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I originally stumbled across Professor Walter Ong’s work while studying language acquisition at Santa Clara University. I dusted off my copy of Ong’s Orality and Literacy to revisit his thoughts on the spoken word. I find this passage quite interesting:

“Because in its physical constitution as sound, the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups. When a speaker is addressing an audience, the members of the audience normally become a unity, with themselves and with the speaker. … The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word…” Ong continues to say that the spoken word is best for medium for transmitting feelings or beliefs.

There are two very important examples from history that exemplify Ong’s points.

The first is Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. Dr. King gave this speech forty-three years ago this week. I have recently ripped a collection of Dr. King’s speeches entitled A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King to my iPod. The following line caught my attention, “With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” The line is a very near the end of the speech and can easily be missed as the speech builds to its emotional ending. But the phrase jangling discords so perfectly describes our the current polical situation. Looking at the quote, it does not do the phrase justice. You must really hear it.

The second important example is from the same era: Robert Kennedy’s Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Joe Klein describes this speech beautifully in his Time.com essay. Klein writes,

“One senses, listening to the tape years later, the audience’s trust in the man on the podium, a man who didn’t merely feel the crowd’s pain but shared it. And Kennedy reciprocated: he laid himself bare for them, speaking of the death of his brother—something he’d never done publicly and rarely privately—and then he said, “My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,’” he paused, his voice quivering slightly as he caressed every word. The silence had deepened, somehow; the moment was stunning. “‘Until … in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’”

Again the transcript pales in comparison, you must listen to the speech to feel Kennedy’s raw emotion and hear its power to unify the audience and the nation.

Both speeches are available for download at American Rhetoric. I am collecting other great examples of oration. If you have a favorite, send it along to me at steve at podtech.net.