This past week, the U.S. Senate impeachment trial started in earnest, and the House Managers began laying out the arguments underlying the two Articles of Impeachment. While opinions are divided on the quality of the presentations as much as they’re decided on the substance of the charges, one clear star in the process so far has been California Representative, Adam Schiff. Legal analysts have praised his ability to effectively assemble the timeline and stitch the many threads of testimony and documents together into a single clear narrative. Representative Schiff, of course, has been a major player in the process, but many, including your author, saw his abilities as a trial lawyer for the first time in this outing, and this role has certainly raised his stock.

Critics will say the House Managers’ presentations were repetitive and, notwithstanding the inability to call new witnesses or obtain new documents, contained “nothing new.” When it comes to putting together what we have already heard, Schiff’s arguments benefit from many of the kinds of techniques that trial lawyers should rely on generally when persuading a jury or arguing in front of a judge or arbitrator. Whatever your political views, and whatever you think of impeachment or Adam Schiff, you can learn from effective technique. In a previous post on Representative Schiff, I focused on ways to borrow closing arguments techniques in your opening. In this post, I want to focus on a stylistic technique relating to pace. Specifically, I think Schiff is very effective at what I call the “rhetorical pause,” meaning the technique in getting the audience to slow down and focus on your message.

What is a Rhetorical Pause? 

This is a term that I’ve invented to describe a basic effect that good speakers are trying to create. The idea is to slow down the processing of your audience. Why would it be a good idea to slow things down? Because when your targets are processing rapidly, they are often busy critiquing or counter-arguing against your message. When they’re processing rapidly, they’re also falling back on their cognitive routines, which include their prejudgements and biases. The psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman considers this fact to be essential in his work, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” The idea is that in order to break through people’s habits and the views that they have already formed, you need to encourage a slower process. In this case, slow means more deliberative, more open to new information, more willing to at least consider moving away from a default conclusion.

How Do You Rhetorically Pause? 

There are several tools a speaker can use to encourage a rhetorical pause by prompting an audience to slow things down.

The Literal Pause

Just stop, and let what you just said hang in the air. Sometimes speakers can become too wedded to either their notes or their chain of thought and just proceed at an unvarying pace. That makes it easier for audience to tune out. A simple cessation of speech can regain attention. But make clear that the pause isn’t random or accidental. A nice pause works best just before or just after a critical conclusion, and it helps to maintain eye contact while you pause so the audience knows that you are doing it for emphasis.

The Repeated Emphasis

Repeating a word, a phrase or a sentence is a way of signaling its importance to your audience. It is like hitting a brief rewind, which has the effect of taking a highlighter to the words, . Everything is important, but just based on the ways that human attention and memory work, something needs to stand out.

The Rhetorical Question

In my view, rhetorical questions are pausing techniques, particularly if an actual pause accompanies them, because they encourage the audience to do the work of thinking about what their answer might be. As I have written before, rhetorical questions are an excellent way of framing issues that is more engaging for an audience.

The Explicit Request to Pause

Perhaps the most obvious way to get your audience to slow down is to ask them to do it:

Let’s think about that for a moment…

Let’s pause on that point, and unpack it a bit… 

Let’s look at that reason again… 

Instead of simply rushing ahead with more information, it is useful to occasionally stop the train and say, “This is important, so let’s consider it a bit more fully.”

Representative Schiff’s Example

In Adam Schiff’s opening this past Tuesday, he pulled together a number of these techniques to give a presentation that was active and engaging, while also encouraging the audience to take its time with the information. About 50 minutes into the opening, he pressed the pause button in the following way:

“Let’s take a moment to let that sink in. [Pause].  July 24th, Bob Mueller concludes a lengthy investigation. He comes before the Congress. He testifies [Pause] that Russia systemically interfered in our election to help elect Donald Trump, that the campaign understood that, and they willfully made use of that help. July 24th. That’s what happens. The very next day, the very next day [Pause], he’s on the phone … President Trump is on the phone with a different foreign power, this time Ukraine, trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the next election. The next day. [Pause]. That should tell us something. [Pause]. That should tell us something.” 

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Image credit: Gage Skidmore, Flickr Creative Commons