I often look at people who can’t get along with others, or who always seem to be at odds with society, and I say, “That person just doesn’t get it.”  What I usually mean by this is that they don’t understand that the world isn’t out to get them in particular.  The world is the world, and things happen that don’t align with what they expect should happen to them.  It’s nothing personal, but they deal with missteps or obstacles in a personal way.

It is those types of people that I think would be terrible orators if they were to choose that as a profession.  I say this because so much of what I have read in these last two weeks has dealt with understanding your audience when you’re speaking.  It seems that all of these great rhetoricians of the past have put a high emphasis on knowing your audience, understanding your audience, being able to talk to your audience, and able to elicit emotion from your audience.

When I think of people I have listened to, from teachers, to friends at a party, to baseball game announcers, the good ones are colorful.  They have life in their voice.  There is a spirit inside them that comes through when they speak.  The lectures are inspiring, the stories are vivid, and the reminder of hot dogs and soda is truly tempting.  There is a passion in the good orators that translates into rapt attention from the audience.  The emotion is there, and they appeal to their audience.

Perhaps this is what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Crassus mean when they say that a good orator must first have a natural affinity for speaking well.  If you have ever watched someone who was great at telling stories, just study what they do.  All of the mannerisms, mimicry, hand gestures, body language, etc. comes naturally for them.  I think that a person could study someone, say from a film or video, to try and copy their mannerisms or gestures or facial expressions.  In doing this, a person would probably improve their oratory skills through repetition and practice.

But, this person would still fail to be as good as the person they studied because those intangibles have been learned and are not an innate part of the person’s being.  The person’s spirit is not naturally attuned to react that way, so in a moment of lost thought or interruption from the crowd, this learned technique could very easily slip from them in a panic.  I believe this was one of the main arguments during Cicero’s writings, that once someone learns art, they have learned it.  Or they can study music, and attain to a high level of mastery in music.  But many people cannot just study rhetoric and become great orator’s.   There is an innate quality that must be there in order for a person to be the best.  We will never say about a good orator, “That person just doesn’t get it.”