Touro Communication Club Notes #41

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Now that both conventions are over, the Presidential campaign steps into high gear. Both Democratic and Republican candidates will hammer away at the other side while boosting their own policies. Although tiresome at times, this is the only way candidates can make their case to the voters. And here is where our interest in communication becomes very important.

Rightly or wrongly, most of us know the candidates only through a filter. A filter is what someone else says about a topic or person. A filter could be your parent, friend or colleague. However, the biggest filter in all this will be the media – TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, bloggers. The voter has to work hard to figure out through the media filter what the candidates stand for 0in specific terms.

For the Communicator, all your Communication tools need to operate overtime:

• Your listening skills must be very sharp,
• Separate YOUR emotions/ bias/prejudice toward to candidate from what he/she says.
• Your ability to analyze the message (logos, pathos, ethos),
• In the analysis of the candidate’s message, do you separate logos from pathos from ethos and weighting the strength/weakness of each
• Discovering the impact of language choice on the message,
• Noticing and analyzing the evidence (type, source, reliability, accuracy)

(Some of you have that list I prepared for the debate club a while ago.)

• Notice the Non-verbals of the candidate. What do they do for/against the candidate?
• Observe the kind(s) of responses each gives to an interviewer (boiler plate/memorized or a considered answer).
• Notice how much adaptation the candidate gives to the local audience and/or interviewer.

As always in oral communication, so much happens at once. Once said, the moment is gone. It is hard for the untrained person to separate emotionally from the speaker. It is difficult to keep a clear sense of how he/she is answering questions or presenting their point of view to the audience.

But most of all, all of us “Communicators-in-Training” need to know what WE stand for, what WE believe in, what WE will support. Ultimately we are using our Communication tools to enrich our own world views and quickly recognize where we agree or disagree with another’s point of view. The process is a life-long journey.

Next time, I’ll write about my long conversation today with a new member of Congress, Yvette Clarke, of the 11^th District in Brooklyn. She replaced Major Owens.

Here's our schedule: (We are now in Room 610 @ 50 West.)

Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - 2 pm– The Communication Club will be meeting: Open Agenda.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 – 2 pm Room 610 (Note time and place change). Club – Open agenda for the moment – Possible topics: continuation of the Story telling/ Leadership discussion, the Presidential campaign, etc. There will be an upcoming film series co-sponsored by the Club and Mr. Mason’s office on Debate and Presidential Politics. Possible films might be “The Great Debaters” (2008) with Denzel Washington, “Recount” (2008), a fictionalized documentary about the 2000 election with Kevin Spacey and “The Candidate” (1972) with Robert Redford.

What happened on September 3, 2008 – SPAR D ebates

Present – Richard Green, Jetante Morris, Lorinda Moore, David Nussbaum, Drani Gabu, Olushile Akintade, Urmi Nath, Amina Bibi, James Millner and Hal Wicke

The ten people went through two exciting SPAR debates. The topics were:

“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”

Affirmative – David

Negative – Drani

To make the debate more interesting, the debaters were to use only social evidence.

David, arguing the Affirmative case, won the debate 5-1

The second debate topic was “Greed is good.”

Affirmative – Shile

Negative – Amina

This time, the debaters were to use only evidence from current events.

Amina, arguing the negative case, won the debate 5-2.

After the vote in each round, the “judges” analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of both debaters, followed by a self-critique by each of the debaters themselves.

Then the discussion expanded to a variety of issues, particularly the Presidential campaign. Not surprisingly, everyone shared their opinion, some more loudly than others. Hal tried unsuccessfully for the group to focus on what the strategy of each candidate had in mind when each presented a point.

Clearly the Communicators have much work to do to separate the issue from the strategy behind to choice of issue. As in all contests, political and sports, WHAT (action)is done on the court or field has to be separated with the WHY (or strategy) behind the action.

Hal Wicke