Over the years, comedy scriptwriter Heidi Ellert-McDermott must have put thousands of words into mouths more famous than hers. But even she didn’t find it easy to stand up and make a speech at her own wedding.
“Even though I felt like I’d written a good one, I was still surprised on the day that I was nervous,” she recalls. “I suddenly found myself thinking, ‘Whoa, it’s my turn’ and the nerves overwhelmed me. It’s only now that I understand a few techniques people should use – and one of them is not alcohol.”
A wedding is one of the few times even those genuinely terrified of public speaking can’t decently get out of, a time-honoured trial of nerves for the self-conscious. But the growing willingness of women to opt in even when tradition allows them to duck out – think Meghan Markle proposing her own toast after marrying Prince Harry this spring – suggests a wider cultural shift. To have a voice, to speak up rather than sit there mute, feels increasingly charged and significant. And not just for women, but for anyone who might previously have struggled to be heard in public life.
“The good thing about a bride’s speech is there are no rules. You can choose to take on some of the duties of the groom or just do something off the wall – tell a story, do a poem, whatever,” says Ellert-McDermott, who now runs Speechy, an agency producing bespoke wedding orations that is receiving an increasing number of inquiries from brides-to-be. “We all know the statistics about how few female speakers there are at conferences. Well, this is one area where women actually do have the control and can put themselves on the lineup – and that’s why it’s disappointing when brides don’t even consider it.”
Public speaking can sound like a rather stuffy skill, redolent of dreary Rotary Club dinners and those polishing future ministerial CVs at Oxbridge. (William Hague, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, the education secretary, Damian Hinds, and universities minister, Sam Gyimah, are all former Oxford Union presidents; for the sake of diversity, former leader Michael Howard was president of its Cambridge equivalent.) This kind of formal oratory isn’t dead, of course; just think of Johnson packing in the crowds on the party conference fringe or the hitherto obscure attorney general Geoffrey Cox QC’s positively Shakespearean warm-up speech for Theresa May a few weeks ago. But the bad news for the one in four who (according to a 2014 survey by Chapman University) is frightened of public oratory is that speaking and presentation skills matter well beyond the obvious fields of politics and the bar. They regularly come close to the top of employer wishlists when hiring and, if anything, matter more for the self-employed when pitching for work, money or just a higher profile in a world where the art of self-promotion is constantly evolving.
Twenty years ago, TED was a fairly obscure annual technology conference held in Vancouver. Now it is a global brand, its 20-minute talks from experts on everything from architecture to the female orgasm downloaded more than a billion times. From podcasts and vlogs to pop-up feminist salon nights where anyone can take the mike, Generation Z is developing new ways to speak, debate, argue and raise professional profiles.
“Some people are wary of being the person who loves the sound of their own voice, but I think that has become quite old-fashioned now,” says Viv Groskop, the standup comedian and author of the forthcoming How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking, who runs workshops coaching businesswomen on public speaking. “Now that you can broadcast 24/7 on YouTube or Instagram Stories, there’s a whole generation who are not afraid of their own voice and wouldn’t even understand the sort of 1950s concept of ‘don’t be the one who’s always talking out of turn’. People want to own the room but not be obnoxious about it, let other people have their turn too.”
What they do worry about, she says, is doing it memorably enough to be heard. “In this particular post-#MeToo moment, women don’t worry so much about what they’re going to say. They know exactly what they want to say and they’re going to say quite a bit about it. But they want to say it in such a way that it’s powerful.”
And that raises serious questions about who has the skills and the opportunity to speak up. In theory, anyone can just nominate themselves to do a TED talk, or chip in at a meeting. In practice, it’s rarely that simple.
