Lincoln

The best closing argument in American history took two minutes.

The featured speaker at Gettysburg was not Lincoln. It was Edward Everett, the most celebrated orator in America, and he spoke for two hours. Lincoln followed him with two minutes. The next day Everett wrote to the President and admitted the score: he wished he had come as close to the heart of the occasion “in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Two hours are gone. The two minutes are carved in marble.

Lincoln built those two minutes the way he built jury arguments for a quarter century in Illinois courtrooms: for farmers, shopkeepers, and twelve people with somewhere else to be. Study the film.

Move One: Small Words Carry Coffins.

Read the Address out loud and count the syllables. Most of its words have one. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Nearly every word a child knows. The subject is death, nationhood, and the meaning of a war, and the vocabulary is Sunday plain.

That is not simplicity. That is discipline. When the stakes rise, weak writers reach for bigger words, hoping the language will do the lifting. Lincoln did the opposite. Big moments, small words. The gravity comes from the facts, not the thesaurus.

The steal: find your theme sentence. If it needs Latin, you do not trust it yet.

Move Two: The Rule of Three.

“We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow.” “Of the people, by the people, for the people.” Lincoln thought in threes because threes land. Two is a coincidence. Three is a law. Four is a list.

Watch what the last triad does: three prepositions, one noun, and a definition of democracy that no committee has improved in a century and a half.

The steal: your motion has three reasons. Not seven. Seven reasons read like doubt wearing a suit.

Move Three: The Turn.

The most famous sentence in the speech is a concession. “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here.” He lowers himself, his office, and the entire ceremony, and in the same breath raises the men in the ground: “it can never forget what they did here.”

Say less about yourself. Say more about them. Diminish the lawyer, elevate the client, and the jury does the math you never had to say out loud.

The steal: hunt your draft for sentences about you, your firm, your efforts. Give those sentences to the facts.

The Drill.

Tonight, take your last opening paragraph. Cut it below seventy-five words without losing one fact. Rewrite your theme sentence until most of its words are one syllable. Find your three, and cut everything that makes it four.

Everett had two hours. History kept the two minutes. Write the two minutes.