If there is one topic that I am totally clueless about, it is politics. Yet when I was watching Barrack Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa caucuses, I swear I became smarter. The message is simple (”Yes, we can!”) yet powerful. The writing is direct yet poetic. The delivery is forceful yet friendly. Though we now know that the speech is scripted by some genius, Barrack made it his. I urge you to set aside ten minutes to watch the video because you will see one timeless technique at work here. It is the same technique that was cleverly harnessed by famous oratorical speakers like Martin Luther King (in “I have a dream” speech) and JFK (in Ich bin ein Berliner speech).

That technique is repetition, or more specifically the power of three. In Garr’s post, he pointed out that repetition can “help [a speaker] tie the theme together and it [also] creates clarity for the listener”. It gets better. When a particular message gets repeated in multiple ways, it becomes sticky, which means that the audience remembers better. In the case of Barrack, this is extremely important since the success of his campaign boils down to how well Americans know him and how well Americans remember his stand.

There are many instances of repetition. Here are some of them.

Barrack started his speech with a set of three.

They said this day would never come.
They said our sights were set too high.
They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose.

Aren’t you curious to hear what he say next? Here’s the next three lines that follow. Another set of repetition.

But on this January night, at this defining moment in history…
You have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.
You have done what the state of New Hampshire can do in five days.
You have done what America can do in this new year, 2008.

This one is more subtle.

And while I’m at it on thank yous, I think it makes sense for me to thank…
the love of my life,
the rock of the Obama family,
the closer on the campaign trail.

Closer to the end, Barrack broke the set of three with a set of five instead, which is oddly similar to what Martin Luther King Junior did with his “I have a dream” speech. Let’s take a look.

Hope is what I saw in the eyes of the young woman in Cedar Rapids who works the night shift after a full day of college and still can’t afford health care for a sister who’s ill. A young woman who still believes that this country will give her the chance to live out her dreams.

Hope is what I heard in the voice of the New Hampshire woman who told me that she hasn’t been able to breathe since her nephew left for Iraq. Who still goes to bed each night praying for his safe return.

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom’s cause.

Hope — hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

Notice the common theme here is HOPE. Now for Martin Luther King Junior, his sub-theme at the ending paragraph is “letting freedom ring”. Let’s see how he apply the repetition technique.

So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that;
let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!
Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

So how do I apply this technique to my speech? Simple. For your next speech, identify the theme or the message. For example, you want to talk about the potential value of free time. Instead of coming out with one example, come out with three to reinforce your point. Something like this:

A tired-out rail-splitter crouched over his tattered books by candlelight or by fire-glow, at the day’s end; preparing for his future, instead of snoring or skylarking like his co-laborers. Abraham Lincoln cut out his path to later immortality in his spare time.

A down-at-heel instructor in an obscure college varied the drudgery he hated by spending his evenings and holidays in tinkering with a queer device of his, at which his fellow teachers laughed. But he invented the telephone in his spare time.

Notice how the point (potential value of free time) sticks better.

You can even pick a question in your next speech and then create another two more parallel questions. For example, if you have this question “Did you waste your life trying to live somebody else life?” This question could follow with:

Did you waste your life by putting your dreams on hold and spending your precious time doing the things that you don’t even like?

Did you waste your life by doing everything else, except spending quality time with your loved ones?

Got it? Now your turn!

Cheers,
Eric Feng
Your Public Speaking Coach

For the full transcript, click here

For the full video, click here.

If you are busy and you do not have 10 mins to spare, watch the best part of the video.

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