Even the best of the speech is lackluster. Now turn to Cicero's Philippics, as translated by the wartime code breaker DR Shackleton Bailey 30 years ago, and published late last year by Loeb. Though much is long, and embedded with subclauses, vivid phrases abound:
From a post at Forbes by Trevor Butterworth. I disagree with the point he ultimately draws--Twitter may be, in many ways, absurd; but it may also hasten the inner ear to the voices and glories of the past.--because as much as I wish I could speak as Cicero must have, I don't necessarily think that we have to sound like Cicero every time we speak. If we could all be Shakespeare, we'd certainly appreciate a break from the rhetoric from time to time, and it's the writing i another style that would gain impact. Read the whole post to see what you think. I did appreciate this paragraph about imagery because earlier today I appreciated Martin Shovel's post about imagery in Martin Luther King's speeches. I confess that I must have been anticipating this thought
There is no question that President Obama has revived political oratory from a sorry state, one that indicts Democrats as well as Republicans, and one dictated not just by the cutting power of television sound bites, which shrunk presidential aspirations from 42 seconds in 1968 to seven seconds by 2000, but also by the willful abandonment of the debating chamber for chatting in the committee room. But many commentators pointed out that President Obama did not seem particularly happy giving his speech at West Point, and no wonder, when he had to declaim entire passages that vary so little in length and meter.
when I was disappointed with my own writing this afternoon precisely because the sentence patterns were so repetitive and monotonous.
Just by chance I turned to Tom Peters after I read Butterworth's post and found this appreciation of Twitter limits and style
The "mea culpa" refers to my absorbing "distraction" (attraction) during the trip. Namely, Twitter. First, I like Twitter as a communication tool, though I plead guilty as charged by some in terms of mostly using it as a one-way communication vehicle—no small sin. Second, I find the 140-character limit a magnificent challenge! I am in the "beginner's mind" mode—and I am definitely learning anew that "practice makes better," or so I assume and hope. I believe that one can have a full-scale "opinion piece" on a serious topic that occupies 140 characters or less. Hence, I am choosing mostly to use Twitter as a straightforward opinion registry, and am leaving the mega-link practice to many many many others. In short, there are a host of things I really really give a shit about—I've been saying my piece in as many settings as possible for over 35 years, and I'm not inclined to stop; as I recently tweeted, my "live stuff" has absorbed about 5 or 6 million miles and about 9,000 flight legs since 1973.