The Spoken Word
May 18, 2012
It’s that time of year again, when school and college graduation speakers and their speeches make news. That time of year when I think most about public speaking.
I enjoy a great speech. I don’t have to agree with the content: if a speech is well constructed and both articulately and passionately conveyed, I’ll listen intently and get pleasure from hearing it.
Sadly, in much the same way that written communication is being castrated by the likes of texting and tweeting, full-bodied speeches are being reduced to a series of soundbites to fit television newscasts and even briefer “reporting.” Because politicians or comedians (if there’s a difference) tend to pounce on and poke fun at one line of a speech, today’s most articulate public speakers seem reluctant to chance a creative metaphor or to stretch an argument beyond conventional thought and expression.
I do recognize that it is important to not confuse rhetoric with results, or worse, to miss the follies that have often flowed from fine words and flowery phrases.
But still, l like the spoken word. Where the speaker has spent time thinking about how the words sound, alone and in combination. A speaker who uses stories to tell a story. A speech that draws from other places and times to help us understand here and now, and to help us consider where we’re headed next. And of course, a speech that’s brief – one when the speaker finishes just before the listener, who still has something to ponder when the speaker leaves the podium.
Limitations of Rules
November 15, 2013
Those who make rules ought to have knowledge of the limitations of rules, lest they overreach and over-regulate.
Dov Seidman writes in how: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything: “Rules fail because you cannot write a rule to contain every possible behavior in the vast spectrum of human conduct. There will always be gray areas, and therefore, given the right circumstances, opportunities, or outside pressures, some people might be motivated to circumvent them. When they do, our typical response is just to make more rules. Rules, then, become part of the problem.”
The NCAA is under constant criticism for its voluminous rule book which seems to pry into myriad of daily activities of athletes, coaches, boosters and others with so many rules it’s impossible for people to know them all. So university athletic departments must hire compliance officers to guide people – effectively absolving the people in the trenches from knowing the rules and committing to their adherence; and the NCAA office must hire investigations to sort through all the allegations of wrongdoing.
While much trimmer than the NCAA Manual, the MHSAA Handbook is much larger today than its original versions. Still, every year in December when the MHSAA staff conducts a series of meetings that kicks off a six-month process of reviewing theHandbook, there is a concerted effort to “make the rules better without making the rule book larger.”
We know that unless the rules address a specific problem and are written with clarity and enforced with certainty, rules do more harm than they do good. “This,” according to Seidman, “creates a downward spiral of rulemaking which causes lasting detriment to the trust we need to sustain society. With each successive failure of rules, our faith in the very ability of rules to govern human conduct decreases. Rules, the principal arm of the way we govern ourselves, lose their power, destroying our trust in both those who make them and the institutions they govern.”