A non-linear defence of President Trump
An impeachment trial begins with a bizarre speech – and classic lessons about setting a clear direction for the people you hope to influence
Castor: ramblin’ man
Bruce Castor is one of the defence counsels given the job of defending Donald Trump in the ex-President’s latest impeachment trial.
‘I think we had a good day,’ Mr Castor said after his opening speech. It’s fair to say this was a minority verdict. His address, full of non-sequiturs and digressions about his childhood and reference to ancient Greece and Rome, has been variously described as ‘rambling’, ‘inaccurate’, ‘folksy’, ‘incoherent’, ‘nonsensical’ and – wait for it – ‘non-linear’.
And they were the kinder reviews.
‘I thought I knew where he was going…and I really don’t know where he was going,’ said one Republican senator. Another: ‘he did not seem to make any arguments at all.’ This, she added, perhaps unnecessarily – for this, after all, is a trial – was ‘an unusual approach to take’.
I’ve had a similar feeling to those senators sitting through many, many business presentations. You think you’re on a straightforward path – then it peters out like a false woodland track and you’re back in the trees and the mud. The more bemused and bored you are, the more airily and self-confidently the presenter sails on.
That’s not very fair to your audience. You are their guide. They expect you to take them from A to B. You are allowed the occasional diversion – as long as it’s clearly signposted.
There are some guides – the charismatic, eloquent, inspirational types – who can get away with a ramble. They can take you where they will: you’ll follow them anywhere.
I don’t get the impression Mr Castro is that kind of speaker. I’m certainly not and you’re probably not either. Far better to decide on a route, show people where you want to get to – and take them there as speedily as possible.
‘Great presentations require diligent preparation and ruthless editing’
No logos – no impact. Forthwrite’s David Kean says the rues of presenting haven’t changed since Aristotle
Classical TED talks: Aristotle and Plato, by Raphael
Aristotle's work Rhetoric – ethos (your credentials), logos (facts and logic) and pathos (emotion) are the building blocks of persuasive argument.
In the top 500 TED Talks, according to Carmine Gallo's analysis in the Harvard Business Review (July 2019), the average balance between these elements is 65% pathos (storytelling), 25% logos and 10% ethos. Storytelling is the bit that makes us relate to the speaker. But if it is just pathos mixed in with ethos and no logos, you end up with a miasma of directionless, meandering anecdote. Or, as Alan Dershowitz said of Bruce Castor’s speech: ‘there is no argument’.
However good a storyteller you are – and Castor is no Spielberg – if there is no logos at the heart of it, you are only left with aimless ramblings. A story must make a point or else it is merely a shaggy dog story. And in an impeachment trial, you don't want that as your last line of defence.
On the other hand, when you already know the verdict will fall in your favour, why bother mounting a proper defence? Castor is either incompetent, supremely arrogant or perhaps, as one of his defenders put it, he just wanted to ‘lower the temperature’.
If so, he didn’t succeed in lowering his client’s. ‘Multiple people tell me Trump was basically screaming as Castor made a meandering opening argument that struggled to get at the heart of the defence team's argument,’ said CNN's chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins.
Whichever it is, Castor's meandering is a sobering reminder of the inescapable fact that great presentations – written or verbal – require diligent preparation and ruthless editing. If you just stand up and seemingly make it up as you go along, you may think you are being inspirational and off-the-cuff brilliant, but the sombre reality is, you leave your audience befuddled and irritated.
It pays to prepare.
A tribute to our founder
Mark Jones writes: I’ve just submitted my VAT return. To begin with, I received an automated email from my accountant. In response, I uploaded my bank statements and payment schedule to an online portal. Finally, I sent photographs of my receipts and invoices to a digital storage and sharing app.
At no point was any writing required, apart from a short note from me hoping my accountants got the data okay. Even that short sentence was not strictly necessary –not necessary, but, given my technical skills, prudent.
Accounting is one area of human activity where the craft of writing is now more or less irrelevant. Even ‘creative accountancy’ has less to do with being clever with words than being cunning with balance sheets and choosy about offshore jurisdictions.
Before we writers get all superior, however, we might need to bear in mind this fact: without accountants, we wouldn’t exist.
Or is it an accountant, singular?
In 2012, the people behind the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time produced a special series of programmes called The Written World.
(I’m a bit of an In Our Time junkie. It was the brainchild of the broadcaster and IoT presenter, Melvyn Bragg, and designed as a riposte to the persistent idea that the BBC is ‘dumbing down’. The programme is certainly an intellectual challenge. It’s also the best thing to listen to on a long-haul flight. Either it makes you brainier or it sends you to sleep: a win-win).
You can find The Written World series on BBC Sounds. It traces the history of writing from its origins and the influence it’s had on our wider intellectual evolution.
Those origins were in Mesopotamia somewhere around 3400 BC. We (or rather Melvyn and a curator) begin the story in the British Museum talking about cuneiform script and the idea an official in what is now southern Iraq had to better record and account for stocks and stores.
Using a reed stylus and a clay tablet, his system of characters would evolve into cuneiform, the world’s first writing system.
The tablet was handy: it fitted in the hand. Over 5000 years later, I worked with a tablet and a stylus too. I wonder if the inventors of the Palm Pilot, launched in 1997 as the latest and whizziest piece of digital technology, knew they were returning to the very oldest form of written communication? (Or that they’d be obsolete within a few years?)
The Palm Pilot: ancient technology
I say that official was a ‘he’: it almost certainly was a ‘he’. Or was it a ‘they’? It plays to our sense of romance and narrative to imagine a single genius suddenly working out a way to communicate complex interactions to his fellow humans. Yet all over the world, from China to South America in the following centuries, groups of people independently discovered scripts and ways of writing. Perhaps writing predated our Mesopotamian official too. But he happened to live in an arid part of the world and use a material that is easily preserved in the dry, hot air.
But let’s stick to romance and narrative. Let’s raise a libation to the true founder of Forthwrite and of any enterprise dedicated to the art of writing: here’s to the Anonymous Iraqi Accountant.
Music for writers
Elbow
Good writers know there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition (under, with, up etc). There is no good reason not to.
The most famous rebuttal to the pedants who avoid the End-Prep at all costs is usually attributed to Winston Churchill. The story goes that a Foreign Office official rewrote a Churchill sentence to avoid this apparent sin. The great man scribbled on the draft, ‘this is the kind of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put’.
This could well be a case of misattribution. It is nevertheless the kind of thing a master of plain English like Churchill would say.
Which brings us to the indy rock band Elbow.
In their 2008 song, Grounds for Divorce, you get this line:
There’s a hole in my neighbourhood down which of late I cannot help but fall.
That contorted syntax seems to have been written by a native German speaker (the verb at the end thing) with a penchant for Latin.
And yet – the line is also rather beautiful. The less convoluted English alternative is nothing like as good:
There’s a hole in my neighbourhood which I can’t help falling down of late.
I’m afraid, Mr Churchill (or whoever), for poets and lyricists some slack we may on occasion have to cut.
Finally….a prince among writers
It was when I was still a juvenile future constitutional figurehead substitute that I first became sensitised by mother-tongue abuse awareness.
This is the Prince of Wales, writing in support of the Plain English campaign. (His mode of expression is ironic).
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