Hello, aspiring original orators. I want to discuss crafting an original oratory outline and really developing the core components. So this is just the first outline stage where you're going to give me the bread and butter, the core foundational blocks of your speech.
And then in the next outline stage, we'll start to focus on some of the more stylistic elements and the connective tissue and transitions and everything like that. So let's start out though, by making sure you understand those core components. And this is a...
very foundational stage of an original oratory. If you work hard on this stage and do this right, you're going to be super well situated to succeed for the remaining stages of this speech writing process. So just a couple of tips. First, continue to study original oratory national finalists and convert their speeches into outlines.
I'm going to be going through so many examples in this speech video. And what I'm hoping to do is to teach you how to study an original oratory. Because if you start doing this on your own, you will start to see the patterns of how an OO is structured and what makes for successful original oratories, both in terms of their organization as well as in terms of their writing. And so this video will help you to see the DNA structure of an OO so that you can start breaking them down yourself. And so I really recommend that you go and start doing this on your own.
I'll also have posted on Canvas some finalist speeches that I have converted into the actual speech text along with their outline form so you can see the actual structure of how they organize everything. Next, attend student coaching, get feedback from the varsity members, just really, really important. And I think original oratory especially helps and really benefits when you are conversing with somebody else and trying to Really explain your original oratory and its mindset. And once you try to do that explanation and have a conversation with somebody, you'll realize, oh, wait, okay, this doesn't really make sense. Or, oh, wait, this is really good and I want to pursue this more.
So I really recommend that. And number three, don't procrastinate. Don't procrastinate on an original oratory.
You will lead yourself into some serious problems if you do. So let's go into the mindset explanation. This is the first thing you will need on your outline. And the mindset explanation, I already went over it in the developing a topic stage, but I want to go over it again because it's so important and it's the area where I think novice OOers probably struggle most.
So you need to review examples and the explanation from the developing a topic video that I posted or that you watched for the previous set of steps. And I really recommend you go and rewatch that if you got comments on your topic proposal that indicated that your mindset explanation still needs tinkering. with still isn't quite superb. Make sure to incorporate that feedback.
That goes without saying. And this is what it should ultimately look like. All right. Two to five sentence explanation. You've seen this before.
Ideally, you have a catchphrase or a term to help the audience understand your mindset. And again, if it cannot be explained easily or directly in a sentence, then it's probably too complicated. For most novice OO mindset explanations, I get Kind of like a word barf of maybe five to seven sentences where you're explaining something abstractly about us not being good people or us being a little selfish or us stereotyping or doing something like that.
And it's not really clear or direct what the core issue is. You just kind of be you oftentimes just start generalizing general bad things that people do in a vague and nebulous way. And if that's what you're doing for the mindset, then it's not going to be a compelling speech.
Make sure you have a good expert to back you up and incorporate a direct quote. And you don't just want an expert saying that like, oh, yeah, sometimes we do. We we don't listen to other people's perspectives or we we end up stereotyping people.
Ideally, you have an expert that's talking about a phenomenon, a psychological phenomenon or a specific mindset or a specific societal attitude that is leading to problems. Again, you want that expert ideally to be someone who has written a long. form source about your topic.
I don't want to just see like psych today article backing up what your mindset is. You need to have a good, robust expert that is backing up the entirety of your speech and forming the foundation of it. So if you haven't found that yet, it's really important that you do because until you find that your speech will probably be flimsy and your mindset will probably be poorly defined.
Watch out for overly vague and vacuous mindsets. I already went over that. Um, if it's just kind of in general talking about bad things people do, but I don't, I don't have something concrete or direct or specific that I can sink my teeth into, that's going to be a problem. And finally, make sure it's unexpected. This is one I see novice original orators struggle with a lot.
You'll come to a mindset that you think causes problems, but it'll be something so obvious, like people are selfish. And the issue with a topic like that, as I explained in the Developing a Topic video, is that it's just people are either going to already agree with you, and thus it's going to feel boring, or it'll feel like it's something that's not solvable, right? And so what you want to do instead is either show me, one, a mindset that... On surface, seems like something that's good, that's something I can imagine myself doing and think on a pretty regular basis, oh, it's good that I embody this attitude or this mindset.
Or B, if it's something that is obviously bad, then you need to show me in unexpected ways how it is taking over society today. What are the forces that have led this mindset to become so pervasive in ways that I was completely blind to? So there needs to be some unconscious element of this mindset that is... surprising me about the ways that I myself would embody it.
Remember, your goal as an original orator is to ultimately persuade your audience, that means me, to change the way I think about something. So if I feel that I'm not implicated in the mindset or that the mindset is so obvious that I already know what you're talking about, then I'm not going to feel inspired to change anything about the way I live my life. So very, very, very important.
The other tip I would give you is to make sure that your mindset is something that you're not going to be afraid of. that everybody could imagine themselves doing, not just one segment of society doing. If your mindset is just talking about one side of the political spectrum or a very extreme set of people who are believing fringe ideas, then I'm not going to feel that this applies to me and thus I'm not going to feel inspired.
All right. So after you establish the mindset, the next organizational move that you need to make as an original Archer is to develop prongs. And you're going to need two prongs. So what is a prong?
A prong is a category of implications of your mindset. It's the way that your mindset affects society. So this obviously wouldn't be an original oratory topic, but let me just give you an example of what prongs could look like.
