URBS 230—Community Leadership and Service Learning

Elevator Speech Assignment

Pete Seeger (a famous folk singer) tells a story that illustrates what goes into an elevator speech. It seems a king wanted to be known as being wise as well as powerful, so he called together all of his wise men and ordered them to pull together everything that was worth knowing and summarize it all into one book. They left the throne room excitedly arguing among themselves about what to include. It took them 10 years, but finally they returned and presented the king with a handsome volume, leather-bound, trimmed in gold. The king was a little preoccupied (there was a war going on, you know), but he thumbed through the book and read a passage here and there, mumbling “Yes!’ and “Oh, I see.” Then he snapped the book shut and looked straight into the eyes of the lead wise man and said, “This is all well and good, but I am a busy man. I want you to go back and summarize this entire book into a single sentence!”

The wise men groaned as they left the throne room this time, and it was 15 years before they returned (well, some of them—wise men tend to be on the older side, and some of them had died in the meantime). Their leader was a lot greyer, and his skin was pale from all the late nights they had been pulling. But he marched up to the throne and said, “Your majesty, we have that sentence.”

The king was surprised—it was so long ago that the whole project had quite slipped his mind—but he recovered quickly and said, “Yes, what is that sentence?”

And the lead wise man looked around at his colleagues, then turned proudly to face the king, and said “This, too, shall pass.”

Well, the king had gotten kind of used to not having the wise men nattering around the throne room and bringing up all sorts of troublesome questions, so he decided to give them a third command. “I want you,” he said, “to go back and distill all this wisdom into one word!”

The wise men were so shocked and discouraged that they didn’t say a thing as they left the throne room this time. Finally, 10 years later, there was only one of them left to come before the king. He was very old, he could hardly walk, and his eyes were so weak from all the reading he had been doing that he could hardly see the throne. But he shuffled forward and whispered in a weak voice, “Your majesty, I have that word.”

By now the king didn’t care, but he figured he owed it to him to at least listen. “Oh, yes. Well, what is it?”

“Your majesty,” he said, “that word is ‘Maybe.’”

The set-up for the elevator speech is this: You have an idea for a project, and you have just gotten into an elevator with the person you need to convince to let you do it. You have 2 minutes until the elevator takes both of you to the top floor. What will you say to convince her?

I’m not asking you to be as concise (or over-generalized) as the king’s wise men. This is a type of persuasive writing, different from the other forms (like the editorial) in that it is so compressed. Most people talk at about 70 words per minute. That means you have about 150 words to make your point. You must choose each word carefully, and you must ruthlessly prune the number of points you can make. You have time for one idea, a few supporting examples, and one or two rebuttals of potential objections. Each one has to be the best one!

I will assess your speech based on

Completeness (one main point, two supporting examples, rebutting two objections)
Conciseness (about 150 words)
Clarity (full sentences, proper mechanics, appropriate word choice, etc.)

MSU