Power Language
Emphasize your points with power language (don’t just repeat, but emphasize). Make your audience think about what you’ve just said, don’t immediately switch to a new point and let them forget your brilliant point
Go from: These terrible acts of violence are why we really need to enforce our border better.
To: These terrible acts of violence are why we must take drastic measures to enforce our border, why we must put all our resources towards protecting our people, why we must all band together to keep all criminals out of our homeland.
Go from: Fear is why we make bad decisions like putting up walls and locking up immigrants who just want to work.
To: Fear is powerful. Fear brings out the best, but also the worst in us. If fear forces us to draw rigid lines that we will never reconsider, to risk so many values that we cherish, to divide families, to hunt down the hungry and desperate, then it is fear that we must battle. We must take down the drug smugglers and murderers and not blindly reassure ourselves that we are solving the problem by arresting little old ladies and anxious workers.
Go from: “Let me ask you something: would you immigrate to another country risking your life just to be a slacker?”
To “Let me ask you something: would you immigrate to another country, risking your life savings and even your own life, just to be a slacker? No. No one would. It’s much easier to be a slacker at home.”
Go from: Now you can see just how dangerous nuclear power is; we’ve had so many accidents.
To: Although many of us want to believe that nuclear power will be the magic solution to our dependence on foreign oil and the miraculous fix to climate change, the reality is the opposite. The only miracle is that we have not yet experienced the nuclear tragedy that will eventually kill hundreds of thousands of people. We escaped a total disaster at Three Mile Island by sheer luck; we escaped countless deaths at Chernobyl only because of its remote location, and the only reason we believe we escaped the worst at Fukushima is that we still haven’t discovered the full impact of that catastrophe yet.
Go from: This is so wrong. What are we thinking? Where are our priorities?
To: How can we allow this to happen to the people of our nation? How can we allow this many preventable deaths to occur? We spend trillions of dollars a year to protect all of our people from external enemies, but hesitate to commit a fraction of this money to protect all of our people from the internal enemies of illness and disease.
Go from: This is so unfair. Why should small businesses be forced to pay for other people’s health care costs.
To: There are many ways to fix the problems of the current health care crisis, but off-loading the costs to small businesses is not one of them.
Go from: I sat and waited until a random doctor called my ticket number.
To: I sat and waited until a random doctor called my ticket number. Yes a ticket number, I had to pull a number and sit for hours waiting for one of the doors in the long hallway to open, just like a housewife waiting for her roast beef order at the meat counter at the local supermarket.