So let's say I'm trying to advocate that everyone should do their homework. And now I'm trying to offer two categories of implications of what happens when you don't do your homework. Perhaps one set of implications could be about you never mastering or understanding. the material. So one set of implications could be you'll never learn, right?
Homework is necessary for you to be able to learn and master new ideas and new skills. And the second prong, the second category of implications could be about the effects on your grade. If you don't do your homework, ultimately your grade is going to suffer tremendously, and that will have adverse implications on your future. So that's what you're doing with prongs.
You're trying to create categories of implications. They are not specific. concrete examples, all right? But instead, they are broader categories that will link many different concrete examples within them. So later in this video, I'm going to talk about how to do concrete examples effectively.
So you should think about your OO outline as being you have your overall mindset that will be in your introduction eventually. Then you'll have prong number one and prong number two. And within both of those prongs, you will have lots of concrete examples to demonstrate that abstract idea, that abstract category of the set of implications of your mindset. A speech is organized into two prongs, so you'll have two body paragraphs that establish two different ways that the mindset negatively affects society. Another way of thinking about it is, what are the two ways that the mindset pans out?
Finally, you'll develop prongs by grouping together similar concrete examples and finding the commonality. I think it'd be really hard to just sit down and be like, I'm going to think of two prongs out of nowhere, out of thin air. Instead, I think the best way to do it is to start grouping concrete examples together being like, wow, these set of problems all seem to be getting at one set of implications and these set of problems seem to be getting at another set of implications. So this is all very abstract and theoretical right now. I want to go through lots of examples.
So here, these are all from national finalist speeches. So J.J. Kapoor's speech, where storytelling society, the problem arises when our complex reality doesn't match the narrative. Too often, we let this oversimplified narrative structure our stories. or structure of our stories blind us to the complexity of the real world.
You guys know this, you've seen this. Now let's see, how did he organize his speech? Let's think a little bit more critically. So the first prong, he called it false narrativization, which is, and he said, the first way our love of narrative causes our perspective to go arise when we insist on viewing complex real world information through the narrative lens. That's where he talked about Gandhi.
That's where he talked about the historical simplification that occurs when we end up... oversimplifying the complex real-world information through a narrative lens. The second prong that he had, he called the happy ending myth.
And he said the second way our love of narrative causes problems is when we insist on finding a happy ending to our narratives, even when redemption is not possible. And he had lots of concrete examples here. What would be really good to do is to pause this video, go rewatch JJ's speech, and now that you understand what his two prongs are, look at all the concrete examples he puts beneath each of those prongs to demonstrate those points.
But notice that idea, happy ending myth and false narrativization, they are sounding like psychological concepts. They're almost like the mindset within a mindset. They are one of the phenomenon that help to explain the implications of the mindset. And then he can demonstrate with lots of concrete examples.
This makes the speech feel like we're learning new phenomenon throughout the entirety of the speech and allows you a lens through which to interpret concrete examples within it. Let's go to another prong or another example. So this was a speech from the speaker, Badri was her last name, and she talked about how we wrongly make false equivalences.
So this was her topic. Highly recommend you watch her speech if you haven't already. And her overall mindset was the idea that false equivalence is a fallacy where opposing ideas are equated, even if they're not equal. By doing so, we lose our ability to arbitrate between conflicting claims because everything is considered equally valid, even in the absence of evidence.
So false equivalency, the idea of when we compare two things, when they really shouldn't be compared, when we're comparing apples and oranges and they can't be compared. First prong, she said we use false equivalence to vilify. She said the first issue is that we make false equivalences in order to vilify those that we do not agree with.
Right. So to put down people that we don't agree with. Second, she said we use false equivalence to justify. And her point here is the issue that emerges is that we use false equivalencies as a way to justify problematic stances and behavior.
So notice both of these prongs. The first is about putting other people down through false equivalencies. And she talked about, for instance, now on comparing Trump to Hitler.
And then in prong number two, justifying really problematic stances and behaviors. And again, she had a lot of concrete examples within that prong to justify or to explain that idea of justification. So just trying to show you examples of how to organize prongs.
Again, it might feel a little bit abstract right now, but that's because I'm reducing the original oratory to the most abstract conceptual components, the overall mindset, and then the two prongs that will organize the speech itself. If you want these to make more sense, go look at those speeches that I posted on Canvas. I have these speeches converted into the full text and converted into outline forms as well, so that you can see exactly how the speakers deployed them.
I also recommend watching the speeches to see how they were performed. Prong number three, or example number three. This was a speech, this was Harris-Hosseini's speech. You all have seen this one.
We oversimplify the inherently complex with disturbing frequency, be it politically or personally. Gone is our appreciation of nuance and depth, replaced instead with a national appetite for soundbites and slogans. All right, oversimplification, we get it.
What were his two prongs? First, it was minimization. And he said, we often oversimplify issues and end up minimizing them and their solutions. This is about minimizing issues that should be more important and more at the front of our minds.
Second, he talked about marginalization. And he said, we don't just oversimplify to minimize issues, but also to marginalize the people we don't like or agree with. The first one was about marginalizing issues or sorry, minimizing issues.
And the second is marginalizing people. So notice how he grouped that there. Issues and people, minimization and marginalization.
Really helped to organize the speech. Example number four. This is from Avi Galati's speech on growth.
