A study of effective and ineffective presidential campaign speaking
This article seeks to isolate factors associated with effective and ineffective campaign speeches made by Adlai E. Stevenson in 1956. To distinguish effective from ineffective speeches, the author solicited the judgments of 105 campaign associates, Democratic and Republican politicians, journalists, and students of public address. Eighty‐seven replies were received and sixty‐four were sufficiently complete for analysis. There was high agreement that six speeches were effective and six ineffective. Factors associated with effectiveness (their opposites with ineffectiveness) included the following: single issue discussed; relatively uncontroversial subject; constructive material emphasized and refutation de‐emphasized; responsive and sympathetic audience; speaker spent great deal of time editing and revising but little on basic draft; revisions were to clarify and identify with audience rather than to qualify remarks; emphasis on solutions rather than problems; introductions contained humor, irony, and sati...
6 pages, 5 figures.-- PACS nr.: 43.58.Dj.-- Communication presented at: Forum Acusticum Sevilla 2002 (Sevilla, Spain, 16-20 Sep 2002), comprising: 3rd European Congress on Acoustics; XXXIII Spanish Congress on Acoustics (TecniAcustica 2002); European and Japanese Symposium on Acoustics; 3rd Iberian Congress on Acoustics.-- Special issue of the journal Revista de Acustica, Vol. XXXIII, year 2002.