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| Kamala Harris speaking at the 2021 Leaders' Summit |
No part of a speech is more important than its beginning and end. Public speaking textbooks tell students to begin their speeches with an attention-getter. A stirring quotation, a story, a clever analogy, or, better yet, a startling fact can draw the audience’s attention to the speaker and her message. Harris began her brief speech with a series of startling, if not horrifying, facts about climate change’s terrifying progress:
“Here in the United States, the storms hitting our Gulf Coast are worse every year. The wildfires in my home state of California have grown in intensity. And of course, no nation or region is immune. Whether it is Western Europe, where heatwaves have made it very difficult to stay indoors while risking a health risk, or the Pacific Islands, where rising sea levels threaten to encroach on the land and homes of lifelong residents, or in Central America, where last year, two major hurricanes devastated entire communities.” [italics added]
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| Earth from a million miles away |
The startling facts that Harris cited were not only horrifying, but specific. She did not begin her speech with some boring, tedious generality like “climate change is hurting us.” To secure her audience’s attention, to drive home the Summit’s worldwide importance, she emphasized a series of growing climate problems. As a resident of the Gulf Coast, I found her first startling fact, the Gulf Coast storms, especially incisive. I lived through some of those storms.
Also, Harris cleverly mentioned climate hazards from across the world. Yes, she began with climate hazards in her own nation, but her brief paragraph traveled across the world. This was, after all, an international summit.
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Speech professor Alan Monroe based his famous Motivated Sequence on the ideas of psychologists William James and John Dewey. The Motivated Sequence points out that audiences act according to what gets their attention. A speaker talking about climate change, on Earth Day or any other day, must begin by focusing people’s attention. As she launched the climate summit on Earth Day in 2021, Harris’ startling, even horrifying facts directed the audience to the crises that faced us. Those crises still face us today, three years later, on Earth Day, April 22, 2024.
How a speaker can get people's attention
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P.S.: Enter "climate" in the search box on the right for other posts about climate change speeches.
by William D. Harpine
Copyright © 2024, William D. Harpine
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