First Draft #27: a newsletter on public language
I have a dream; Mission statement nonsense; Nike World Cup woes; “Learnings”; Omitting “that”
The story of a dream
Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream speech, which was sixty years old this week, is an address nobody could give today. The issue has moved on but so has the language. No current speaker, even in a religiose country like America, would be so unapologetically biblical. But also, we see too much today. Nobody would be permitted to repeat themselves in the way that Dr King did at the Freedom March in Washington on 28th August 1963.
The famous occasion was by no means the first time Martin Luther King had set out his dream. In fact, he had used the locution, and whole passages from the speech, many times before, on the preaching circuit. Too many times, in the opinion of his speech writer Clarence B Jones. Jones persuaded Dr King that it was time they wrote another speech. Two of the original drafts were titled “Normalcy, Never Again” and “A Cancelled Check”. And indeed, that is how the speech begins and it has to be said that it’s not all that good.
King had worked so late into the night on his speech that, by the time he finished at 4am, he had missed the deadline for submitting the text. The speech was also far longer than the five minutes he was granted (he ended up speaking for sixteen). But, remarkably, the phrase by which we know this speech was not in the text. King admits in his autobiography that he was himself – and in this the whole team agreed – rather bored with the rhetorical dream sequence which he felt had worn thin. One of the other speechwriters in the team, Wyatt Walker, described the dream passage as “trite”.
The new speech, though, was falling flat. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was on the podium with Dr King that day. She had seen him do his dream riff in Detroit a few months earlier and she whispered to him as he struggled through his text “Tell them about the dream, Martin, tell them about the dream”. So, right there, on the biggest day of his life, with no script and no autocue, King switched and started speaking from memory. He started off on the passage that has entered the annals of great public speaking and, as he did so, Walker turned to his colleagues and said “Aw, shit, he’s doing the dream”. It might just be the largest misjudgment in the history of rhetoric.
He quoted the King James version of the Bible, Isaiah 40: 4-5, from memory, perfectly. He pieced together the geographical landmarks of the United States with the call for justice. It is an astonishingly fluent and moving sermon. The progress in civil rights was the last victory for moral progress before the culture wars. Go back to it. Just listen to the inflection of the voice when King demands justice for all God’s children. It is magnificent and he wasn’t supposed to say a word of it. @PhilipJCollins1
Failed missions
Recently spotted on the website formerly known as Twitter: a post comparing two mission statements from the ad agency Ogilvy. The first, written decades ago by David Ogilvy himself, couldn’t be simpler: “We sell or else.” The second, a recent screengrab from the company’s website, is verbose, sentimental and vague to the point of being accidentally metaphysical (“People expect brands to go beyond”). It’s hard to conceive of a more stark demonstration of the decline of public language. And it’s not just about style, or pithiness. By refusing false pieties the first statement demonstrates a higher degree of integrity than the second, despite the latter’s claim about inspiring “people and brands to impact the world”. Brands go to extreme lengths to assert their virtuousness. In doing so, they often forget an old fashioned but effective way to do just that: be honest. @AlexDymoke
Nike: Doing it wrong
Nike initially refused to print a single replica shirt for fans of England’s World Cup Golden Glove-winning keeper Mary Earps. Pressure from a 150,000-signature petition, Earps's criticism, and UK Parliament led to a partial reversal. However, the company’s jargon-filled statement (“proudly offering … innovation and services to our federation partners” while “working towards solutions”) left many, including Earps herself, unmoved. It’s a world away from the punchy principles penned by Nike exec Rob Strasser in 1977, including “break the rules”, “stretch the possible” and “our business is change”. Nike surely missed a chance to honour those ideals by smashing through the FIFA bureaucracy with a simple message: “We decided to Just Do It. Earps shirts on sale now.” @james_carroll
Jargon buster: Learnings
When Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan burst onto screens seventeen years ago, the word learnings was supposed to conjure the comically broken English of the film’s protagonist: technically correct but somehow strange. Today, you read it everywhere. Shell’s last annual report told shareholders the Board had made use of “learnings and insight gained outside Shell”, while bp’s assured theirs it was “review[ing] learnings from key incident investigations.” The WHO recently published a report on Key learnings for future pandemic preparedness and response. And Rishi Sunak’s July statement on so-called “rip-off degrees” declared that, in a “fast moving [sic] industry such as digital marketing,” many university “learnings” are rendered almost immediately obsolete.
