Words: Catherine Bray
Illustration: Jem Robinson

Persuasion will take you far in this world, whether your aims are the noble betterment of mankind, the making of cold, hard cash, or some as-yet-unimagined hybrid. From Martin Luther King Jr to David ‘the Father of Advertising’ Ogilvy, a talent for combining language and delivery to get people on your side is well worth having. With this in mind, we gathered some insider tips and tricks from a lobbyist who writes speeches for rhetoric’s man of the moment and potential future US president, Barack Obama.

When it comes to making speeches, those with the position and public speaking skills to carry them off aren’t always the ones who put pen to paper in the first place – which is where the writers come in. Over dinner in Soho I meet Jacob Rigg, who through his work for the Liberal Democrats and American organization Democrats Abroad, has come to write for Barack Obama, a politician hailed as much for his magnetic style and persuasive speeches as his liberal policy agenda.

Jacob himself fits well into the new-style politics with which the Obama campaign is associated. Having attended state-school followed by Greyfriars Hall, Oxford, at 26 he’s much younger than you might expect of a man playing this kind of role both in UK politics and 2008’s highly-competitive Democratic presidential candidacy race.

And unlike some who would exclusively stress the scientific side of politics, citing poll data and column inches as the sole indices of a persuasive campaign, Jacob is prepared to allow a breath of the artistic side of life into his work, describing speechwriting as like “poetical storytelling.”

Softly-spoken, with a tendency towards genial self-deprecation, Jacob slightly underplays the extent to which his own initiative is responsible for his achievements – a trait he shares with the man for whom he wrote the influential Ebenezer Baptist church speech Radio 4 praised as up there with JFK’s ‘Ask not…’

Obama’s speeches are often compared to those of Luther King Jr, but Jacob reveals you’ll need to go further back in history than that to find the source of persuasive language. “People used to mock me for this,” he admits, “but if you’re interested in writing speeches, read Aristotle’s Rhetoric. For most of the stuff that’s out there, rudimentary tricks, Aristotle cornered the market thousands of years ago.”

It was Aristotle who first defined rhetoric as “the art of discovering, in a particular case, the available means of persuasion.” As Jacob puts it, “it’s great; there’s actually a handbook on it all,” though he acknowledges that “very few people have the willpower to drag themselves all the way through it.”

Willpower is a trait held in common by most politicians, but the overriding factor that has set the most persuasive ones apart over the last fifty years has been their skill at using burgeoning audio-visual mass media techniques. How do you go about presenting yourself well in the age of 24/7 rolling news?

“Obviously when you’re communicating through a television set, you’re communicating in different ways to people. When Ronald Reagan was president, he made a big thing over the fact that he was communicating with people in their living rooms, and often when you’re at a speech – David Cameron’s speeches are like this – they don’t seem that impressive face-to-face. He doesn’t get so passionate. He has bits where he does, but he understands that really the big influence in this country is on the people watching the six and ten o’clock news.”

Jacob contrasts this with the famous case of Neil Kinnock’s pre-election tub-thumping of 1992: “It went down amazingly well in Sheffield with the Labour voters, but he looked like a very irate mad bald man to everyone else on television. And a lot of people, perhaps over-blowing it slightly, cite that as one of the reasons he lost the election. Of course, Barack is a dream to work with in that his voice and demeanour are so suited to writing speeches with such melody.”

Tailoring presentation to medium then, is a key lesson. But what about content? “The struggle is to say something that an audience doesn’t want to hear, and then make them empathise,” asserts Jacob. “This creates an emotional resonance in a speech that many British politicians fail to create.”

These tensions between presentation and content, and between being TV-friendly and charismatic in person, make for a complex cocktail for the speechwriter to anticipate. “In one sense you’re trying to get a soundbite that journos, particularly television journalists, are going to pick up on,” Jacob admits. “But on the other hand, which isn’t necessarily the toughest part of it, you’re trying to get the crowd gee’ed up - and you’re mixing that with what people in their homes are going to be interested in.”

Unsurprisingly, Jacob finds that the writing process will also vary depending who will be delivering your speech. “When you’re writing a speech, the guy who’s giving it always has a certain style. A good speech for Barack is not a good speech for, say, [Lib Dem leadership candidate] Chris Huhne, who is a classic example of a bit more of a policy guy, but less inspirational in that rhetorical sense.”

‘Inspiration’ is a familiar word in the reams of writing about Barack Obama’s style. But it’s not all about charm, or at the other end of the spectrum, hard facts. In-between you’ll find the delicate art of formal technique; a balance of quantifiable tricks and more subtle, almost theatrical, writing tropes.

“The established techniques are things like lists of three,” Jacob notes. “This is what stand-up comedians call a turn-the-corner. It involves typically a list of three items followed by a fourth item, which is unexpected. Interestingly, no-one’s ever really done much research into why they’re compelling and other numbers aren’t.”

Jacob is keen to stress the creative side of this work. “Varying the rhythm of the speech is very important, and again, there’s very little research done on it, but one of the interesting things is the link between theatre, music and speechmaking. A speech isn’t just a piece of writing – it’s there to be given rather than read.”

Talking specifically about the Ebenezer Baptist church speech, Jacob suggests that “one of the things that speech did very well was varying the rhythm, in terms of there being a very clearly defined beginning, middle and end of the speech, which helps people know where they are. It’s like going to rowing trials at Oxford: they ask you to hop on a rowing machine, but don’t tell you how long to row for. Ten minutes feels like forever because you don’t know when it will end. The big mistake of many speechwriters is not signposting the structure of the speech – audiences switch off.”

Lastly then, if speechwriting is indeed an art, with what other arts does it share its key characteristics? And how can anyone writing a piece of persuasive writing, political or otherwise, extrapolate from that knowledge to improve their craft?

“It’s sort of like a musical composition,” is Jacob’s final take. “You’ve got the introduction, and you establish the ideas – and I’ve taken ideas from Solzhenitsyn, King Lear, and even a Lacoste advert before – so people kind of know what you’re going to talk about, so they’re intrigued. They wonder how you’re going to expand on that, and you end that section generally by changing the rhythm or pace of the speech.”

“Then have the middle where you’re expanding on those things, and then you summarise them at the end and come back to it: like a symphony. Still, I’ve got a long way to go before I can really tell other people about how to write well.”