Have spent 30 or so years studying the method of public speaking.

Lot of things that SSI gets wrong, no doubts there.  But we do believe that on this one, we will be able to predict the success-or-failure of the man who succeeds Dapper Dave...

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Presidents make speeches primarily to avoid mistakes; their thing is precision.  If you speak publicly, you can learn that from them.  They project authority, and there's a method they use for that.  And so on.

Public speakers who want to retain authority need to be large-minded; they're not bogged down in debate, and neither are they contemptuous of arguments beneath their radar.  They're just legitimately too big to be involved in irritating things.

Authority figures must be careful not to let their audiences see them sweat.  There is a catastrophic embarrassment out there somewhere, and for the speaker, it must be avoided, at all costs...

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Comedians have a rhythm to the way that they tee up a golf ball and then whack it at you.  Often they try to finish their sentences with the power words. 

If you speak, you try to apply this cadence. ... in fact, no matter what your context, you can't learn more than you can learn from comedians; their success lives and dies with the selection of a single word.  Audience feedback hones their deliveries to a razor's edge.

The "punch line" is a cliche, but along with being a cliche, it's also a rhetorical device.  Hey, it's a rhetorical structure.

Dave Niehaus had an innate ability to structure a 10-, 20-, or 30-second descriptive bite around a strong finish. 

Take The Double, for instance:  Dave, without having to calculate his method, executed the Comedian's Cadence brilliantly.  You and I might have been talking about Edgar as the play occurred. 

As the ball came off Edgar's bat, though, Dave Niehaus was blowing over that, and ratcheting up for what he might be allowed to say 12 seconds on ....

... pitch, swing!, ball's lined ----, cora coming in , here's junior, the throwwww... The Mariners!? Are Going To Play For The American League Championship ... !!

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Shock jocks are about holding attention.  Though it might not seem like it, they've got an array of techniques at their disposal for doing that.

You want to consistently hold a person's attention for, say, 15 years?  Then you ask a radio info-tainer how he has done it... choice of topic, for one thing.

At SSI, if traffic is off, we always have the choice of publishing something that everybody will resent ... ;- )

Niehaus did this also.  When he wanted attention during a dull game, he could go to a robust bag of experiences and stories...

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Part 2

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