Here’s David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, giving sharp-eyed observations on the UK Speechwriters’ Guild conference last week:

Many of these 67 speechwriters from Britain, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Holland and Denmark told me their speakers wouldn’t go for the kind of intimate, personal, emotional authenticity that I was going to celebrate in the latest edition of my “speechwriting jam session.”

How did the speechwriters themselves feel about the American rhetorical style? Some despised it; others pined for it.

A native mistrust of emotion, a native disgust for narcissism

Americans are big on splashy speeches for two reasons, theorized the former diplomat, sometime speechwriter and fulltime peanut gallery pundit Charles Crawford. “You’re used to communicating with immigrants who don’t speak very good English. And … you’ve got to have a show! In America, everybody wants a show!”

Whereas in the United Kingdom, and even more so in Europe, what everybody wants—well, what everybody expects—is an objective recitation of the facts, the policy, the idea. “Yes, people like to be entertained,” said veteran U.K. political and corporate speechwriter Stuart Mole. “But there is nothing as exciting as ideas.”

There’s also a mistrust for obvious rhetorical devices and a low tolerance for personal anecdotes. Francois Mitterrand opening a speech with heartwarming tale about his childhood? Ridiculous, said a French speechwriter I spoke with. Elucidating a policy by telling the story of a typical person whom that policy affects? Transparently manipulative, said a British scribe. Humor? A Dutch speechwriter said that in Holland, speakers are discouraged from jokes with the stock advice, “Act normal and that is funny enough.”

This is a good bit:

…  I further told him candidly that the only confidence I had in my own talk stemmed from the fact that I’d rehearsed it eight or 10 times, all the way through.

He smilingly professed to be utterly mystified that anyone would need to rehearse a talk. And then he proceeded to give what I had to grudgingly admit was a pretty decent, pretty smoothly delivered talk, which even the foreigners seemed to appreciate…

Read the whole thing. It reminds us that when it comes to effective energetic public speaking the Americans are in a world class of their own, with Brits and other English-speakers some way behind and the rest more or less nowhere. Sad. But true.

There really are stark cultural differences between how speakers are seen by their audiences. I learnt last week that whereas Poles think that anyone getting up to give a speech must be important and learned and deserving a respectful hearing, the Dutch seem to think that any speaker is a priori too big for his/her boots and should quickly shut up!!

Meanwhile, reader Nigel Sedgwick makes an important practical point: who is the audience for any speech?

In important contexts (and that does go well beyond the political context), speeches are studied after the event, by analysts but also by the more general wider audience for those speeches. The sceptics amongst us seek to differentiate the useful policies and rationales from the rhetorical skills that were used (quite rightly) to attract interest and hold it during the speech (and attract later interest too).

Thus, an important speech must also stand up well to just plain simple reading of its transcript.

This includes standing up to quite a bit of bobbing about within the transcript (especially say introduction and conclusion), to decide whether the whole thing is worth the reading … So I repeat that, for the more important speeches, its transcript must be tolerably attractive too.

This is quite correct. How indeed to distinguish between the version read by experts or the wider public later, and the version delivered on the day which perforce includes rhetorical tricks to keep the immediate audience’s attention?

This opens an interesting question. What is the authoritative version anyway?

A significant policy speech will be produced in several different versions if the policy team are doing their job well:

  • the version actually used by the speaker on the day (laid out in big fonts, v short paragraphs and with various ‘stage directions’)
  • the version handed out to the media (usually with a Check against Delivery warning, meaning that the ultimately authoritative version is what the speaker actually says on the day – a good speaker during a speech may spontaneously change some points of detail and substance, for all sorts of reasons)
  • the version printed on the website or issued to a journal

A smart team will put round to a wider reading audience and media a solid cleaned-up ‘official’ version of the speech which includes all the policy meat but omits some of the flim-flam trimmings (informal introductory sections and jokes). Why? Because they want smart busy readers like Nigel not to waste time.

This works well enough in practice. Anyone desperate to have the fullest possible verbatim transcript of what the speaker actually said on the day, including any goofs or mistakes or confusions, can get one (if one has been made) simply by asking. At least that’s how the FCO has done it for a long time, and for all I know still does.