Great speech, really funny. Go watch it if you haven't already. He said, we prize growth for the sake of growth, demanding measurable, even malignant expansion at the expense of intangible enrichment and experience.
We perceive growth to be this ever-rising line that knows no boundaries, and we justify most behaviors as long as we grow in this way. So his mindset is all about our attitude towards growth. And so what was his first prong? His first prong was about stagnation. Okay.
The first way the problem pans out, Avi said, is that we believe if we are not noticeably moving up, then we're not growing. So that's the first set of issues. Overall mindset is we view growth or reprise growth for the sake of growth. We just perceive it to be this ever rising line. First problem that emerges is if we don't think we're growing, then we feel bad.
We feel that we're stagnating. And second is about values. This is the second way our problem pans out. When growth is continually upward, our values crash because before long, the only other place to go is downward.
So in this second. set of concrete examples, the second prong, Avi was getting at the idea that when we just value growth as continually being upward, we'll sacrifice our values. So the first one was about the psychological effects personally, when we feel that we're stagnating, when we're not growing.
The second one was about how we end up justifying bad things, or we end up abandoning our values in the name of growth. Good organizational techniques. One more example.
So this is Badri's other national finalist speech. where she talked about hatred being woven into the fabric of American life in ways that we don't understand. Her first prong was about our feelings towards hate. And she talked about here how we simply love to hate today more than ever.
Second prong was about our response to hate. And she said, my second concern is how we respond to hate. We do one of two things.
We either distance ourselves from it or ignore it entirely. So notice the first one is about our overall attitude. and our attachment to hate, and the second one is our response to hate when we see it.
So again, really good ways to organize the speech. So hopefully these prongs have helped you to understand organizationally there's a lot more going on in terms of the structure of an original oratory. And so coming up with these prongs is very very important to a successful OO. So now that you understand the prongs, I want to go into the concrete examples.
And remember, concrete examples is what you sprinkle into the body paragraphs or into the prongs themselves. So you'll have the overall mindset, you'll have two prongs, and then within each of those prongs, you'll have tons of concrete examples. So concrete examples are the current events, the societal problems, the stories, the anecdotes, et cetera, that illustrate the problems caused by your mindset.
You want to avoid overgeneralizations, just vague psych studies that make sweeping claims. end up not being nearly as effective as you drawing on concrete examples of events that we've all heard of in the news that help us to understand those events through a new lens or specific societal problems that are going on that are very concrete and direct. Those will always be better. So the more specific and concrete, the better.
The more abstract, nebulous, and kind of psych study, not as great. Now, a psych study can be good to kind of supplement an idea or to help us understand. why a certain phenomenon is occurring.
But if it's only psych studies, the speech will get pretty abstract and academic pretty quickly. Concrete examples must have explicit and compelling explanations why the mindset is the root cause of that example. This is a big place I see novices go astray, where they have a mindset, and then they're giving concrete examples, but I'm sort of sitting there wondering, wait a second, why does this mindset lead to this concrete current event or this concrete societal problem? the link there seems tenuous. And so that link between the mindset and the concrete example, really important.
And it's really important to have the cause and effect relationship in the right direction. You need to prove that the mindset is the cause of the example, not that the concrete example occurs and then results in the mindset, right? So if you're talking about hatred within society, you can't give some example of a division in society and then say, And that is leading to ever rising feelings of hatred. Instead, you need to show the opposite, that the hatred is what leads to serious problems in society, something like that.
Really useful to have evidence or an expert to back you up. But there's an art to this. You want to make sure that your explanations don't get overly lengthy.
Instead, the best thing to do, like if you were to be talking about a current mindset, right? And for instance, if JJ was talking about the dangers of storytelling, rather than giving me an example and then having an expert explain why that example is an example of storytelling and then connecting the dots between that and the mindset and having to have this big clunky five to seven sentence explanation. Instead, what could maybe be much more effective is just having a line from some prominent person like a politician that's embodying your mindset that so clearly reveals the mindset or embodies that mindset in and of itself.
I think Harris did a great job of this when he was giving examples of the way that people oversimplify issues. It's not like he needed to, you know, quote Tommy Lahren, explain that example, then bring in an expert that explained that Tommy Lahren was oversimplifying it. The example, the concrete quote from Tommy Lahren herself when she talked about immigration being like the way we lock our doors at night, was just so obviously an oversimplification of a complex issue that Harris didn't have to do a lot of heavy lifting.
So if you can find the right concrete examples that have really direct links to your mindset, then you don't need to over-explain them. And that's the ideal. That's the ideal. And so oftentimes, it's less about the concrete societal problem of how many people are dying from this or how many people are negatively affected by this.
It's more about people's attitudes and statements and actions towards that problem that will reveal the mindset. Let's talk about the sequencing of those body paragraphs, right? So let's say you have 10 concrete examples that you want to put into a prong. I mean, 10 would probably be too many, but let's just pretend.
How are you going to order them, right? Which ones do you put first? Which ones do you put later?
Use the shorter concrete examples at the beginning of each prong paragraph to establish the prevalence of the prong and the mindset. So you'll notice that oftentimes at the beginning of body paragraphs, the speakers will often have short concrete examples, maybe one-liners or two-liners. And oftentimes they're really humorous. Think about Harris in his OO had opened up one of his paragraphs with the governor of Illinois who drank the chocolate milk and said, diversity.
