Some folks can stand to listen to the President talk … and some find it refreshing.
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Great piece in the Washington Post by Barton Swaim author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics.”
His basic conclusion: “The most distinctive thing about Trump … is the structure of his language.”
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Swain says that Trump — nnlike most politicians –doesn’t speak in political rhetoric; he speaks in punchlines – short jabs, not convoluted passages. He lays it out there and let’s you buy in or opt out.
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For context, Swaim argues that “most modern politicians are habitually careful with their language.”
They play defense … knowing that all of their words and sentences will be dissected by political opponents and the mainstream media.
Accordingly, their syntax “tends to abstraction. “
They speak less about particular things and people — bills, countries, identifiable officials — and more about “legislation” and “the intelligence community” and “officials” and “industry” and “Washington” and “government.”
And, their long, flowing sentences are very complex, using “a high number of subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases — “over the last several years,” “in general,” “in effect,” “what people are telling me,” and so on.
The problem: “When they rely too heavily on abstractions, when they avoid concrete nouns, when all their statements seem always hedged by qualifying phrases, they sound like politicians, in the worst sense of the word.
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Trump’s language is different.
Trump “speaks in simple sentences, grammatically and conceptually … with very few of the complicating phrases you hear from an ordinary politician … He makes no effort to hedge his statements” … and, tends to hyperbole for emphasis.
And, Trump’s sentences usually “withhold their most important word or phrase until the very end.”
Pop, bang … here’s the takeaway … “fantastic”, “terrific”, “tremendous” …got it?
Trump’s sentences “get even shorter when he lapses back into his campaign boilerplate. “
His sentences sometimes contract to less than fifteen syllables … little more than a subject, a verb, and usually a direct object.
What makes his words effective is that they don’t sound like political speech.
Swaim ‘s overall observation: “For people who’ve grown weary of politicians using vague and convoluted language to lull or impress their listeners, to preserve their options and to avoid criticism, Trump sounds refreshingly clear and forthright.”
Trump may be wrong … or maybe even goofy … but he lays it out short and sweet … and lets people decide if they want to buy in.
Some dogs eat the food, some don’t …
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May 8, 2017 at 11:54 am |
The other side of the argument – also expounded upon by the Washington Post – is that his communication style is a disability:
“It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na&utm_term=.83fe46163bc6
March 10, 2018 at 2:17 pm |
As a speech/language pathologist (retired) I firmly believe that Trump has a language disorder. I believe that he shows dysnomia or word finding deficits as well as expressive language disorganization. I wrote a piece about it the morning after his nomination, while listening to his thank you speech. (Here is the link if you’re interested. http://www.liberalamerica.org/2016/07/22/this-speech-expert-thinks-trump-has-a-disorder-heres-why-video/)