My purpose in public address and in speech is really encapsulated in three C's: clear, concise, correct. No overblowing rhetoric or anything like that. As simple as possible: clear, concise, correct.
My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg.
So far the changes in the president in his second term have been mainly of a rhetorical nature.
My policies and my record are very clear that I have made it easier to vote. We have made the elections process more accessible to people in Georgia, not less, despite their rhetoric.
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.
I despise the phony, fancy-pants rhetoric of professors aping jargon-filled European locutions - which have blighted academic film criticism for over 30 years.
Too often, ill-informed rhetoric has led to emotional hysteria that obfuscates solid evidence regarding the real problems faced by poor people and, in overwhelmingly great proportions, by black people.
Daily we see how demographic change and uncertainty about what it means to be British is exploited by those with their own agenda; those who employ divisive rhetoric, engage in scapegoating and do nothing to tackle root causes of the insecurities people face.
Too often, politicians fail to relate what they advocate to the kind of society they want to build, or they dress up policy in rhetoric which belies their actual intention. Meanwhile Joe Public is left wondering what on earth this bunch are all about and how their vision of a good society differs from that of the other lot.
I think of a monument as being symbolic and for the people and therefore rhetorical, not honest, not personal.