That established the prevalence of the mindset. Now that wasn't showing that people are psychologically damaged by this mindset yet, right? It wasn't establishing problems, but it was just establishing the prevalence of that phenomenon, showing us that it's so widespread that even a governor would oversimplify something like diversity.
by drinking chocolate milk. And that way you can get some humor points as well. And then as your paragraph goes on, establish slightly longer examples to really show the harms of the problems caused by the pronger mindset. And so that you get more serious as the paragraph goes on.
JJ, I think, did a great job of this too, where he would begin each body paragraph in a really funny way. And then you would end on a kind of profound point before transitioning to the next paragraph and getting humorous again. So think of it as a crescendo, right? You start off with the lighthearted, build to the more serious, and then transition back to the lighthearted when you get to the next paragraph.
And that's a really good way to do it. It's important, though, that you don't have really long concrete examples, right? If all your concrete examples are like 10 to 15 sentences long, that's way, way, way too long.
The longest example that you would want is maybe four sentences. in a body paragraph. And if every concrete example is like that, it's too long. That would be like the longest, most serious one at the end.
The art of brevity and being concise is really important for an OO. Most of you for probably most of your academic careers have been rewarded for being able to go in depth and write a lot, right? If you can write a longer research paper, your teachers will be impressed with you and probably award you more. I will be more impressed if you can establish your core points and your core claims in fewer sentences.
If you can establish something more directly and concretely quickly and without needing to over-explain it, that is always more effective for public speaking than if you have to spend many sentences establishing it. So again, I will mark you down if you are over-explaining, if your sentences are far, or if your explanations and concrete examples are far too long, I will reward you if they are short, but don't oversimplify and skip any of these steps. If you just have short concrete examples, but you never explain how they link to the mindset, that's not ideal.
Let's look at some concrete examples. So this is from JJ's speech, right? And he says, Gandhi is revered in history as the saintly hero who achieved India's independence.
However, journalist Mayuk Sen explains that, quote, the Gandhi narrative excludes the uncomfortable facts that Gandhi sexually assaulted women, espoused anti-blackness, and ignored India's untouchable caste. The Gandhi narrative is so powerful that when I related these details to members of my own family, they flipped. Gandhi was important and influential, but his story was complex.
And imposing a simplified narrative structure makes his history a lot. So great job here, right? I think establishing the example of Gandhi, showing us evidence that demonstrates that the Gandhi narrative ends up excluding these really problematic aspects of his life, and then tying it back to the mindset of a whole as a whole when he says imposing a simplified narrative makes his history a lot.
Really great work here. I think there are strong links to the topic. It's established pretty quickly and then he can move on. Here's another example.
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Amanda Bennett tells about her husband Terrence who was diagnosed with cancer shortly after their marriage. Terrence fought heroically but ultimately succumbed to the disease. Amanda explains that once it became clear that Terrence's cancer was terminal, they felt shut out from the cancer community.
Cancer advocacy is so focused on the narrative of the happy ending that it often isolates those whose outcomes are not ideal. So this was also from JJ's speech. You probably remember it. And you can see here he's doing a good job of giving us a source, a concrete example that helps us to understand the dangers of when we fixate on a certain type of narrative, the happy ending.
And so he does a great job of connecting it back to the mindset in that final sentence. Remember, your examples are only as good as the link to the mindset itself. I don't care if you can prove to me that 4 billion people are dying if you can't show that those 4 billion people dying aren't. caused by the mindset itself. Next, this is the second part of that concrete example.
He says, and Amanda and Terrence aren't alone. Journalist Peggy Orenstein notes that the Susan G. Komen Foundation, our nation's largest breast cancer support organization, spends only 3% of its budget on research into terminal cancer. In the cancer narrative, Amanda explains that, quote, dying is seen as failing. We have the heroic narrative for fighting together, but we don't have a narrative for letting go. So notice here, he does a good job of establishing a societal problem that only 3% of our budget on research into breast cancer is into terminal cancer, right?
And then she brings in another quote that says dying is seen as failing, and then he connects it to the mindset. We have a heroic narrative for finding together, but we don't have a narrative for letting go. So notice he doesn't spend super long trying to establish all of the impacts and the problems of cancer itself. We understand that cancer is bad and a lot of people die.
He focuses on establishing the links to the mindset itself about our views towards terminal cancer and our narrative or our lack of narrative that we have there. Here is this from Avi Galati's speech on growth. Let's look at this concrete example.
So he's saying we prize growth just for growth's sake. We view it just as being upwards. Otherwise, we're failing. He says, take our language of growth and career.
The University of Georgia finds that 57% of Americans believe they're in a career plateau. Since 1939, Merriam-Webster has defined a plateau as a, quote, stable level of achievement that we've worked hard for. But now in our growth for growth's sake's culture, the university concludes that over half of us associated plateau with topping out. having nowhere else to go and even stress, depression, and a loss of purpose. So great stuff here, right?
He draws on a concrete definition that says plateau is a stable level of achievement, something that should be good and fine, but then brings in a study that shows us that over half of us associate plateauing with failure. Really good stuff here from Avi's speech that establishes quickly some of the problems in a concrete way of the mindset. Here's another example from that same paragraph. He said, For decades, one of my teachers has inspired thousands of students.
But every year, her dad asks, what comes after this? She told me, does anything have to come after this? I couldn't believe that anyone could suggest that my teacher, who helped put me here today, wasn't growing.
