Bukit Batok Toastmasters Club: A Twenty-Minute Tour through the History of Rhetoric

On 3^rd August 2019, I dropped by Bukit Batok Toastmasters Club for a short language workshop, my 23^rd club visit on the 34^th day of the Toastmaster year.  Due to work and personal commitments, I was only able to attend for my own segment before leaving early.  My thanks go to Club President Tony Lim, DTM, for having me.

Rhetoric and the Development of Civilisation

In my twenty-minute segment, I gave an overview of rhetoric and its role in shaping civilisation itself, citing from memory a handful of the most historically significant speeches in modern political history.  These included President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Berlin Address, delivered on 26^th 1963, containing the line “Ich bin ein Berliner,” a declaration of solidarity with West Berlin at the height of Cold War tension.  They included Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 28^th August 1963.  They included Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill’s address to the House of Commons on 4^th June 1940, commonly remembered by its closing vow that Britain would never surrender, delivered as the Dunkirk evacuation concluded and invasion appeared imminent.  And they included Malcolm X’s landmark address on the historical distinction between the house “nigger” and the field “nigger”, delivered as part of his 1963 “Message to the Grassroots” speech, one of the sharpest pieces of political rhetoric produced during the American civil rights era.

Why the Craft Behind Them Matters More Than the Fame

I went into detail on why each speaker chose the words he chose, the manner of delivery, how each connected with his audience, and the effect each speech produced.  None of these four men succeeded by accident.  Kennedy’s line worked because a single foreign phrase, delivered with the correct German pronunciation, collapsed the distance between an American president and a besieged European city in four syllables.  King’s repetition of “I have a dream” eight times across the speech is a textbook use of anaphora, the same device Kennedy himself relied on in his inaugural address two years earlier.  Churchill’s speech built a rising rhythm across successive clauses, “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds,” so the House of Commons would feel the resolve accumulate rather than merely hear it stated once.  Malcolm X’s speech drew its force from a sustained historical analogy, precise enough that the audience could map every detail into the political situation he was describing.  We then considered how Toastmasters can apply the same rhetorical and psychological techniques, at considerably smaller scale, to move an audience toward a position and construct a more convincing argument.

Eric Tan, DTM, then wowed the audience with his explanation of rhetorical devices and how to deploy them, serving as Language Evaluator for the day.  A workshop on rhetoric followed immediately by a language evaluator applying that same rhetoric in real time is exactly the kind of structure that turns a lecture into a lesson the room retains.

---

Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters