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By David Dahlbacka

An important part of public participation in policy-making is giving oral testimony at public hearings. For your testimony to be effective, your audience must remember what you say, and what they remember is determined in large part by how you structure your testimony.

The structure of oral testimony is determined by the nature of the meeting. The officials in charge of public hearings usually limit oral testimony by ordinary citizens to 2-3 minutes. (Political figures, powerful economic interests, policy-makers, and other “important” people often receive two or three times that.) If you run over your time limit, they will cut you off, so limit yourself to crucial points. If you have technical details to contribute, you must provide written testimony. Often, the comment period for written testimony is longer than that for oral testimony, but you should not depend on that.

When you give testimony in a public hearing, you are addressing three audiences at once:

• Those who called the meeting, such as the Metropolitan Planning Organization, Environmental Protection Agency, City Council, and the Federal Communications Commission.
• Those who attend the meeting, such as policy wonks, informed or uninformed citizens, and supportive or hostile citizens.
• Those paying attention to the meeting from outside, such as the courts, political figures, opinion-makers, the news media, and citizens watching on TV or podcasts.

While the formal audience consists of those who called the meeting, those who attended the meeting are equally important, because your testimony may motivate passively supportive citizens to speak out for themselves.

The ideal structure of oral testimony is based on the psychology of human memory and decision-making. Politicians, advertising people, con artists, and other professional persuaders know these principles, whether instinctively or by training. If you do not, you limit your ability to counter the effect of professional persuaders on others and yourself.

• Most people have severe limits to their retention of spoken information.
• Most people require an emotional hook to make the material worth remembering.
• Most people require repetition to reinforce the initial impression.

Therefore, you should summarize each point by a key phrase of 5-7 words, ideally with an emotional hook; and repeat that key phrase at least three times. If you paraphrase to avoid repetition, your audience may not remember the key phrase at all.

The number of points you can make is determined by the amount of time you have. With three minutes, you have time for at most two points, so you must present your strongest points orally and present your complete testimony in writing.

This, therefore, is the suggested structure:

• Introduction
  o Opening sentence.
  o What you want to accomplish by your testimony.
• Point #1
  o Key phrase #1
  o Evidence supporting point #1
  o Key phrase #1
• Point #2
  o Key phrase #2
  o Evidence supporting point #2
  o Key phrase #2
• Wrap-up
  o Key phrase #1
  o Key phrase #2

In Part 2, I will provide an example of testimony that uses this structure.