Effective Efficiency: Your Presentation Can Be the Next Gettysburg Address

The Gettysburg Address, made by President Lincoln mid-Civil War, dedicated a prominent battlefield as a cemetery for Union soldiers. Not exactly the event you’d expect to spawn one of the most famous speeches ever, huh? It came 11 months after the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared ending slavery an explicit purpose of the Union’s involvement in the war, and it was delivered in under three minutes. What made this speech so memorable?

Here’s what we know:

1) It’s packed with weighty allusions.

This powerful presentation opens with “fourscore and seven years,” a Biblical reference that would have been familiar and authoritative to an 1863 audience. It recalls both the Revolution (“fourscore and seven” translates to 87, and 87 years earlier, America was born) and the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”).

2) It’s simply structured.

It begins with a nod to the recent past, reminding the audience that this is a freedom struggle, and we were here, embroiled in a similar fight, less than a century ago. But by employing Biblical phrasing, it also evokes the historical/archetypal past, subtly reminding everyone that this struggle is noble, epic, and universal.

Then it mentions the present. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war.” Now, at this moment, young men are dying so that this nation can endure.

Finally it conjures the future. “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

The end. Straightforward and powerful. We were there, we are here, this is where we will be if we keep at it.

3) It ends with a call to action.

And a call to action may be the most important part of any presentation. Why would your audience do what you want, if you don’t ask them to? (Seriously, how often do “tasks” just occur to you, and how much more often do you do things because your significant other/boss/pesky in-law asks?)

In Lincoln’s case, at the height of the Civil War, he urged his fellow citizens to stay energized and keep sacrificing. “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

4) It’s effectively efficient.

The Gettsyburg Address is roughly 270 words and 10 sentences long. Many of those words are repetitive (“we” and “here” are used 22 times) and few of them have more than two syllables. No one needs a dictionary to understand. No one feels dumb. Lincoln’s words are common and his points, precise.

(The day’s keynote, Edward Everett, spoke for over two hours. Our attention span is about 20 minutes, so of course no one remembers what he said.)

We know that in the Gettsyburg Address, not a single word was wasted (too bad Lincoln was a few centuries short of Twitter), but what we don’t know is…

5) What exactly were those 270 words?

We have Lincoln’s drafts and multiple transcriptions in different newspapers, but these copies don’t match. Sometimes the word-count is 270, sometimes 272.

Guess what? It doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that ten of the most famous of those words weren’t even proprietary. (According to the Washington Post, they came from a prologue to a 1384 translation of the Bible.)

What matters is that those ten words—“government of the people, by the people, for the people” –will be forever associated with Lincoln and with his vision of a more equitable nation. We consider those words his, despite their being borrowed. Those words, and the concepts of freedom and democracy they denote, have become Lincoln’s legacy.

The last phrase of the last sentence of the Gettsyburg Address is this: “That government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

No. 16 knew how to land a punch, didn’t he?

Okay, so the takeaway for your own presentation:

1) Reference with emotional resonance.
2) Find the “here” in “there” and “where.”
3) Be clear and concise.
4) Ask for action.
5) Land that punch (even if it’s with a borrowed glove).

And if you need help in launching or landing your punch, that’s where we come in. At Ethos3, we would love to work with you to structure a presentation that’s as eloquent and meticulous (and nearly as memorable!) as the Gettysburg Address. But it’s up to you to be proactive (hey, here’s our call to action!) and get in touch.

Remember, even Lincoln had a silent partner. We want to be your John Wycliffe (hello, the 14th century Bible translator?).

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