It’s a long time since Margaret Thatcher was advised to lower her voice by an octave if she wanted to be taken seriously but women may still have to work slightly harder than men to sound authoritative on a stage, according to research suggesting a lingering subconscious association between deep voices and leadership. (One study of 792 male chief executives, in affiliation with Duke University, found the ones with lower voices led larger companies and made more money.) Prejudice also lingers around regional accents, with the BBC political correspondent Chris Mason recently admitting he was told as a young journalist that he’d never get on the radio with his Yorkshire Dales burr, while the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, is dogged on social media by people suggesting her Mancunian vowels somehow make her sound “thick”.
There is, Groskop argues, still some unspoken resistance to being lectured by people who don’t fit a received idea of leadership. “Clearly Hillary Clinton is an excellent speaker but, as Jennifer Palmieri [her director of communications] has written, throughout Clinton’s career she received constant advice about how to change her speaking style. She would always reply, ‘If you could just tell me now who I need to talk like, tell me who’s perfect?’ – and there was never an answer.”
But fear of criticism is no reason to duck out of a presentation, she argues; the key is to find a speaking style that works for you. “It’s a terrible misnomer, this idea that somehow, if you’re scared of something, that’s an indicator you’re not suited to it. If you remember the speech Oprah gave at the Golden Globe awards [about #MeToo], which was universally acclaimed as brilliant, she said afterwards one of the reasons it was so good is she got so nervous she was dry mouthed. She could hardly move her lips and so she had to enunciate every syllable just to get through it.”
Planning in advance for how you’ll cope if something goes wrong helps considerably, says Groksop, as can simple tricks such as speaking more slowly than feels natural or doing breathing exercises before going on stage. But arguably the best means of conquering fear is practice, and the earlier it starts the better. Rhetoric, or the art of oral persuasion, was taught to ancient Greek and Roman students as an essential tool for taking part in a civic life, in a culture where written texts were still relatively new forms of communication. To this day, a nodding acquaintance with Cicero or Demosthenes remains a staple of a classic public-school education (the old Etonian Tory MP Jesse Norman once explained his alma mater’s dominance of politics by arguing that it excelled both at letting pupils take the initiative and at “things like rhetoric and poetry and public speaking and performance”).
Schools such as Eton no longer have a monopoly on perhaps the most valuable skill gained from learning to debate – developing the critical thinking skills needed to formulate an argument in the first place. Godwin junior school is a large primary school serving a relatively deprived area of Forest Gate, east London. More than a fifth of its pupils have free school meals and more than a third don’t have English as a first language. Yet, two years ago, it won the national schools debating cup organised by Debate Mate, a not-for-profit organisation that sets up debating clubs, hosted by students from top universities, in inner-city schools.
“Our school is about preparing pupils for lifelong success and a lot of research shows that it’s not just academic results that count. They’re very important, of course, but it’s also about children and young people being confident and articulate,” says the headteacher, Sine Brown. “Whether it’s job interviews, university interviews, starting your own business and wanting a loan to do so, it’s not just what you put on paper – it’s how you present yourself. The debating club helps develop confidence and articulacy and we’ve really seen the difference it’s made to our children.”
The club is popular, with about 80 children enrolled, and Brown thinks it has boosted their self-esteem. “It’s about our children knowing that they’re as good as anyone else, as capable of holding a room. To be 10 or 11 and stand up in front of a roomful of people you don’t know and present an argument not only teaches them a skill but gives them a mindset. The shift is, ‘I can do this.’ Those children you might not naturally think would gain a lot, you can see it in their confidence, in the way they hold themselves. You can see they feel they have a right to be heard.”
The bonus, she says, is that learning how to marshal evidence, and how to predict and counter opposing arguments verbally, has also improved the children’s written work. The advantage of teaching children not merely to speak in public but to debate is that it encourages different ways of thinking, according to Jessica Rolfe-Dix, a former teacher and managing director of Debate Mate.
“We have a thing called points of information – interruptions from the other side – and if you don’t accept them then you don’t get as high marks,” she explains. “You see them listening and then having to respond. That skill is one they’ll take into university or the workforce – it’s being able to not fold under pressure and to take a challenge in a non-confrontational way.” For some older children growing up in London’s “postcode wars” between rival gangs, she says, debating competitions are one of the few chances they have to mix safely with teenagers from other estates. For others, learning to anticipate and rebuff the opposition is an early exercise in staying one step ahead of the argument, which is perhaps why university debating clubs have traditionally been such a training ground for politicians.
