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In Plato’s Gorgias,
it quickly becomes apparent that Socrates is the one driving the conversation.
The other characters participate in the debate, but the way that Socrates
phrases his questions and structures his replies almost forces the conversation
in his intended direction. The debate never seems to drift out of his control
because he carefully organizes his thoughts in a way that flows. President Bednar
was not having a conversation per se, because he was addressing such a large
audience, but he worded his speech in such a way that the audiences’ thoughts
flowed from one idea to the next in the way that he intended. He achieved this
in many forms, but I only have time and space to address two of them.
First he made lists, much like how I am doing
now, in order to get his audience to focus on his main points. The same thing happens
in General Conference, devotionals, etc. When someone says that they have three
points and starts to talk, your attention may start to drift, but as soon as they say
they are moving on to the next point you naturally pay attention again just
long enough to catch what it is. The speaker does this because he/she knows
that the audience will probably not have a long enough attention span to listen
to every word, but the list allows for at least the main points to get across.
Secondly, his speech had a natural order to it. He started in the past and moved on to the present and the social media aspects of what he was talking about. Did anyone else notice that the people he quoted, for the most part, went in chronological order? I thought that was really cool; because of the increasing time periods he went from pictures of the prophets, to audio bits, and then to videos of increasing quality.
Lists are in fact a very effective way to convey and retain information. For the same reason that people make bullet points and take notes Elder Bednar created a list within his speech. How often do you write down your notes as a wall of text with no clear divisions of thought or topic? I certainly never do. There is something about including breaks and making decisive points of information stand out that enables the audience to better ingest and digest objects of study. Accompanying these readily apparent topics of thought were voices other than the speaker's own. Not much else is as effective in increasing validity than by having backup that agrees.
ReplyDeleteI honestly had never thought of the effective of lists like this before, but its so true. That transition from one point to the other always jogs my drifting mind back into focus so that I start paying more attention to the next point - brilliant. And that idea that his quotes/clips came chronology was very effective in building ethos because he proved that the underlying doctrine of his ideas weren't new but had in fact been around for a long time.
ReplyDeleteI also noticed the natural flow to his speech! It was great decorum, it was understandable and made the message powerful.
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