When we equate growth with mobility, we equate stability with failure. Powerful rhetoric there. But what I like about this, notice that the last example was a little bit more abstract, right?
He's getting at a broader phenomenon in society about the psychological effects of our attitude toward plateauing, but then he demonstrated it with a really good, quick, concrete example that helped us to imagine, and he brought in a personal anecdote, which is quite powerful. Next, this is from his same speech. He said, Leaders obsessed with ever-rising economic growth exalt the total cost of goods and services. Gross domestic product. Our GDP may be rising, but those who boast about this growth overlook something else.
Income inequality. The Wall Street Journal reports that for the past 60 years, the U.S. has averaged a 3% economic growth rate. But today, 43 million Americans, worse than ever before, live in poverty.
When growth means that in our jobs we feel stuck and that in our economy only a few prosper, we're not growing. We're just directionally challenged. And the only direction is up.
So notice here, he does a great job of showing that our obsession with the GDP means that we overlook inequality. Why is our primary metric of economic well-being the gross domestic product and not whether or not inequality is increasing or decreasing? Great, great stuff here. Good concrete example. Okay, now we have a long one.
This is from Harris's speech. You all have seen this, but I just want to break it down bit by bit. So this is first prong is first body paragraph.
It says, don't get me wrong, Pepsi isn't the only one guilty of oversimplifying race in America. Last year, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner proved his commitment to racial equality by walking on stage in Chicago, chugging a glass of chocolate milk. And as he drank, the governor said, and I quote, diversity.
That actually happened. And though that sounds crazy like him, we often oversimplify issues and end up minimizing them. So notice he gives that prong right after a humorous transition. But that humorous transition gives us a good concrete example that's short and humorous. Don't believe me?
Well, how many times have you heard someone debunk global warming by citing the robust evidence that, quote, it's cold outside? We do this with every issue under the sun. In fact, just last January, while discussing immigration policy, TV pundit Tommy Lahren argued for border security by arguing, it's simple.
The same way we lock our doors to our houses at night, we ought to lock the doors to our country as well. And you know what? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I don't think Tommy Lahren likes chocolate milk.
I mean, really, immigration is the job of 22 federal agencies and cannot. possibly be reduced to such a facile analogy. So notice here, JJ has done a good job. He gave us a really quick one, right? Global warming and the way that we debunk it by saying it's cold.
Then he gave us a slightly longer one about Tommy Lahren's attitude towards debunking immigration policy and then brought in more evidence saying like, look, there are 22 federal agencies. It cannot be that simple. Then he transitions to another example.
For that matter, neither can the gun debate, but that doesn't stop millions from echoing the lines we've all heard. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Which sounds true enough, but as articulated by Dr. David Kyle Johnson of King's College, this defense cleverly evades the fact that guns make it substantially easier for people to kill people. The fact is that when we adopt such simplistic rhetoric, it's not just people we oversimplify, but their solutions as well.
You want to stop illegal immigration? Great. Build a wall, crime will fall.
And if you want to end school shootings, then, quote, just arm the teachers. But these so-called solutions are no more than Band-Aids for bullet wounds. They don't solve anything.
They just deny us the rational discourse we deserve. So notice all the examples we get by the end of the speech, right? We get the humorous example of the Illinois governor and drinking chocolate milk. We get the very quick example of it's cold outside to debunk global warming. We get the more in-depth example of...
Tommy Lahren trying to debunk immigration policy and our attitudes towards immigration. And we get a more in-depth example of gun control and saying that guns don't kill people, people kill people as an oversimplification with multiple experts there. And then we get a couple of quick examples at the end that tie the knot, right?
You want to stop illegal immigration, build a wall. You want to end school shootings, just arm the teachers. And so by the end of this paragraph, we have a ton of concrete examples to illustrate this prong. to help us better understand the mindset as a whole and its implications. Really, really good stuff here.
This is the type of studying and breaking down I want you to be doing with OOs to be able to really, really understand your speech event. Let's look at a badly written concrete example, all right? Here you'll see there's no link to the mindset. This was a speech, it was a freshman rhetoric speech just generically about apathy, okay? And we are too apathetic today.
So look at this. It says, first. Being apathetic to others'suffering has forced many people into bankruptcy. For example, a man by the name of Martin Shkreli is infamous for raising the drug price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 a pill. This drug has been the primary choice for those with weak immune systems as well as the treatment of toxoplasmosis.
Toxoplasmosis is known for causing fevers and muscle pain in its minor cases as well as brain inflammation and eye infections in its more serious cases. As a result, people who needed the drug were spending $75,000 for 100 pills. For low to medium income consumers, this could have caused bankruptcy. So notice, this is very poorly constructed because this speaker spends so long establishing all of the problems of what happens when the price of this pill, of this drug is raised and the condition that needs to be treated and what happens when it's not treated and how much money needs to be spent and how this could lead to bankruptcy. But he never explains how apathy is the root cause of the rising of this drug.
price. And so that's a serious problem. I don't feel at the end of this paragraph that I've learned about the mindset at all.
I've just learned about this issue of Shkreli raising drug prices, but that's not the point of an OO, right? You need to explain the mindset. So if you compare this with all of the examples I just showed you, notice that the emphasis on those national finalist OOs was about proving or establishing the links of the mindset and helping us to understand the mindset.
