I continue to get excellent speechwriting tips from Richard Dowis’s The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write One, How to Deliver It. Today, I’d like to share with you his approach to using statistics in speeches.
Dowis writes, “Sometimes statistics just need to be compared with something that the audience can more easily relate to. For example, a billion is a number that is almost impossible for the typical person to comprehend. And a trillion – well, that really boggles the mind. So if you refer to a trillion dollars, you might as well be speaking a foreign language. Your audience just won’t be able to grasp it.”
He cites a dry quote from a speech on the cost of the Federal government’s anti-poverty efforts: “Since President Johnson launched his idealistic War on Poverty in 1965, this country has expended a whopping $5.4 trillion on programs for the poor. That’s a lot of money.”
Dowis suggests that with a little more thought and research, the speechwriter could have dramatized that statistic in this way:
“Since President Johnson launched his idealistic War on Poverty in 1965, the country has spent $5.4 trillion on programs for the poor. How much is $5.4 trillion? Well, if you had that amount today, you could buy every farm in the United States. You could also buy every factory and every office building. You could become a communications magnate that would make Ted Turner look like a piker. You could own every radio and TV station and every telephone company in the country. You could also buy every retail and every wholesale business, every hotel, every power company, every airline, every railroad, and every trucking company.
“And with the money left over after all those purchases, you could buy the nation’s entire commercial maritime fleet.”
Now, that’s got my attention.
Dowis cites part of another speech, this one given by an oil-company executive to the Society of Management Accountants, in which the concept of “parts per trillion” is vividly explained.
“Advances in technology enable us to measure things that we could never measure before. Scientists, for example, are now able to speak in terms of parts per trillion. One trillionth is an awfully small number. One trillionth of the distance to the earth’s moon is 1.5 hundredths of an inch. That’s roughly like comparing the thickness of a human hair to the distance traveled one way by the Apollo astronauts.”
These are excellent examples of how we can make speech statistics “snap, crackle and pop.” I know next time I include statistics in a speech, I will look for creative ways in which to express them.
How about you?
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Here’s a story i like to tell in my writing seminars to make the same point.
Every year about 150 million babies are born around the world, give or take. Now, that happens to be equivalent to the population of Turkey and Egypt combined. But how helpful is that if you’ve never been to Turkey or Egypt?
Try looking at it in a way people can relate to – and time is often an effective device to use. In this case, by dividing 150 million babies by 365 days, then by 24 hours and then by 60 minutes and so on, you arrive at the fact that every second of every day, just under five new babies are born. Now that is something people can understand.
And then, depending on how friendly the group is, I often point out that if five babies are born every second, that means at least 10 adults are having more fun than we are right now.