On speechwriting

An extract from Richard Heller's book High Impact Speeches, 2002

Having decided to be truthful, entertaining and logical, a public speaker has only one basic means to achieve this.

There are different skills in speaking well, but ultimately a good speech depends on its words. The great speeches of history work on their own, on the printed page, without the aid of the orator's voice or the setting, the atmosphere or the audience response. If you want to speak well you need to know how to choose and organize words. In fact, you need to know how to write.

By writing well, you will go a long way to overcoming the errors and the terrors of public speaking and liberating the other skills which make a speech work.

The exhilaration of writing well will give you energy, unlock your imagination and give you new insights about even the most familiar and boring subjects. There are few things that match the sensation of writing well: P G Wodehouse described it as a series of spasms, and Tom Stoppard likened it to hitting a ball absolutely perfectly with a cricket bat. By writing well, your material will communicate your exhilaration to your audience. You will win their hearts, and their minds (and votes and money) will follow.

The discipline of writing will make you think constantly and automatically about your objectives and how to organize your material to achieve them. The even tougher discipline of re-writing will sharpen you up even more, and take your words to their destination even more swiftly. When you have finished your (first) re-write you will feel confident in your material, perhaps even eager to deliver it to its audience.

If you are speechwriting for somebody else, it is your job to transmit these gifts of exhilaration, tautness and confidence to another person, but you can still experience them vicariously. Your words are your children: you love them and are proud of them, even if someone else is taking care of them.