And so the emphasis wasn't as much on just trying to establish, look at how serious toxoplasmosis is and look at how serious it would be if they had to spend this much money. Next, this is another concrete example, but notice how vague this is, okay? When we ignore others and not listen to them and don't listen to them, grammar, they can become hurt and they make and they can make questionable decisions because they feel alone.
This was a speech like we need to pay more attention to others. In fact, this mindset starts at home. According to Rebecca Keenan, When parents refuse to answer children's questions about sex because they are uncomfortable about the topic, it can cause serious repercussions in the future.
Many parents embody this mindset today, with over one-third of parents not listening to their children's questions about sex ed. These children need to be answered, and their parents are not willing to be a sensible outlook to do so. Because of this, many children can be exposed to negative external influences that could have been prevented if their parents had listened to their questions.
Sorry, this was a speech on, like, we need to listen to people more. Now notice that the explanation is, I don't feel like I'm getting a concrete example. It's not like JJ when he was talking about the specific individual of Amanda Bennett and her husband Terrence and how they felt when they were excluded from cancer. It wasn't the concrete example of the specific research of only 3% of breast cancer funds end up going to terminal cancer. This was just kind of a vague and nebulous, just like many parents refuse to answer their...
children's questions about sex because they feel uncomfortable. And that means that ultimately children feel that they could be exposed to or children might be exposed to negative external influences that could have been prevented if their parents had listened to their questions. I promise you, your audience will oftentimes be parents. If you try to tell this to parents, like, did you know that many parents are bad at parenting? Do you think the parent in the back of the room is going to be like, oh yeah, this is totally me.
I totally suck. This has completely taught me something new. No.
But if you give me a good concrete example of a specific parent that did this, or even better, more broadly, our attitudes towards sexual education from prominent figures who are in charge of education, say. the head of the education department of the federal government, now I will be much more intrigued and be like, oh my goodness, this goes all the way up to the federal government level. That's fascinating. Next, dramatic implications.
And I went into pretty good depth in this on the developing a topic, but I want to go into it again. So this is the part of the speech where you bring the problems caused by the mindset to an emotional climax through an extended dramatic story and a series of the most severe impacts. This is the dramatic moment.
This is its own paragraph. So think about the organization. You have the mindset explanation.
That'll be in the introduction. Then you'll have prong number one, lots of concrete examples. Prong number two, lots of concrete examples.
And then the dramatic implication. And so let's talk about this. Here's the structure. First, you have an extended dramatic story. Often, this is personal.
It needs to be a concrete moment, though, a human story that gives dramatic weight to the problems caused by the mindset. This is a classic writing tip, but you need to show as opposed to tell. Don't tell me that oftentimes as a kid, you struggled with this mindset and felt really bad at certain times. Give me a story that has conflict, a time when this came to a head, where you had to choose to either embody that mindset or abandon XYZ thing, and you chose to do the wrong thing there, right? Show me the conflict moment where somebody embodied the mindset towards you.
Imagine how powerful that JJ story was because of all the concrete details of him pointing at the TV, turning to his dad and telling his dad, look, dad's on TV. That added so much as opposed to if he had just said after 9-11, many Sikhs across America experienced discrimination. That would have been way more vague, but the concrete story to root that example made us really emotionally relate to it.
Number two. Then give us a series of the most severe impacts, right? What you want to do after you establish the extended dramatic story is to then link that story to many other severe societal impacts that are going on and list them one after the other to give the speech a sense of escalation and climax. This is where you hit us with the most heavy hitting problems.
Save them for this dramatic moment of the speech so we think, wow, this is really, really serious. Let's look at some examples. So this is from Avi Galati's speech.
And notice here how he'll go from a dramatic or extended personal example to then a series of very serious societal examples. He says, for most of my life, I've chosen activities and fake beliefs that propel my growth into the Ivy League. My growth had to be upward and measurable by scores and awards, because if it wasn't, then I could improve to my teachers, my parents or myself.
I played the piano for seven years, hated it, golfed for five. And I even started quitting the things I loved. I stopped singing and dancing because they seemed useless as I imagined a lawyer future that I secretly hoped would never come. Until just last month, I had my first interview with a college counselor.
I was so ready. Until he asked, Avi, what are you truly passionate about? Who are you? And I couldn't answer.
I didn't know. So just quick pause. Notice. If he had just had the first part about him abstractly doing things he didn't like, I don't think this story would be as powerful. The way it gets powerful, though, is by building to that concrete moment, that moment of conflict where in a particular moment, his college counselor asks him, what are you passionate about?
Who are you? And he couldn't answer. I didn't know.
How many of us feel like we're growing when we're really just lost? In our bodies, when cells start growing out of their own volition, only to increase and increase in number, we have a name for it. Doctors call it cancer.
And yet externally, when we see the same behavior, we applaud. But it's cancerous. It's cancerous when we celebrate urban growth while gentrification displaces 20,000 African Americans in Washington, D.C. It's cancerous when Boeing wasn't ready to grow their 737 MAX fleet but did anyways and took 345 lives in the process. And it's cancerous.
When USA Gymnastics in the past 15 years has a record explosive growth in gold medals, but hides the more than 160 sexual assault survivors, our false notion of growth has metastasized and it has become malignant. The language of true growth is dead and we must revive it. The really great stuff here, hopefully you see the power of this paragraph of going from that extended personal story, which allows us to relate on a more intimate and emotional level with the speaker. And then going from there to a series of heavy hitting societal concrete problems to really make us feel how pervasive and serious this is more broadly.
