Here’s my new piece over at Huffington Post UK on the ever fascinating subject of Speechwriting and Authenticity (and Spontaneity).
It was prompted by this one by Max Atkinson which obliquely referred to my presentation at the recent UK Speechwriters’ Guild event and suggested that I was one of several prophets of doom who were articulating misconceived and misleading concerns about the experience of public speakers and audiences.
Misleading? Misconceived? Moi?
Max suggests that for most speakers achieving a spontaneous style has to be a long-term goal because they aren’t ready to devote the time and effort needed to master the techniques involved. True, no doubt. But a serious speechwriter needs to push that angle hard. It’s not about having good words. It’s about delivering them convincingly, which is a more about emotional content and energy and less about clever phrasing.
We probably are not disagreeing about too much when it comes down to it. There is a busy market for people who write speeches for other people, just as there appears to be a willingness by the masses to listen to dire speeches and presentations. A top-end speechwriter will aim to help a speaker both with the words and with the style and emotional conversational content of a speech or presentation. More often than not, the speaker especially needs help in formulating his/her own thoughts systematically, if s/he has any such thoughts.
My own most basic thoughts on public speaking were summarised here after my talk at TEDx Krakow in 2010. It all comes down to Message, Structure and Story.
Thinking about it since then, I’d say that the greatest of all these is Structure. And looking at the audience as if you are in fact talking to them. People can warm to a clumsily delivered address with a rather confused message delivered with directness and evident sincerity. They are turned off by a more polished performance which looks artificial. At least I am.
This is what I mean by Authenticity. It’s all about being honest and sounding real, not pumped up by someone else’s words. My HuffPo piece quoted two interesting real-life examples – John Prescott and David Blunkett – who had to depart from their laboriously drafted scripts and did rather well. And it gives the last word to a very smart Russian speechwriter called Alexei Kapterev who points out that if you’re reading from a text you’re not looking at the audience…
Oh, and read too this fine observation by Alan Barker at Distributed Intelligence. He points out that there is a tension between an audience wanting a speaker to be ‘authentic’ and the speaker feeling anything but.
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This is a great subject for discussion and I'm glad you raised the question. I encourage my clients to gather their thoughts via a mind map, distill these into an outline and speak from the outline without ever having written it all out in a literary form. I find that the speakers who start by writing it all out in sentences naturally create long sentences which is not the form of someone who is speaking spontaneously or from the heart. In addition, a speech that has started with written out long sentences is very difficult for the brain to remember when the speaker is standing up in front of the crowd. It uses a different mental channel. It removes the speaker from the audience by causing them to be thinking in the past rather than in the present. I'm interested in seeing other comments on this subject because, next to speakers anxiety,I find this is the second most important challenge for my speakers.
Connie – excellent! Thanks. See also THIS on the merits of dictating a speech, not writing it:
I’m saying something subtly different. That first dictating a speech text is likely to produce words which somehow sound better – more direct and energetic – because those very words have been spoken in the first place…
Bottom line: the speaker indeed has to engage with the speechwriter to get optimum results. Which all too often does not happen here in Europe. And if it does happen the speaker may not welcome being told that being an effective communicator is not so much about words but rather her/his personal style.
At some point the problem spirals off into something more like therapy than smart drafting…
http://charlescrawford.biz/2012/03/03/more-on-mor…
The late Lord Burkitt (of Ulverston) says in his memoir that he never used full notes and he made some very persuasive speeches at the bar. I recall his comment that a short list of single words ideas is all he recommended. His words were from memory that 'the words will come to clothe the ideas if you have confidence'.