Off go sundry Crawfs to Poland for a few days, myself mainly working. Not much posted here this month. Am I running out of steam for this blogging business? Or is it just grey, muggy, flat August malaise time? Sigh. Quickies to keep you amused for a few days while […]
Part of next week will be spent giving some Speechwriting Training. One of the things I have been taught on my Mediation training is the technique of ‘reflecting back’. In other words, a good mediator (so it is said) is not one who shows ‘neutrality’ by being aloof and detached from […]
My piece analysing David Cameron’s high-profile speeches in Turkey and India has attracted some attention, and various well-taken comments. Part of the problem for a speechwriter for a top politician is to work out who the audience is, and craft the words accordingly. Most speeches of any consequence by (say) […]
Years ago when I was at Harvard University on a sabbatical midcareer break, I experimented for the first time with voice recognition software. In those days, the technology had already advanced pretty well. That is to make the system work, you had to load the program on to your PC, then read […]
My recent piece about the feebleness of Peter Mandelson’s speechwriters looked ahead to the coming international tour of David Cameron to see if his people would do a better job. NB folks, what follows is not about policy as such. It’s about speechwriting and diplomatic technique, and the way messages are […]
Being a serious former Ambassador Oliver Miles manages to give the lame FCO diplo-blogging genre the thrashing it richly deserves AND do so in an elegant Guardian article: Why do diplomats (and Whitaker’s article quotes some examples from Americans as well as the British) feel the need to let it […]
Liam Murray notes that the Department of Health has four speechwriters, one for each Minister. Plus 35 other people in the PR/Spin area. This is ridiculous. Cut. Then cut harder.
The Observer gives us a savage critique of the looming disaster facing civilisation as we know it thanks to the massacres being proposed for the UK’s public sector by the new coalition government. More! It’s written by a senior civil servant. Anonymously. How senior, pray? Can’t be that senior or […]
As you all know from the great Frank Luntz, it’s not what you say … … it’s what they hear! And much of what they ‘hear’ comes from what they ‘see’ and ‘feel’. Thus the best speaker in the world will be undone if the audience see and remember him/her as the one who […]
Here is a link I have been sent to a site extolling the benefits of therapeutic writing – writing as a tool to deal with stress, trauma and frustration in your own life. There are no fewer than 52 hot writing tips. Such as No 8: Chuck the rules of […]