Very, very effective. Let's look at another one. I have no idea that the harms of this habit have been felt by each of us. But the harm I feel most, the one most responsible for eroding nuance and wrecking our discourse, is the false dichotomy, where we insist that answers must be either black or white, left or right, and nothing in between.
Yesterday's complexities become the binaries of tomorrow. And if that sounds abstract, it isn't. I've lived it.
This is Harris Hosseini's speech. When then-candidate proposed his Muslim ban in 2016, My neighbor told me that I had nothing to fear because I was one of the good ones. You know, I have to ask, were the 50 Muslims slaughtered in a New Zealand mosque three months ago good ones or bad ones?
When she said that, I felt so diminished. But what really struck me was that she didn't intend to hurt me. Her words lacked malice, but they were injected with bias.
And that's what makes this so insidious. We often don't mean to oversimplify. It's just so easy to. And along the way, Whatever our intent, communities are categorized, issues minimized, and people, you and me, are dehumanized.
So notice Harris's dramatic implication a little bit more subtle than Abhi's, but nevertheless still very rhetorically powerful as he transitions from that personal story about his neighbor telling him he was one of the good ones, to then connecting it to the New Zealand mosque shooting, and then the broader societal phenomenon that might occur. Your dramatic story, everyone has something they can draw from, I promise you. They don't have to be stories that are as dramatic as someone getting murdered before your eyes. They don't have to be serious, traumatic incidents. But I promise you, you've experienced these mindsets in subtle ways in your life.
And if you can draw that out in a way that is profound, then the speech can have a lot of resonance and weight. Let's go to another. This is JJ Kapoor's.
I'm not going to read this one out loud, but I recommend you pause it and look at it if you want. He goes from the 9-11 story, the Osama bin Laden looking at the screen saying it was Papa, to then more broadly the danger of the single story and Sikhs and Muslims becoming national villains and the Islamophobia that was at the heart of America at that time. Next, let's look at Badri's speech. I'll read this one.
This is from the false equivalencies. The harms of these false equivalencies invade into our relationships and reasoning. Last spring, one of my friends shared with me her struggle with depression, which included suicidal thoughts.
Her cousin, who was her emotional rock, also battled depression and had recently killed himself. In her words, leaving me completely alone. In my attempt to console her, I said, I get it.
I get it. And in those three small worlds, words, I falsely equated my experiences with pain and suffering with hers, when the reality is I can't and never will get her pain. Russell Friedman, author and founder of the Grief Recovery Institute, explains that all pain is unique, and when it comes to relationships, comparing our own to someone else's is dangerous.
It minimizes their experience. Even worse, in her 2017 book Live Large, author Elizabeth Cook explains that these false equivalencies limit our reasoning, so that rather than discerning the differences, we box everything into oversimplified categories and call them equivalent. We compartmentalize, and that is the greatest harm.
It happens when we falsely equate young black men to dangerous predators, or Muslims to terrorists. Sounds unlikely? My classmate used this equation when he saw my hijab, the symbol of my faith, and said to me, it really brings out your inner terrorist. These are the Trojan horses that we let into our daily lives.
These false equivalences of language, logic, and emotion that we allow through our front gates. So really powerful. Notice she actually had two personal stories here, starting first with that moment of her friend whose cousin had committed suicide and her saying, I get it.
Notice this is powerful because she had good intentions, but she shows how even those good intentions really led to serious problematic actions. And then second, she expanded it to societally. When we create a false equivalence, through discrimination, calling young black men dangerous predators or Muslims terrorists, and then how that played out with her classmate by saying that her job brings out her inner terrorist.
Really powerful stuff here, and it really has strong emotional resonance. I really recommend you watch these videos and to see these moments of the speech, because it'll be much more powerful from the perspective of the speaker than me just reading them to you. And finally, let's look at this last one.
This is from Badri's speech on hate. And she says, I don't mean to simplify hate. It's complicated and multifaceted, and I know this because I've known hate. My freshman year of high school, one of my classmates called me Osama bin Laden. I hated him for what he said to me.
And in that moment, all I wanted was for him to be gone. I soon after realized that my feelings towards him were not rooted in sheer anger, but in pain. Psychologist Bernard Golden writes in his book Overcoming Destructive Anger, hatred is a reaction to and distraction from some form of inner pain.
Each moment of hate is a temporary reprieve from inner suffering. It was so much easier to hate on him because as author James Baldwin tragically notes, the reason why we cling to our hate so stubbornly is because once it's gone, we'll be forced to deal with our pain. Even in its extremes, hatred is the story of pain.
For every assault rifle turned on a nightclub, for every bomb planted in a place of worship, for every hateful noose and burning cross, you have somebody who has been fundamentally broken and radically afraid. Whether it was socialized into them or a response to trauma or despair, they are filled with this all-encompassing terror and grief that is protected by a hard coat of hate. And I say this not to justify those that have done unspeakable things to others. but so that even so, we never stop seeing them as anything but human.
