Blogs
October 23, 2009 by Gerhard
Welcome Guest Blogger, Gerhard Gschwandtner What happens when people ask you to address a group of people to persuade them to take action on an idea? Chances are that you suddenly become aware of your heartbeat, your throat may become dry, you nervously take a sip of water, stand up, and then notice that all eyeballs in the room are focused on you. In one short moment you may have experienced a surge of anxiety that you are trying to mask with a smile that has a hard time sticking to your face. How should you prepare for a
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October 21, 2009 by Jerry
On his nightly “fake” news program, The Daily Show, Jon Stewart often aims his satiric barbs at television news: at the broadcast networks for their breathless inflation of non-events, and at cable news for their extreme branded positions. Two of his favorite targets are Fox News for their conservative views and CNN for their overweening claims about being “the best political team on television.” But Stewart’s assault on CNN last week went much deeper than their self-praise; he went right to the heart of one of journalism’s basic tenets: investigative pursuit. As the Huffington Post reported, Stewart showed video
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October 19, 2009 by Jerry
Now that we are in the peak sports period of the year—the culmination of the baseball season and the heat of the football season—the voices of play-by-play announcers and color commentators are filling the airwaves. Most of them are just that, filler; stuffing the soundtrack with meaningless digressions, infantile inanities, vain attempts at jock humor or, at best, statements of the obvious. One voice stands out from all the rest: Vin Scully, the radio voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers—now playing in the National League Championship Series. Scully, who is 81 years old and in his 60th year as
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October 14, 2009 by Jerry
In the preceding blog, you read about how Microsoft, with their venerable taglines, “Where do you want to go today?” and “Your potential, our passion,” deployed a call to action and a benefit to great effect. The taglines scored a trifecta by adding a third rhetorical device, the persuasive word, “you.” “You.” If you do a search on bing.com for a Yale University study of persuasive words, you’ll find nearly 200,000 references to a ranked list of the top ten persuasive words. “You” leads the list. (The others, in descending order are: “Easy,” “Money,” “Save,” “Love,” “New,” “Discovery,” “Results,”
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October 12, 2009 by Jerry
In my blog two weeks ago, you read how Yahoo, following the example of other corporations, deployed the persuasive word “you” in the tagline of their new $100 million marketing campaign called “It’s You!” Microsoft (now a business partner of Yahoo) has a pair of taglines using the same powerful word, but theirs add two other rhetorical devices to score a trifecta. Microsoft’s venerable slogans, “Where do you want to go today?” and “Your potential, our passion,” are successful because each of them deploys three powerful persuasive selling factors: Each of them represents a call to action for Microsoft;
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October 9, 2009 by Jerry
Earlier this week you read the blog about the effective—and ineffective—use of voice-over in several current films. The effective was when the familiar narrative device provided commentary or character development; the ineffective when it was used as to advance the story. The latter is one of the cardinal sins of all forms of writing—including presentations—telling the story rather than showing. Since then, another film using voice-over has come to market and was met with stern criticism because it told rather than showed. The film in question is The Invention of Lying, whose main premise is that of an alternative
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October 7, 2009 by Jerry
A delightful Corona beer video commercial, set in their now-trademark tropical seascape, makes a humorous, but telling point about peripheral vision. A man and a dark-haired woman are seated in beach chairs, their backs to the camera, their heads facing straight ahead toward the surf. The man is on the left, the woman on the right; between them is a low table with two bottles of Corona, each topped with a wedge of lime. Corona Squirt After a moment, a tall and tanned, willowy blond girl, wearing a tiny white bikini, enters into the scene from the right and slowly
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October 5, 2009 by Jerry
In his Wall Street Journal review of “The Informant!” the veteran film critic Joe Morgenstern wrote, “More often than not, the extensive use of voice-over narrative means the filmmakers didn’t know how to dramatize their story without it.” Morgenstern knows whereof he speaks; professional writers consider voice-over narrative as a form of cheating, and audiences find it unrewarding. The positive counter to this narrative device is to relate a story primarily with action or, as it is more commonly known, to show versus tell. In a previous blog on this same subject, you read about two other otherwise excellent
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September 30, 2009 by Jerry
In two previous blogs you read how Barack Obama deployed the persuasive word, “you” to great rhetorical effect during his presidential campaign, in his historic Inaugural Address, and in his first formal address to a joint session of congress. “You” is persuasive because it makes a direct connection between the speaker and the audience. Many corporations, in their desire to connect with their customers, deploy the word in their slogans: Burger King’s “Have it your way” The U.S. Army’s “Be all that you can be.” (See prior blog for fuller discussion) Cisco Systems’ “Are you ready?” Microsoft’s “Where
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September 25, 2009 by Pearl
Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, gave a rambling speech at the United Nations that ran for 90 minutes instead of the allotted 15. The speech drew strong reactions ranging from approval by his supporters to rebuke by his critics to satire from a comic. Neil MacFarquhar of The New York Times wrote, “At one point in his speech, Colonel Qaddafi waved aloft a copy of the United Nations charter and seemed to tear it, saying he did not recognize the authority of the document.” On BorowitzReport.com, Comedian Andy Borowitz wrote: An escaped mental patient broke into the United Nations
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