textbook teaser #4
Music: Gillian Welch: Revival (1996)
INFORMING WITHOUT TEARS
In final years of his life the infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley met an Englishwoman eager to learn about ceremonial magic. Her name was Anne Macky, and she had almost no background in the occult tradition, nor did she know much of Crowley's philosophy. In poor health and encouraged by the attention, Crowley wanted very much to inform his new acquaintance about his theories, but he was initially at a loss for where to begin. You see, for much of his life Crowley had studied a vast number of occult and mystical traditions—alchemy, astrology, the Greek Quabbalah, hermeticism—and wrote prolifically about them. He eventually developed a fairly sophisticated system of symbolism and a philosophy of "magick" that spans across thousands upon thousands of pages in books and occult magazines. Where does he even begin?
Crowley decided that he would ask Macky to pose him questions, and then he would answer them in a return letter. This method of informing his new pupil about magick proved successful, and soon the modern magus found himself in regular correspondence with a larger group of students. "Much gratified was the author," Crowley said of himself, "to have so many letters of appreciation thanking him for 'not putting it in unintelligible language' [and] 'for making it so clear that . . . I can understand it'." In fact, Crowley was so gratified by his students' appreciation that he published his easy-to-read letters into a book, which he titled Magick Without Tears. Since the 1940s, Crowley's more teacherly persona in this lettered collection is among the most popular of his many books, most of which are a difficult slog. The difference with Magick Without Tears had everything to do with Crowley's generous attitude toward his audience, and his willingness to—as they say—"meet them half-way." He figured out where his students were at in their studies, and then designed his informational campaign to adapt to them.
In many ways, the title of Crowley's dry-eyed book is your principle task as an informative speaker: you must convey information in a way that is clear to understand, but also in a way that is not insulting or that "talks down" to your audience. By knowing the general background knowledge that your audience will have about your topic, you will have a better sense of how sophisticated your speech should to be. Ultimately, when you are speaking to inform, you have one primary goal: to provide a new point of view or new information on a topic. To achieve this goal, you need to know what kind of topics folks tend to be informative about, as well as the way in which to discuss those topics. We'll cover all of this (and a knock-knock joke) in the pages to come. But first, we need to take something of a philosophical detour before we dive into the nitty-gritty.
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Because speaking is always a request for a listener, some public speaking instructors believe that any speech---from a wedding toast to a classroom lecture---is persuasive. "There is no such thing as a purely informative speech," they argue, "this genre is a fiction!" Well, wherever you stand on the philosophical issue, from a pragmatic standpoint we can definitely say this: you are going to be asked to compose and deliver an informative speech for your class. So you're going to need to know something about why the genre of informative speaking can be distinguished from others. And I'm willing to bet that your informative speech assignment comes before a persuasive speech assignment? Am I right? See, your textbook author has magickal psychic powers (how's dem apples, Aleister?).
More seriously: while we can easily debate the finer points of where informing ends and persuading begins, the fact is that speaking to inform and speaking to persuade are different for two reasons: (1) speaking to inform is easier than speaking to persuade; and this is because (2) speaking to inform is about creating new beliefs or perspectives, while persuading is about changing them. In short, change is key.