquered distance and aroused feelings about a subject that might otherwise have seemed remote.
Overcoming Apathy. We live in an age of communication overkill. Modern audiences have become jaded by an endless barrage of mass-mediated information, persuasion, and entertainment. The personal contact of public speaking, even when mediated, allows speakers to reach out and touch listeners with language. Jesse Jackson stirred the audience of the 1988 Democratic National Convention with the following message:
America’s not a blanket woven from one thread, one color, one cloth. When I was a child growing up in Greenville, South Carolina, and grandmother could not afford a blanket, she didn’t complain and we did not freeze. Instead, she took pieces of old cloth—patches, wool, silk, gabardine, crockersack on the patches—barely good enough to wipe off your shoes with.
But they didn’t stay that way very long. With sturdy hands and a strong cord, she sewed them together into a quilt, a thing of beauty and power and culture.
Now, Democrats, we must build such a quilt. Farmers, you seek fair prices and you are right, but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is
not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages. You are right. But your patch, labor, is not big enough. Women, you seek comparable
worth and pay equity. You are right. But your patch is not big
enough. Women, mothers, who seek Head Start and day care and pre-natal care on the front side of life, rather than jail care and
welfare on the back side of life, you’re right, but your patch is not big enough.
Students, you seek scholarships. You are right. But your patch is not big enough. Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right, but our patch is not big enough. Gays and lesbians,
when you fight against discrimination and [forl a cure for AIDS, you
are right, but your patch is not big enough. Conservatives and progressives, when you fight for what you.believe, right-wing, left-wing,
hawk, dove—you are right, from your point of view, but your point of view is not enough.
But don’t despair. Be as wise as my grandmama. Pool the patches and the pieces together, bound by a common thread. When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground we’ll have the power to
bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to our nation.6
Jackson’s references to poverty and his grandmother’s loving care aroused sympathetic feelings in many viewers. The image of a quilt—suggesting the traditional warmth of home and the ability to create things of lasting value and beauty from humble materials—gave the audience a vision to unite them. When artfully used, language can overcome the barriers of time, distance, and apathy to make us care about a subject.
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