Pause for dramatic effect: Trudeau, MLK, Dwayne Johnson & Obama

Justin Trudeau’s speechlessness spoke louder than words.

Asked last week about Donald Trump’s handling of the George Floyd protests, the Canadian Prime Minister said nothing for 22 seconds… and thereby said it all.

It’s an open question whether Mr Trudeau was doing it for effect or was genuinely baffled as to what he could decently say without creating yet another diplomatic incident.

Either way, his long, eloquent silence came as a welcome reminder that the pause - in all its many forms - is an essential tool for any public speaker.

Watch Justin Trudeau say nothing for 22 seconds here (2’21”)

The list of effects that you can achieve with a pause is long and varied, but what follows here is a handful of examples showing the weight of the dramatic pause.

As a first example, let’s look at how Martin Luther King imposed a sense of occasion in the

opening lines of his landmark “I have a dream” speech from 1963. Two pauses in the middle of his first sentence express a solemnity that a flow of words could never achieve:

“I am happy to join with you today//in what will go down in history//as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation”. 

Two brief pauses set the solemn tone for the rest of MLK’s famous 1963 speech (2’41”)

Last week, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a tough-guy US actor, used a tense pause, punctuated with an incredulous shake of the head, to powerful effect when he called out the US President for failing to bring his divided nation back together.

“Where are you?// Where// is// our leader?// Where are you?// Where is our leader at this time when our country is down on its knees…?” he asked.  

Dwayne Johnson uses a pause to cast Trump as the AWOL President (The full video is 8mins, but the dramatic pauses feature in the first 30”) 

The unrivalled master of the dramatic pause, of course, is President Barack Obama who pushes his silences about as far as he can.

Take a look at how he urged graduate students at the University of Illinois in 2018 to achieve change through voting. If you vote, he told them, “something powerful happens//change happens//hope happens//not perfection//not every//bit of cruelty and sadness and poverty and disease suddenly stricken from the earth//there’ll still be problems, but// but with each new candidate that surprises you with a victory that you supported//a spark of hope happens.”

(Truth be told, President Obama pushes the art of the pause close to the edge: US talkshow host Stephen Colbert compiled this amusing 5-minute video showing nothing but the silences from that same hour-long University of Illinois speech.) 

As Mozart allegedly said: “The music is not in the notes but in the silence between.”

Watch President Obama master the art of the pause here (1’16”)

Charles Fleming, 8th June 2020

 You can read my other articles about public speaking and interview techniques on the Expression/Impression blog, available here. Please feel free to pass this article on to anyone who might appreciate it.