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Rule of Three

rule of three in presentations

Back to Basics

Let’s get back to basics. Let’s get back to the Rule of Three.

Ever been to London? Stop, look and listen should be paramount in your mind because the traffic goes the wrong way.

Like spaghetti westerns? You should remember the good, the bad and the ugly.

Do you go to church? I bet you are familiar with Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Did you study Latin in elementary school? If you did you certainly know veni, vidi, vici, (I came, I saw, I conquered). It’s a Latin phrase popularly attributed to Julius Caesar who, according to Appian, used the phrase in a letter to the Roman Senate around 47 BC.

Over the urinal at the Harvard Club of New York there is a framed plaque containing these words: VENI, VIDI, WIWI. Those Harvard guys are so juvenile.

When my daughter got into a private school, my father was upset. He believed that the pressure she would face would never allow her to be “fat, dumb and happy.”

Did your parents put you to bed and wake you up in the morning when you were young? Mine did, always spouting the almost rap-like phrases, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

When you were a kid, did you sit on the floor like I did with my siblings and watch Superman? Did you thrill at the power of the opening, at the hard steel profile of the bullet leaving the pistol. “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s SUPERMAN.”

Make Yourself Memorable

When we speak to groups we tend to reach for emotion, or at least more emotion than we otherwise would, and much of that emotion gets packaged into words that come in three’s.

Of course Mo, Larry and Curlie are an exception, but the French stand and salute when they hear, Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite. Abraham Lincoln brought the crowd to stunned silence when on November 19th, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he exhorted his audience to resolve that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

The rule of three makes for powerful speech writing and powerful speech making that you can learn, practice and master.

Using the rule of three allows you to express concepts more completely, emphasize your points and increase the memorability of your message.