Hayes
Eng. 1A
4/21/14
Word Count: 1177
If we can learn one thing about changing the world from history it’s that every cause needs a skilled orator. From Mahatma Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. words have proven to be one of the most powerful weapons against tyranny. A skilled orator has the capacity to emotionally move people and inspire them to take action against their oppressors. Sheryl Wudunn and Kevin Bales are two writers who hope to do just that. Wudunn and Bales both gave talks at different TED conferences but both talks addressed the issue of human rights. Wudunn addressed the injustice against women internationally and Bales put the spotlight on the millions of people currently enslaved across the world. Wudunn and Bales both gave great speeches, but how well organized their speeches were and emotional appeal is what sets the two speeches apart.
When giving a speech it’s important to organize your ideas in a way that is easy for you audience to follow. Wudunn does a great job with organization in her speech by introducing a solution and setting up how it would work for the audience in one paragraph before going into a story of success that embodies that claim in the next paragraph. For example, before telling Saima’s story, she first talks about economic opportunity and how it benefits women and their communities. She says “I’ve talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. I’ve hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. So of course, when you educate girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion.” (Wudunn) The last sentence is a great example of an effective transition into Saima’s story, “With economic opportunity, it can be transformative” (Wudunn). Transitions are helpful in organizing a speech because it helps connects your ideas and helps the overall flow of the speech. Bales lacked this in his speech. His speech was very informative but not organized.
Bales speech offered us a lot of information on modern day slavery and a few solutions but fails to organize it in a way that is easy to follow. He fails to use transitions to make a smooth shift from one topic to another, making it hard at times for me to follow him. For example, he goes from talking about countries where slavery exists today in one paragraph to discussing how slavery impacts the environment negatively in the next. He says, “Now, where is it? Well, this map in the sort of redder, yellower colors are the places with the highest densities of slavery. But in fact that kind of bluey color are the countries where we can't find any cases of slavery. And you might notice that it's only Iceland and Greenland where we can't find any cases of enslavement around the world..We're also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction…..” (Bales)
He also could have used an organizational method similar to Wudunn when introducing an issue in one paragraph and discussing the solution in detail in the next paragraph. He is very brief in talking about some of the solutions he talks about and fails to offer us an example of how it would be implemented in reality. For example he goes into great detail when discussing the cost of liberating the enslaved but fails to discuss how exactly that would happen.The lack of organization in his speech makes it seem choppy and is less effective when compared to Wudunn’s well organized and detailed speech. While the topic of his talk stirs up strong emotions, Bales’s fails to really talk about the victims of slavery in a way that is effective emotionally.
What made Wudunn’s talk work so well is the emotional approach she used. Her use of anecdotes helps us to not only really understand what the issue was but also the victims of these issues. For almost every issue she discusses in her talk she had an anecdote of a woman who successfully overcame the odds. She says, “Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. And they share this great splendor with a very large pig.” (Wudunn) This is helpful because by introducing the women by name and telling their stories to us makes it possible for an emotional connection to form. We feel like we know these women, which also makes it more personal. While Bale’s discussed a very emotional topic, he fails to offer us that same emotional connection. He doesn’t introduce most of the people he talks about, he doesn’t go into personal details about their background, it’s all very cut dry. He says, “These young boys are in Nepal. They are basically the transport system on a quarry run by a slaveholder. There are no roads there, so they carry loads of stone on their backs, often of their own weight, up and down the Himalaya Mountains” (Bales) He introduces them, tells us a little bit of their story, and then quickly moves onto the next topic. Were only left with a superficial impression of who these people are and they seem to blend into the other various statistics offered by Bales. Bales utilizes a more logical approach in appealing to the audience about modern slavery. While he does make great use of clips and a few anecdotes in his talk, his arguments rely heavily on statistics. The emotional approach is definitely present in his speech but he fails to really allow the audience to connect to the people in his stories. It’s important that when talking about issues regarding human rights and using anecdotes about it’s victims that we go a little more into depth about who these people are and why their stories matter. This is the difference between telling just a sad story and a story that will inspire change.
In conclusion, while Wudunn and Bales both talk about very horrifying truths the differences in organization and how well they were able to emotionally connect with their audience is what made one talk stand out over another. Being knowledgeable about an issue is great but in order to really bring about change one must know how to convey that knowledge in a way that is inspirational. After all one speech can spark a revolution and according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights sometimes force is necessary when seeking freedom. “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of the law.”
Works Cited
Wudunn, Sheryl. “Our Century’s Greatest Injustice”. TEDGlobal. Jul 2010. Lecture.
Bales, Kevin. “How to Combat Modern Slavery”. TED. Feb 2010. Lecture.
UN General Assembly, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948, 217 A (III).
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