Anatomy of a speech

Because you asked...

Photo credit: Matt Rourke/Associated Press

I didn’t choose to write about the DNC convention speeches in my previous post – it was happenstance.

While driving up from Kozhikode to Bangalore at the end of my recent trip, I was listening to some of the speeches on loop.

“That sounds familiar,” my wife said at one point. I told her I’d been listening to that same speech the previous night.

“Why?” Because I learn writing from reading and listening to speeches.

“How?” So I explained.

“Have you written about this anyplace? Send me links?”

I hadn’t. “Yeah, well, maybe you should.”

So I did, not expecting it to mean much to those who subscribe to this newsletter.

The reaction has been unexpected — and startling. Comments, yes, but also emails, WhatsApp messages, several of them from writers who wrote in with questions. Two of those mails and one WA message made the same request, in different ways: Instead of clips from a half dozen speeches, could I take one speech and annotate it, highlighting elements of the craft?

So here: One speech, annotated. Text in normal font, my comments in italics.

Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d hear myself saying: I’m Pete Buttigieg, and you might recognise me from Fox News.

(Coaches who teach the art of public speaking suggest that it is a good idea to start on a light note, ideally with a joke that breaks the ice. Problem is, too many speakers take that literally; they go through ‘1000 Jokes for All Occasions’ or some such – and the joke they pick to “break the ice” often has no relation to the rest of their speech. Buttigieg does it right – he uses the fact of his frequent appearances on Fox News, a rarity for a Democrat, to set up why he is on-stage at this moment: see the passage immediately following for how he makes the connect):

I believe in going anywhere, anywhere, in service of a good cause. And friends, we gather in a very good cause, electing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the next president and vice president of the United States. The choice could not be clearer.

(In just 43 words, he connects up his opening line with why he is there now, explains what the cause is, and sets up what follows):

Donald Trump rants about law and order, as if he wasn’t a convicted criminal running against a prosecutor. As if we were going to forget that crime was higher on his watch. Talks about the forgotten man, hoping we’ll forget that the only economic promise that he actually kept was to cut taxes for the rich. And don’t even get me started on his new running mate. At least Mike Pence was polite.

(Buttigieg’s first order of business is to frame the opposition – and he frames Trump with three broad brushstrokes: Convicted criminal, weak on crime, crony capitalist. He then points to Trump’s lack of good judgment, exemplified by his choice of running mate):

JD Vance is one of those guys who thinks if you don’t live the life that he has in mind for you, then you don’t count. Someone who said that if you don’t have kids, you have, quote, “No physical commitment to the future of this country.” You know, Senator, when I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then, many of the men and women who went outside the wire with me didn’t have kids either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.

(As he does with Trump, Buttigieg frames Vance with one devastating point, using Vance’s carping comment about those without kids to skewer him. Vance equating having children with being committed to the country was poorly thought through – and Buttigieg, with ice-cold logic, destroys that argument by citing his own military record.)

Choosing a guy like JD Vance to be America’s next vice president sends a message. And the message is that they are doubling down on negativity and grievance. Committing to a concept of campaigning best summed up in one word, darkness. Darkness is what they are selling. The thing is, I just don’t believe that America today is in the market for darkness.

(In writing, each sentence, each paragraph, has to do one of two things: (a) Widen or deepen the point or (b) Move the narrative forward. A passage that does neither is a speed bump. The passage above is a classic example of how to do the first, and set up the second: Having painted Vance as clueless in the preceding section, Buttigieg points out that choosing such a person exemplifies the Trump brand of politics – darkness. The speech is about choices and why we make them – and having outlined one choice, he sets up the alternate with that one final line: that America has had enough of the politics of darkness. This allows him to lead smoothly into his leitmotif: That there is a better kind of politics we can chose):

I believe America is ready for a better kind of politics. Yes, politics at its worst can be ugly, crushing, demeaning, but it doesn’t have to be. At its best, politics can be empowering, uplifting. It can even be a kind of soul craft.

My faith teaches me that the world isn’t made up of good people and bad people, but rather that each of us is capable of good and bad things. And I believe leaders matter because of what they bring out in each of us, the good or the bad. Right now, the other side is appealing to what is smallest within you. They’re telling you that greatness comes from going back to the past. They’re telling you that anyone different from you is a threat. They’re telling you that your neighbour or nephew or daughter, who disagrees with you politically, isn’t just wrong, but is now the enemy.

I believe in a better politics, one that finds us at our most decent and open and brave. The kind of politics that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are offering. And as you have felt these many days, that kind of politics also just feels better to be part of. There is joy in it, as well as power.

