We asked two top voice and presentation coaches, Laura Spicer and Ed Percival, about what oratory skills we can learn from US President Barack Obama
In most of his major speeches he
acknowledges and has us applaud superior behaviour
How Obama Keeps Audiences Engaged by Ed Percival He uses chunking up as a way of uniting
O
bama and his scriptwriters use a number of speech patterns familiar to the NLP community. The useful ambiguity of 'you'
enables him to address the crowd and
the individual at the same time - 'It's as though he was just speaking to me'. His speeches move up and down chunk sizes
- he will introduce a big chunk nominalization - freedom, hope, triumph and then chunk down into specifi c examples of each to explain what he means by each term. Obama reverses that by picking up
examples of apparently insignifi cant action and amplifying its importance to become an example of another big chunk nominalisation. In this way, he connects us to why this behaviour matters.
us on differences - he keeps chunking up to a bigger context that we can all agree on - compassion, tolerance, ambition. He usually uses the same device to illustrate how tough the path ahead is, and what we'll need on the path. In most of his major speeches he
acknowledges and has us applaud superior behaviour - that is followed by him inviting us to take responsibility to behave in the same class of superiority. He sets big chunk context for the next chapter - 'You have told us you want ACTION from us' He builds agreement throughout and usually ends with giving us responsibility. 'Your job as a US citizen.' Of course, he usually ends with a unifying call to action. www.edpercival.com b
FREE DOWNLOAD Dowload Ed Percival's Report "The Speech Patterns of President Obama"