The bully pulpit is not an open microphone. You have to target it very carefully.
The aim of talk should be like the aim of a flying arrow -- to hit the mark; but to this end there must be a mark to hit, that is, there must be a listener.
The open letter has always been an interesting rhetorical strategy - a way of delivering a pointed message to a specific individual or group while also reaching a wide audience.
Spending energy to understand the audience and carefully crafting a message that resonates with them means making a commitment of time and discipline to the process.
If you want to communicate with the American public, the literature tells you you've got to be talking at about a sixth-grade, seventh-grade level.
Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
Forget words like 'hard sell' and 'soft sell.' That will only confuse you. Just be sure your advertising is saying something with substance, something that will inform and serve the consumer, and be sure you're saying it like it's never been said before.
I'd never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that's the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.
When people feel like they are being spoken directly to, I do feel like... they'll do things like turn out in an off-year, mid-year primary.
Structure your presentation so that you appeal to the different interests of the different decision-makers involved.
Every argument is incapable of helping unless it is singular and addressed to a single person. Therefore, one who discourses in any other way presumably does so from love of reputation.
The other mistake I think people make is talking to who's available rather than talking to who they need to talk to.
