Trump-speech analyzed:

Whatever is to blame for the appeal of Donald Trump, who graces our cover this week (if that’s the word), it certainly isn’t his eloquence.

The point is made for us by Barton Swaim in the course of his survey of American styles of oratory, as heard in, particularly, inaugural presidential addresses, from John Adams and Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan and beyond.

There was a time – according to the “erudite and insightful” study Swaim reviews – when audiences not put to sleep by foggy logic and propositions they didn’t believe had their patriotic and altruistic feelings aroused instead.

But Trump’s “choppy, jokey, vaguely belligerent” chat is “the repudiation of the Great American Speech” – and perhaps that is just what Americans want.

(Thumb sketch of review of Stephen Fender’s The Geat American Speech: Words and monuments)

Let’s double-check those last words. So far, Trump has perfect pitch for millions of us. That’s partly the age we live in, when eloquence has been badly wounded.

In addition, we’ve been hearing uber-nonsense — “foggy logic and propositions [so many of us] didn’t believe” — from the tongue-tied (except when tele-prompted) presidential elocutionist long enough to make many of us ripe for rough approximations that do touch our “patriotic [if not] altruistic feelings.”

Newspapers not what they used to be. Alan Taylor looks at today’s newsroom.

At my old newspapers [( Edinburgh) Herald and Scotsman], today’s fillers of the front page rarely leave their desks, let alone the office. Instead they tweet like demented birds, fill in Freedom of Information forms and embellish press releases.

Verbal communication is kept to a minimum; even colleagues sitting side by side prefer to send emails rather than use their vocal cords.

Anyone suspected of having had a liquid lunch can expect to be collared by “Human Resources”.

Meanwhile, edicts from on high emphasize the imperative to feed the voracious beast that is the website and tailor “content” to whatever will attract the greatest number of “hits”, in the belief that this will increase advertising and thus protect jobs.

Towards the end of my tenure, fearful of catching something contagious, I rationed my visits to the office. Whenever I did drop by, it was eerily empty and the silence was unnatural, like that in a movie which foretells something awful about to happen.

Thus he concludes a half-page “Freelance” piece in Times Literary Supplement. Subscription needed: Freelance | TLS