Maintenance
Part of How to analyze a speech instead of quoting its lines
How to produce a one page speech analysis in a single session
A step by step method for a one page speech analysis in about two hours: fix the version, ask a question, map the structure, add three observations and a limit.
Most speech analysis is commissioned or attempted at a scale nobody has time for. The useful thing is usually a page: a described structure, two or three observations, a stated limit. This page sets out how to produce that in a single working session.
It reproduces no passages and names no speaker.
What to take away
- A one-page analysis is a genuine product, not a compromise, and it is what most readers actually need.
- The order of operations matters more than the time spentstructure first, interpretation last.
- Fixing the question before listening is what prevents a short analysis from becoming a summary.
The session
Budget roughly two hours. The steps are in order for a reason: each one
Eight Steps in Order
- Fix the object and version
- Write the question
- Listen or read once
- Map the structure
- Take three observations
- Check the occasion
- Write the limit
- Draft
- Fix the object and the version.Text, performance or event. Which document or recording, held where. Five minutes, and it decides everything else.
- Write the question.One sentence, capable of a negative answer. "What problem was the opening solving" is a question. "Why is this speech great" is not.
- Listen or read once, without notes.Mark only the points where your attention changed. Nothing else. This is the opposite of the marked-up method described under close reading, and deliberately so: the marking comes later, once you know what you are looking for.
- Map the structure.Movements, in order, with a phrase describing the job of each and the time or proportion it occupies.
- Take three observations.Tie each to a timecode or a line reference. Three is the number that fits a page.
- Check the occasion.What preceded it, who convened it, what was pending. Twenty minutes in a newspaper archive or a program.
- Write the limit.One sentence naming what you could not establish.
- Draft.Structure, question, observations, limit. In that order it writes itself.
What fits on a page
| Section | Length | Contains |
|---|---|---|
| Object and version | Two sentences | What you analyzed and which document |
| Question | One sentence | Something that could have come out otherwise |
| Structure | A short list | Movements and proportions |
| Observations | Three short paragraphs | Each tied to an artifact |
| Limit | Two sentences | What is unresolved and why |
That is around five hundred words, and it is more useful than four thousand
words of description. The full method it compresses is in speech analysis.
Timing and proportion, cheaply
The single most productive short exercise is timing the movements. It takes one
Timing the Movements
- Run one pass with a stopwatch
- Time the opening
- Time the middle share
- Time the ending
- Compare proportions across speeches
Proportion is where speeches differ most and where description is weakest. Writers claim a speech "spends most of its time" on something without measuring, and the measurement usually contradicts them.
Classical teaching divided an address into parts with distinct jobs. The summary of dispositio is a serviceable set of labels for the map, if treated as a starting grid, not as what the speaker had in mind.
Analyzing a short speech
The short session suits short material especially well. A two-minute address can be timed, mapped and compared against a second one in the same sitting, and comparison is what makes observations mean anything.
Pair two speeches from the same occasion type, then ask one question of both. The answers will be about the occasion as often as about the speakers, which is correct and useful.
Ceremony material is easy to pair because the occasions repeat exactly, as award speeches sets out. Older material is easy to pair because it can be reproduced and marked up freely, the practical argument in public domain speeches.
What to leave out
Leave out the speaker's biography unless the audience knew it. Leave out the outcome unless your question is about effect. Leave out every device name that is not doing work in a sentence you have written. Leave out adjectives about greatness.
What remains is short, checkable and unlike almost everything published about famous speeches, which tends to be long, unsourced and admiring. The device vocabulary, used sparingly, is in rhetorical devices, and the reason so many published analyses are long and empty is discussed in political speeches, where the same hindsight habit does the most damage.
Common questions
Is two hours really enough?
For a page with three sourced observations and a stated limit, yes. It is not enough for a claim about effect, which needs evidence from afterwards.
What if I cannot hear the speech?
Then the object is the text, and steps three through five apply to reading rather than listening. Say so in the first two sentences.
Can I do this without any archive access?
Structure, proportion and argument need only the version you have. The occasion step is the one that may fail, and the limit sentence is where you say so.
Does a short analysis need a conclusion?
It needs an answer to the question it set, which is not the same as a verdict. An answer of "not determinable from the surviving record" is a legitimate result.