You see, America doesn't have a problem with hate. It's got a problem with hurt. So again, really powerful going from that personal example of not just her classmate calling her Osama bin Laden, but the real hatred she felt towards that classmate afterwards, expanding it to a psychological phenomenon of pain being at the root of that, and then connecting that to all the societal impacts.
of shootings and bombs and nooses and hangings, all of those big issues that are going on in America today. Powerful stuff. All right.
So after the dramatic implications paragraph, your final paragraph is the solution. And so this is where you much introduce ways that people can shift their mindset to solve for the problems that you've outlined. And typically speakers offer two to three ways to shift our mindset. So this is the structure of a mindset shift solution.
So you should have two or three mindset shift solutions. First, explain how the audience should shift their mindset. So what do we need to do?
Second, back that up with an expert or evidence to prove it's a good idea. And third, give a concrete illustration of what this mindset shift would look like in one's day to day. I need to understand what it is, an expert to prove to me it's a good idea.
And finally, exactly what it would concretely look like. Let's look at some examples. So. How can we learn from Paris'mistake?
I believe this is the false equivalence speech. Let's deconstruct the golden apple from its surface to its core. On the surface, false equivalences are set up with language x is y or x is like y.
These linguistic propositions should be an immediate alert of a possible false equivalence. Think of the solution step as biting into the fruit, or in our case, the substance or logic of a false equivalence. Is it really a fair comparison, or do these things simply share similar traits?
As explained by Harvard Law professor William Fisher, a balanced comparison doesn't mean perfectly equal, but it does have to be reasonably equal. So this is really good. It gives us a new way of thinking about how to compare things with some experts here and a concrete question that we should always be asking ourselves to prevent us from being tempted to make false equivalencies.
Next. And finally, we need to reevaluate the core or the intent of these false equivalences. So notice this is another solution mindset shift suggestion in the speech.
Ask yourself, why am I making this comparison? Is the intent to change someone's mind? Then an unfair comparison to vilify or justify will only derail the logic and inflame the emotion. If the intent's to console or comfort someone, then we need to do more than equate our experiences to theirs. Psychologist and doctor G.N.
Siegel suggests simply saying, I don't know what to say, but I want you to know that I care. Listen, ask questions. and keep the focus on them.
So again, really good solution mindset shift because it gives us, again, concrete ways to think about changing our mindset. It explains why it's a good idea to do it. It gives us concrete examples of what we should be asking ourselves and what we should concretely be doing to prevent ourselves from running into these problems.
This was from, I believe, Harris Husseini's speech. So how can we ensure that our discourse and politics reflect that? I believe that starts with rejecting the oversimplified false binaries presented to us in America today. What does that mean?
We'll take the issues of our time. It means believing the radical notion that we can uphold the Second Amendment, and at the same time, we can end gun violence once and for all. It's not either or. We can protect our borders, and we can take immigrants and asylum seekers with the compassion they deserve.
And most importantly, as Americans, we can love Cardi B and Nicki Minaj. It's not mutually exclusive. Let's not be tricked by the false choices meant to divide us. It's a really good solution mindset shift, right? gives us something, he gives us a concrete shift that we need to make, reject oversimplified binaries, gives us concrete examples of ways that we could embody that, and even add some humor into it.
Next, in our own lives, we must make a commitment towards meaningful communication. This is also from Harris's speech. You know, the farther away you stand from something, the simpler it seems. So be it on Twitter or Thanksgiving dinner, the next time you find yourself debating the other side, get close. Not.
physically, that's assault, but ask questions. Engage with the intent to learn and not persuade. Try verbally reiterating the other person's point to them so as to ensure that you do not oversimplify their argument.
And the next time you hear the words simply put, ask yourself, can this be put simply? If so, great. But I'd ask you to consider the simplest equation of all, one plus one equals two.
That's pretty basic, right? Well, what if I told you that the mathematical proof for that equation is 372 pages long? So again, really good stuff here, right?
He tells us abstractly we need to make a commitment to meaningful communication, but then gives us lots of concrete examples of the way we should be doing that, the questions we should be asking ourselves. And then has a really interesting anecdote at the end about even things that seem complex, like 1 plus 1 equal 2, are actually incredibly complex. One more.
So today, with our finite resources, we must impose tangible boundaries on our economic and personal growth. So this is from Avi Galati's speech on growth. And so his mindset shift is we need to impose boundaries on our growth.
And quote, if a boundary makes you feel bound, says Dr. Kate Raworth, consider this. The world's most ingenious people turn boundaries into the sources of their creativity. From Mozart on his five octave piano to Serena Williams on a tennis court to us.
here this week sharing our messages in rooms at 325 square feet instead of pushing beyond beyond boundaries how can we grow within them so again some really good stuff here he has a expert to back him up some concrete examples and then the question that we should be asking i i think it is meant to say pushing beyond boundaries so guys hopefully at the end of this video i know that was lengthy that was a lot of examples i'm trying to give you as many concrete examples as possible so that you have the tools at your disposal to go and break down original oratories yourself, right? The basic structure of having a mindset explanation, having two pronged body paragraphs with lots of concrete examples within them, having a dramatic implications paragraph, and then finally having the solution paragraph with mindset shifts. That is the basic structure of an original oratory. If you do hard work on this stage of the process and have the good foundational building blocks, you're going to be really well situated to succeed. As always, if you have questions, please come to Student Coaching.
Please reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to help. But best of luck on this stage.
Keep working hard over this week. I'm really excited to see what you all produce. And until then, stay safe.