When Meghan Markle and Prince Harry got engaged, nobody expected a textbook wedding. British royalty marries transatlantic, biracial celebrity; this was a new-edition fairy tale like no other. Aside from the carriages, crowds and the length of Meghan’s train, almost everything was done delightfully differently.

But what will stay with me forever from Harry and Meghan’s big day was the sermon by Bishop Michael Curry, the first African-American leader of the US Episcopal church. Not for raising eyebrows or causing faintly embarrassed smiles. Not for its considerable length. Not for representing diversity. But because it was 100 per cent textbook persuasion of the type we teachers train pupils to recreate year after year in English language papers.

And yet everyone in that well-educated audience seemed rather uncomfortably surprised.

For the establishment guests packed into Harry’s side of St George’s Chapel, nothing came as a greater surprise than Curry’s sermon. And yet he ticked every box, and then some more, when it came to public speaking with persuasion, as it is measured by our own exam system.

‘AFOREST’

The features of writing we demand of our pupils are now so extensive that they need acronyms to be remembered. For persuasive writing, you need ‘AFOREST’: alliteration, facts, opinion, repetition and rhetorical questions, emotive language, statistics and triples (or the “rule of three”). What seems like creative flow is, in fact, a carefully engineered rhetoric that needs to fulfil several different criteria if it is to gain enough marks for the new top GCSE grades of 9 or 8.

Without even a glance at his iPad, Curry delivered language so rich in persuasive features that it actually distracted from Harry and Meghan. All his sermon lacked was statistics.

Alliteration had never been so pervasive: love would “lift up and liberate” and heal our “sin-sick soul”, said Curry. Repetition ruled the roost and left us in no doubt of his overall message. The rule of three loomed large: love was “unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive” and God was “loving, liberating and life-giving”. Facts were woven in, albeit in a style that might be described as broad-brush: fire made the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and human migration possible. And emotion stirred the soul with possibilities well beyond romance, as love meant no child would “go to bed hungry”.

In case that wasn’t enough, Curry also threw in humour, gesture, dramatic pause and anticipatory doubt, too (“if you don’t believe me…”).

‘Textbook example’

Perhaps his sermon would have achieved the same aims with less repetition. We might have managed with fewer rhetorical questions. But this was a persuasive speech to be remembered, that held its audience transfixed, whatever their view. And if there was one way of remembering the features of persuasive writing for GCSE, listening to this speech was it.

So, while Meghan’s gown and the other surprises of the royal wedding keep us talking, pause for a second and think about this: we were shocked when someone stood up in front of the world’s cameras and delivered a powerful textbook example of what we are training English language pupils to do, day in, day out.

Pupils sitting their English language GCSE next month take note: when it comes to public rhetoric, it took an evangelical, charismatic preacher from the US to bring home quite how uncomfortable the British establishment is with too much charisma. They should take a leaf out of Year 11’s book.

Liz Hawker is a parent, Dyslexia Specialist (5-18) and linguist (French, German and Linguistics)