Another tiresome night in hospital (at least until 0330 or so) getting treatment for a horrible cough. I had a saline nebulisation which seems to amount to spraying my nose with misty sea water. Rather bracing. Feeling better now.

Off tomorrow to the 2011 UK Speechwriters Guild conference in Bournemouth on Friday. I am leading a session on Speechwriting in English for Non-Native Speakers. This has different aspects and permutations:

  • speech-writing in English by people whose first language is not English
  • speech-writing in English for a speaker whose first language is not English
  • speech-writing in English by non-native speakers for an English-speaking audience

This probably happens every day in the European Union: a (say) Polish official has to write a speech for a (say) Italian Commissioner to deliver to a mainly English-speaking audience. And lo!, some EU officials will be at the Bournemouth event.

Part of the real-life problem is that if a senior EU official or EU Foreign Minister needs a speech in English, s/he will ask the best available English-speaker on the team to work something up. That person is likely to know all sorts of English idioms, and therefore end up overdoing them in an effort to strike the right level of informality. Thus:

We stand firm in countering the basic ingredients of terrorism

This sentence shows a superb grasp of English grammar and vocab. But it’s too clever – the metaphors all get mixed up, standing firm to counter basic ingredients.

It’s no surprise that so often these foreign speeches in English speeches are a clumsily written and philosophical mess, or default into absurd, clunky pseudo-scientific twaddle as the desperate speechwriter grinds on to fill a page but having nothing to say:

… everything was discussed and decided within this parameter and it is within this praxis that the international system functioned 

My basic point will be that speechwriters won’t go far wrong if they aim for short rather than long, dashes of humour, no pomposity – all summed up in a very English subtle idea, light touch. Poles and Russians, for example, culturally just don’t do ‘light touch’, as far as I can see. Other European nationalities might attempt it but end up being ponderous or silly.

This is not being supercilious towards foreigners. The vast mass of British people too – including speechwriters at the top of government – struggle to draft a good speech in good English with a ‘light touch’ sense to it:

When the Treasury publishes in a few days time the most comprehensive study of economics and climate change, I will call for global co-operation among governments, government providing the right incentives and investment through a new environmental transformation fund, business taking its responsibility and by our will to act, new incentives to change behaviour can truly make a difference

Aaaaaaiiiiiieeeee

Anyway, that’s what I’ll be talking about. Be there or be square.

And if you can’t make it, you know what to do to get a bespoke seminar by me on the same subject.