That’s why, if my OkCupid profile had included the question, “What’s the most important thing about remarks for President Obama?” I would have said this: Write long sentences. Most speakers can’t handle them. They need to keep things tight. Otherwise they get lost. But Barack Obama could control a run-on sentence the way a sports car makes turns at speed, emphasizing, pausing, finding beats within the words and phrases not because of the punctuation but thanks to his innate talent as an orator, his voice rising and falling and carrying you along with it, so that by the time he reached his
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