This document provides tips for using effective language and emphasis in opening statements. It recommends using vivid imagery, concrete language, and action verbs to paint word pictures for the jury. Abstractions should be avoided. Important points should be emphasized through variations in tone, pace, and silence to dominate the jury's conversations the way visual emphasis is used in writing. Numbers can also be delivered emotionally to engage the audience. Quotations, analogies, stories and other rhetorical devices can aid emphasis.

1. The Language of Opening Statement
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

2. The Language of Opening Statement
(1) Use Powerful Imagery
(2) Stick to the action – avoid abstractions
(3) Emphasis and Impact Devices
(4) The Power of Silence
(5) We have five senses, not one

3. The Language of Opening Statement
• The language used in opening statement is
different from the abstract and general
language used in everyday life.

4. The Language of Opening Statement
(1) Use standard English: vivid, plain, simple
language. Ease the legalese.
– Use concrete, not abstract language.
– Use specific, not general language.

5. The Language of Opening Statement
(2) Use power language.
– Remove qualifiers like “I think,” “I believe,” and “I
will attempt to show …”
– Use the active voice.
– Rely on nouns and verbs.
– Use language that has appropriate emotional
content and appeal.

6. The Language of Opening Statement
(3) Vary up the length of your sentences, but
tend strongly towards short sentences.
Written sentences are normally longer,
clunky, and more complex than sentences
delivered orally.

7. Use Powerful Imagery
• The setting: We may have to take the jury to
the streets of an inner city such as Newark or
Camden without ever leaving the courtroom
in order to draw them into the re-constructed
reality of a new and unfamiliar world.

8. Stick with the action – avoid
abstractions!
• The words we use can help the jury picture the
streets of Newark.
• Action verbs paint vivid pictures in our minds and
avoid dull and empty abstractions.
• Paint vivid word pictures by visualizing the scene
in your mind and then describe it in exquisite
detail so that the jury can see it in theirs.
• There is great power that comes from being able
to see an event in detail
• Use of word pictures must be learned. Lawyers
intuitively speak in abstract and general terms.

9. Stick with the action – avoid
abstractions!
• Active or passive words tell very different
stories.
• “John fired the gun” tells a different story than
“the gun went off in John’s hands.”
• Decide which story you want to tell, and then
use the appropriate active or passive tense.

10. Stick with the action – avoid
abstractions!
• Abstraction: My client suffered a broken leg.

11. Stick with the action – avoid
abstractions!
• Criticism: This tells us nothing. Tell them what it felt
like to have a broken leg with the bone sticking through
the flesh. Tell them how excruciating the pain was.
How John could not make it through the night without
being heavily sedated. How he clenched his teeth so
much that he grinded two teeth down down to the
gums. Tell them how John was confined to a bed for
two weeks with a solid cast extending up from his
ankle to his genitals. How he couldn’t walk for two
weeks and how he had to use a bed pan to urinate and
to defecate. Make the jury see it. Make the jury feel it.
Make them understand. Make them care!

12. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• There must be emphasis to the extent that
your points will dominate the conversation
during deliberations.
• Cases are lost because the jury does not know
how important something is and does not
remember the point.

13. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• As lawyers, we are very good at emphasizing
the written word in our briefs through a
variety of literary and stylistic devices such as
italics, bold-faced font, and underlining.

14. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• However, we sometimes struggle to do with
the spoken word what we do with the written
word.
• We must emphasize important points orally in
the same way that we emphasize written
words.
• The challenge is, “How do we do this without
a keyboard and without a neon highlighter?”

15. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• From day one of my acting training, I learned
that an actor is like a composer: that what you
read in the script is only the merest indication
of what you have to do when you really act
the part. After all, anybody can read lines.

16. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Emphasis may be gained in a number of ways
from outright telling the jury how important
something is to harnessing the power of our
voice in ways that we never dreamed possible.
• Here, tone, voice inflection, pace, and silence
are our tools.

17. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• For example, let’s say the script contains the
line, “Oh, I forgot.” Along comes the star of
the High School Drama Club, and what you get
is, “Oh, I forgot.” It is a straightforward but
uninteresting reading of the words.

18. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• But then the person who never acted a day
before in his life but who knows a lot about
human nature, says, “Oh!” His fists go to his
temples in a moment of painful recollection.
• A long pause follows during which he realizes
that it’s too late now and he must make the
best of it.

19. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Finally, almost with a shrug of his shoulders,
he says casually, “I forgot.”
• Which one is the actor?

20. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Here’s an exercise that you can practice on your
own. It demonstrates how a single phrase can be
open to different interpretations depending upon
how the phrase is delivered.
• Begin with the words, “I am the happiest person
in the world.”
• You can say these words like a computer – slow,
mechanical, and devoid of any emotion – and
they will be unconvincing. Or, you can deliver
these same words as if your fondest dream has
come true.

21. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Query: What would your opening statement
and closing argument sound like if the text
were replaced with numbers?
• In other words, replace the text with the
numbers, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10” but keep
the same emotional undercurrent that exists
when you speak the actual words. By
emotional undercurrent, I’m referring to pitch,
vocal inflection, sentence length, and pauses.

22. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Begin counting.
• Does it sound like you are reading a grocery
list and that it could put an audience to sleep
or is it emotionally riveting?

23. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• This is a challenging exercise.
• Here is how you can ease your way into it.
• Pretend that you are the valedictorian of your
class and that you are delivering the
commencement speech at graduation.
However, the script has been written for you
and consists of the numbers one through ten.
How would these numbers sound? What
would the cadence be?

24. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Compare that to what it would sound like to
be a politician delivering a concession speech
– through these numbers – to his or her most
ardent supporters after a hard fought and
drawn out campaign.

25. Emphasis & Impact Devices
Inspirational Quote

26. Emphasis & Impact Devices
“Words by themselves are not the expression of
truth. The emotions communicated in the
sounds of the words are the only truth!”
-- Gerry Spence

27. Emphasis & Impact Devices
TIPS

28. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• # 1: By adjusting the pitch and vocal inflection
of certain syllables in important words,
shortening your sentences, slowing down the
pace, pausing to allow for important points to
“sink in,” you can do with the spoken word
what you do with the written word.

29. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• # 2: Don’t overlook the mannerisms and
phrases that you use to convince people in
everyday life. These will bring you closer to
the goal of being real and natural in front of
the jury.

30. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• # 3: Voice work is an often overlooked but
invaluable tool for the trial lawyer. Simply put,
it will help you free your breath, develop
resonance, loosen jaw and tongue tensions
and wake up your full vocal range. When this
happens, your voice will drop into your body.
Tip: Relaxation and release is essential to
opening, freeing, and ultimately strengthening
your voice.

31. Emphasis & Impact Devices
• Speech devices that are enormously useful
and which have withstood the test of time:
– Quotations
– Analogies
– Similes and metaphors
– Illustrative stories
– Painting word pictures
– Repetition
– Triplets like “battered, beaten, and abused”

32. Emphasis & Impact Devices
– Parallel structure like, “Ask not what your country
can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country.”
– Enumeration like, “There are five facts showing
negligence: (1) … (2) …. Etc.