(Note the sequence: He starts by saying he will go anywhere in service of a good cause. The cause that brings him to the stage now is good politics, and the choice before the people. He explains why Trump/Vance is the wrong choice; he talks of good politics and good leaders and brings in Harris and Walz as exemplars, and with that, he ties everything together in a neat package. It is a simple, easy to follow train of thought – the audience/reader never loses sight of the central premise. And what follows is rhetoric gold):

And if all of that sounds naive, let me insist that I have come to this view, not by way of idealism, but by way of experience. Not just the experience of my unlikely career. Someone like me serving in Indiana, serving in Washington, serving in uniform.

(In his book On Rhetoric, Aristotle outlines the rhetorical triangle: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Ethos is about establishing credibility, telling the audience why the speaker is best suited to talk to them about a particular subject. Pathos is the appeal to emotion, and Logos is an appeal to reason. Thus far, Buttigieg has mostly relied on ‘Logos’. It is with the passage above that he brings both Ethos and Pathos together — his credibility, his fitness to talk of good politics, stems from his unlikely biography):

I’m thinking of something much more basic. I’m thinking of dinner time at our house in Michigan, when the dog is barking and the air fryer is beeping and the mac and cheese is boiling over. And it feels like all the political negotiating experience in the world is not enough for me to get our three-year-old son and our three-year-old daughter to just wash their hands and sit at the table. It’s the part of our day when politics seems the most distant. And yet, the makeup of our kitchen table, the existence of my family, is just one example of something that was literally impossible as recently as 25 years ago, when an anxious teenager growing up in Indiana wondered if he would ever find belonging in this world.

(Buttigieg is gay, married to Chasten Buttigieg; they have two children, Joseph August and Penelope Rose. Buttigieg begins with an everyday domestic scene that plays out in millions of homes, and links it to the fact of his being gay, without needing to mention it in so many words, and makes the point that the very existence of a family such as his would be unthinkable 25 years ago).

This kind of life went from impossible to possible. From possible to real. From real to almost ordinary in less than half a lifetime. But that didn’t just happen, it was brought about through idealism and courage, through organizing and persuasion and storytelling, and yes, through politics. The right kind of politics. The kind of politics that can make an impossible dream into an everyday reality. I don’t presume to know what it’s like in your kitchen, but I know, as sure as I am standing here, that everything in it, the bills you pay at that table, the shape of the family that sits there, the fears and the dreams that you talk about late into the night there, all of it compels us to demand more from our politics than a rerun of some TV wrestling death match.

(Politics is an abstract concept – it could mean different things to you and to me. Buttigieg cuts through the fog and makes it concrete – he defines politics as the determinant of the kind of life we get to lead. Having first set up the image of his own dinner table and pointed to the extraordinariness of that ordinary scene, he links his lived experience to that of his audience – and nails the point about how, and why, we need to make our choices. Note, how each passage leads inexorably to the next, how each point links up with the next to lead the audience where the speaker wants it to go. In passing, a word on transitions: The amateur way of doing it is to set up transitions with clunky questions and/or bridging sentences – like, “At this point you might be wondering…”. Buttigieg is a pro – his transitions are organic, the shift from thought to thought flowing with an ease, an inevitability, that is a masterclass in itself. His job done, he now rounds into the home stretch):

So this November, we get to choose. We get to choose our president. We get to choose our policies, but most of all, we will choose a better politics. A politics that calls us to our better selves and offers us a better every day.

That is what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz represents. That is what Democrats represent. That is what awaits us when America decides to end Trump’s politics of darkness once and for all. That is what we choose when we embrace the leaders who are out there building bridges and reject the ones who are out there banning books.

(Your closing is the last thing the audience hears – or reads -- and thus it needs to connect up all the dots and, in the case of a political speech in particular, bring the audience to its feet. Buttigieg nails both tasks here – he links the two leaders with the collective and the collective with a shared goal; and he uses a rising tempo to bring his audience to a fever pitch of shared excitement. Listen to his delivery of this part, and imagine how the impact would have been diluted if he had paused to acknowledge the applause he gets for each line – he raises his voice over the storm of applause, and in effect the words and the applause come together in a valedictory drumroll).

This is what we will work for every day to November and beyond. So let’s go win this. Thank you, Democrats. Thank you.

(One final thought: To write a good speech, you need to be clear about two things: Your audience, and your objective. Here, Buttigieg’s audience is not the densely packed convention hall in Chicago inhabited by people who have already got the memo, but the millions listening from their homes — some of them Democrats, others Republicans, and others still undecideds/waverers. His objective is clear – to frame the election not as a choice between two leaders, but as a choice between two ways of living: In the dark of autocracy, or the light and air of individual freedom. That objective drives his entire speech – and at no point does he digress from his goal. It is also a model of brevity — just 949 words, but because of its clear throughline, its tight focus on a singular message, it does more than say Bill Clinton, rated one of the best orators in the Democratic lineup, accomplishes at four times that length.)

PostScript: That is the on-demand post, done. Back to regular service in a day or three, once I’ve cleared my backlog of work.