The Labour MP and former education minister Kevin Brennan doesn’t have the traditional background some might expect for a former president of the Oxford Union. The son of a steelworker and a school dinner lady, both of whom left school before 16, he was the first child from his school to get into Oxbridge. But as Brennan puts it, “Being from south Wales I was used to the idea that you should be able to orate, to speak, to use language to persuade people. And one thing I did feel going into that environment as a young man was that most of the people who went to university weren’t geniuses, but a lot of them had been imbued with a great degree of self-confidence, not always justified, by their educational backgrounds.”
He resolved, he says “never to let that group of people lord it over others because of that confidence”. What the union gave him was the chance to learn from the cream of guest speakers. Brennan still remembers the former Tory MP Matthew Parris giving a “brilliant” speech about being gay, without ever specifically mentioning that he was gay (this was after all the early 80s), and the formative experience of debating alongside Neil Kinnock: “I learned from him how to use a little bit of humour to make your point – Neil was very good at that – and something about the rhythms of speech. He was of that old-time, chapel-preacher-from-the-valleys tradition, brilliant at speaking without notes.”
Brennan taught for a while after graduating and introduced a debating club to the comprehensive he worked in. “What I tried to do was to say, ‘Yes, it’s important to be able to present your views on world peace or whatever, but actually what really matters is if someone challenges your views, can you defend them?’ Because that means you understand them.” It is this ability to confront and dismantle counter-arguments, rather than simply clinging to the line, that arguably distinguishes political sheep from goats.
The classicist Mary Beard once argued, in a lecture for the Almeida theatre’s Figures of Speech series, that political oratory in the strict sense died when politicians stopped writing their own speeches. Audiences could, she argued, tell the difference between a leader articulating their own thoughts and one speaking someone else’s lines.
No modern leader has time to write all their own material, of course. Arguably, though, big set-piece political speeches no longer matter as much as we tend to think. Croaking through a party conference speech while the set collapsed around her did not finish Theresa May off in 2017, while this year’s infinitely better performance hasn’t magically revived her either. Donald Trump is a terrible speaker but, if anything, his fanbase sees that as a mark of authenticity.
Yet shining in a televised debate – as Nick Clegg famously did in 2010, or Nicola Sturgeon in 2015 – where politicians have to think on their feet can still be a game-changer. Short, highly emotive outbursts in parliamentary debates increasingly have the capacity to go viral, too. (Think Anna Soubry furiously pointing out that Brexiters on her own side won’t be the ones losing their “gold-plated pensions” if it all goes wrong or those clips of Jeremy Corbyn at prime ministers’ questions that do so well on Facebook.)
The prepared speeches that still make the hair rise on the back of one’s neck, meanwhile, tend to be those that aren’t just selling a policy or playing to the gallery, but actively confronting elements of the audience. Kinnock’s extraordinary denunciation of Militant Tendency; Hugh Gaitskell’s “fight, fight and fight again” speech on nuclear disarmament; Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that the “lady’s not for turning”; Robin Cook’s resignation speech over Iraq – all are examples of speakers tackling more than just an abstract argument.
“Speeches where you’re genuinely trying to persuade and change the opinion of the room are more electric,” says Brennan. “If you’re just preaching to the faithful and pushing their buttons, that’s a different thing from when there’s a transformational issue at stake and the leader is trying to lead people somewhere they didn’t know they wanted to go.”
And that’s perhaps the difference, in the end, between giving a great speech and genuinely owning the room. The former is nerve-racking for the speaker. But the latter is not wholly comfortable for the room. And that’s what makes the question of who gets to be on the podium in the first place so significant. Who, exactly, is now afraid of whom?
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