Like all of the prime minister’s favourite phrases, learnings has its origins in management consultancy. By transforming the act of learning into a noun, learnings makes knowledge and experience into things that you can itemise and sell. Even better, by fixing to learn in its gerund (-ing) form, learnings are defined by their infinite continuation. Lessons and conclusions are final and definitive; learnings – and profits they generate – go on forever. But the best thing about learnings – from the perspective of those who advise for a living – is that it shifts responsibility for outcomes entirely onto the learner. Consultants can teach the wrong lessons and draw the wrong conclusions. But learnings fail as a result of learner error. You can hardly blame Borat’s etiquette coach, after all, for his failure to abide by a word of her advice. @HibbertLizzie
That’s enough
“Omit needless words”. This pithy dictum, made famous by EB White’s 1959 The Elements of Style, is one of the most memorable and useful writing rules. Often, when training companies to write better, we are asked: but how? One way is to habitually delete “that”. In my first week as journalist, my editor printed my work and crossed out “that” many times. “Much smoother,” he said. Compare “He thought that the book was too long” to “He thought the book was too long.” Losing “that'', especially after “to say”, “to believe”, “to think” and their equivalents, makes prose clearer and more direct. Now that’s a rule worth remembering. @AlexDymoke
Language and beyond
A fascinating essay with a worrisome question for academic history: can we trust anything we read? Follow chains of citations to their source — as very few do — and “facts” often are not as they seem. Anton Howes thinks he’s found history’s version of psychology’s replication crisis.
The brilliant story of how a Romanian “philosopher-mathematician” legally gamed the lottery and won multiple times in multiple countries.
A Cornell study found AI machines, while adept at generating jokes, can’t understand why they’re funny. On a multiple choice test, the large language model chose the correct explanation of why a New Yorker cartoon caption was funny two thirds of the time. Humans got it right 94% of the time.
Sadiq Khan isn’t the first left leaning politician to incur voter wrath as a result of environmental taxes, notes Paul Bledsoe in an article for the Progressive Policy Institute. Clinton and Obama both suffered heavy mid term defeats after proposing energy hikes. Democrats eventually found a new approach: the Green New Deal. Essential to the GND was that it made things cheaper, not more expensive. Candidate Biden adopted versions of many of its policies and made them law once in office. Bledsoe says there is room for Starmer to do the same. “There is little moral or political justification for moderate income voters to pay onerous taxes like the London Ultra-low Emissions Zone fees,” he says. The goal instead, should be to “reduce the costs of cleaner technologies by stimulating innovative investment so clean sources are more affordable.”
A stirring defence of Gen-X from Harper’s Magazine.
Mark Thompson, former boss of the BBC and New York Times, is the new CEO of CNN. Mark has written a book on rhetoric - Enough Said - which is on our shelves and which our James worked on at Thompson’s literary agents. An elegantly written argument about how technological and social trends have weakened the force of public language. We recommend it. This interview with the BBC’s Amol Rajan is also worth your time, particularly on his turnaround of the New York Times.
Ange the orator: How Tottenham’s gruff new Australian manager uses rhetoric to fire up his team. (£)
Interesting Economist article on the revival of Tolstoy in Putin’s Russia. (£)
A surprisingly entertaining skip through the history of corporate presentations, with a focus on PowerPoint. After his invention conquered the world, PowerPoint creator Robert Gaskins — son of a Renaissance scholar — lamented: “more business and academic talks look like poor attempts at sales presentations.” His 1984 two page proposal can be viewed here.
New from us
Zach’s essay on the spirituality of DH Lawrence.
Phil back in The Times with a column on the left’s global struggle to inspire amid financial scarcity.
Phil’s in-depth discussion of Martin Luther King’s iconic speech on Times radio. Listen from 1.03.
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At The Draft we’re specialists in writing and rhetoric. We help businesses and public figures make their case more persuasively. If you could use our help, get in touch. And if you enjoy First Draft, forward it on. Thanks for reading.