Archive for the 'politics' Tag

How to Analyze Public Speakers

During my senior year of high school, I attended a weekly seminar on Media, Politics, and Public Speaking. Every week, we would have a politician from the Portland area, such as Brad Avakian or David Wu, speak to us for the first half of class. Not only did these interactions serve as great exposure to local politics, but our instructors used the time to help us become more media savvy by asking us to reflect upon and analyze what we heard after the speaker had left.

One of the tools we were given for analysis was a worksheet written by Aloha High School teaching legend James Barlow. It provides four pages detailing various categories of argumentation that a speaker might use to persuade his audience, such as “folksy appeal” or “tabloid thinking”. I found that using it just a few times really helped me to see through these tactics, which are ubiquitously used by public speakers, and also enabled me to better challenge their arguments.

I came across the document recently while sorting through some old papers, and thought that the world might benefit from its presence on the internet. All of the definitions don’t seem entirely accurate, but the content is all perfectly valid. There’s a pdf of all four pages available here, and a transcribed version is below the fold.

July 15, 2008 | no comments | tags: , , ,