Longing for the Spoken Word

 

"Remember, your audience can read the words on your slides faster than you can speak them." — Christopher Craf

For centuries, the transmission of knowledge and human exchange relied on the spoken word. Parents passed down wisdom to their children through stories, laws were recited aloud, and itinerant preachers traveled from village to village, sharing tales of divine mysteries to prove God’s existence. Early cultures thrived solely on oral tradition. Even today, among Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, the oral testimony remains central.

The Power of the Storyteller and the Power of Words

The invention of writing in the 4th century BCE changed everything. Experiences, laws, and contracts could now be recorded with binding precision—because oral transmission was unreliable. Something was always omitted, something added. Written texts, especially those initially carved in stone, remained constant. Yet for millennia, writing remained an esoteric skill reserved for elites. As long as the masses couldn’t decipher it, people still depended on spoken words. And sometimes, this flexible system worked to the advantage of those in power.

Gutenberg’s invention of the modern printing press around 1450 not only marked the end of the Middle Ages but also the beginning of widespread literacy. Over the following centuries, written communication gained dominance, gradually displacing oral tradition. Knowledge was preserved in essays, dissertations, academic theses, and encyclopedias. From the 16th century onward, stories of all kinds and lengths were committed to paper. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, spanning 4,195 pages, remains one of the longest novels ever written.

Overwhelmed by Text

Today, we’ve grown accustomed to this written world—and we’ve moved it online. Social media and messaging platforms, however, are now ushering in a new paradigm shift: the move away from text and toward images. Communication scholars call this the Visual Turn.

Yet text still dominates. Humanity has never written as much as it does today. Every day, 455 billion words are sent via WhatsApp alone. The average message may be just seven words long, but the typical user sends up to 40 of them daily. We are drowning in text. Libraries are full, magazine racks overflow, flea markets spill over with books, and the sheer volume of online content has grown beyond our wildest imagination. Essayists, journalists, bloggers, and influencers ensure the flood of words never ends.

A Longing for Voice

Amid this deluge, a new longing seems to be emerging—a longing for orality. How else can we explain the growing popularity of lectures and talk shows? The ever-expanding list of events, gatherings, and conferences where people simply… talk? Or the hype around podcasts, an audio format gaining more and more fans who prefer to listen to experts’ tips and insights rather than read them?

For communication expert Jonah Sachs, these are all signs of a return to the oral tradition. He interprets this as a reaction to today’s overwhelming text-heavy world: "The oral tradition that dominated human experiences for all but the last few hundred years is returning with a vengeance. It’s a monumental, epoch-making, totally unforeseen turn of events."

We crave the human voice. It enriches information with nuances that text alone cannot convey. A voice doesn’t just belong to the person speaking—it gives the words a deeply personal touch. The voice is a powerful instrument, one we often underestimate. Too rarely do we explore the possibilities offered by intonation:

• Melody
• Tone color
• Volume
• Speech tempo
• Pausing

These are just a few of the ways you can experiment with your voice. Try it out.

Practical Tip: Take the manuscript of your last speech—or pick a TED Talk. Every presentation has a script you can download, in the language of your choice. Select a passage you particularly like and recite it aloud, trying different intonations each time. Practice. Experiment. Get to know your instrument: your voice.

Forget Vocal Training?

You don’t need to do much more than that. Vocal coach Cornelia Moore doesn’t put much stock in excessive voice training or the question of which voice is most successful in pleasing an audience: "A voice touches us when it’s authentic, not when it chases an ideal."

Good vocal training, she argues, doesn’t force the voice into a specific mold but liberates it from false expectations.

And often, less is more. Emma González proved this powerfully on March 24, 2018. The 18-year-old was in the middle of her final year at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, when former student Nikolas Cruz, 19, entered the school just before dismissal at 2:40 PM. Armed with a semi-automatic rifle, he triggered the fire alarm, set off smoke bombs, and fired 200 shots indiscriminately into the fleeing crowd. That afternoon, fourteen children and three teachers lost their lives; fifteen more were injured.

This was the Parkland massacre—the eighteenth school shooting of that young year. A few weeks later, in March, González stood before 500,000 people in Washington at the March for Our Lives event. Among all the speeches demanding sweeping changes to U.S. gun laws, hers stood out. She stepped up to the microphone, briefly greeted the crowd—and then fell silent. For six minutes and twenty seconds, she didn’t say a word. She didn’t break her silence as the audience grew restless. She didn’t break it when they began shouting encouragement. And she didn’t break it even when an organizer came onstage to assist her. González didn’t need the silence to compose herself, as some in the crowd assumed.

The shooting at her school had lasted exactly six minutes and twenty seconds. It’s a span of time that seems short but feels endless when spent in silence—or in terror. During those moments, González had lost seventeen friends and acquaintances. And that’s precisely why her speech at the Capitol in Washington on March 24, 2018, consisted of six minutes and twenty seconds of silence.

Sometimes, silence speaks louder than any story.


This article is adapted from my book, What's Your Story? Leadership Storytelling für Führungskräfte, Projektverantwortliche und alle, die etwas bewegen wollen , published by O'Reilly Media.

Learn more about the art of storytelling for leaders in Between the Lines – A Guide to Storytelling, by Petra Sammer. Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ax3rLfy

Follow Petra Sammer on LinkedIn, subscribe to the SAMMERy newsletter, and discover more insights and practical tips on effective storytelling on the Amazing Stories blog.

This text was written by a human; AI tools were used for spelling and grammar checks. Photo by Andreas Fickl - Unsplash