Why are some speeches better than others? Which words work and why? How can you make your speeches resonate better? How can you use frames to make your speeches more powerful?
If you write speeches, or would like to, and would like a chance to have a one-on-one consultation on how to improve them, this is your chance.
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Some political words have very contested meanings. Two people could argue for hours about what 'progressive' means without persuading each other. The same goes for 'freedom', 'justice', 'fairness,' and so on. If you want to persuade, avoid these contestable words. Your audience is not likely to understand them in the same way you mean them, so they won’t help you much.
Other ways of speaking are hard to misunderstand. When President Obama signed the healthcare bill, an eleven year-old kid was standing next to him: Marcelas Owens, whose mum had died of a treatable disease because she had no health insurance. Marcelas had campaigned on the issue with the message that '"no other kid should lose their mom because they don't have healthcare."
I love this. It does the nakedly political work of persuading you to support Obama's bill, without using any contestable words at all.
It's all a question of the right tool for the job. Sure, contestable political language is the best tool for other important work (motivating, discussing ideas, and understanding the political spectrum, for example).
But for persuading, I'm a big fan of those uncontestable words.
Sometimes when people ask what I do, and I tell them I write speeches for other people, I notice a little flash of suspicion pass over their face. I understand, though. In everyday life, we don't expect someone's words to be a team effort.
That, it seems, was also how Jimmy Carter felt about having people write speeches for him. He wrote all his own speeches until he ran for President for the first time in 1976, and even then he was reluctant to let anyone else do it.
His speechwriters felt it. One of them, James Fallows, summed it up like this:
"The relevant facts about Carter's mind as it relates to speeches are: first, that he lived most of his political life without speechwriters... Second... that whenever possible he feels much more comfortable extemporising rather than reading from a text. And third... if he had the time, he'd still write them all himself."
Because Carter wasn't comfortable saying someone else's words in public, he avoided contact with his speechwriting team. That in turn made it harder for them to familiarise themselves with his voice, his inner thoughts, and how his mind worked. They did their best. They read his book, and some even tried to get inside his mind by reading books which had influenced him, religious works, poetry, and even listening to the music which most moved him. But ultimately, because Carter shared that very natural mistrust of delegating his public voice to other people, he inadvertently made it harder for those people to write in his voice in the first place.
If you think your public speeches could be better, but you have some resistance to the idea of asking a speechwriter to help you, perhaps it's because you first need to get comfortable with the idea that your public words are important enough to delegate.
One of my favourite books on speechwriting is ‘Presidential Speechwriting – From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and Beyond’.
That’s because it doesn’t just discuss how to write speeches, it also discusses how speechwriting happens in practice. Each US President organised their speechwriting in a different way, and brought different talents to the job, and by comparing them, the book powerfully shows how these kind of organisational aspects affect the quality of the speech in the end.
My favourite chapter is on Jimmy Carter. Carter, it explains, was actually a great speaker when he had an ‘human interest’ topic. Yet most of his Presidential speeches flopped, because he couldn’t adapt to working with a formal speechwriting staff, and for various other reasons.
Lesson One - Lists Kill A Speech
What tended to happen in the Carter White House was that the speechwriters would draft a speech outlining the policy, and when it was ready, it would go to Carter for the final edit. The problem, in the words of one of his speechwriters James Fallows, was that:
“Carter thinks in lists, not arguments; as long as the items are there, their order does not matter, nor does the hierarchy among them... Whenever he edited a speech, he did so to cut out the explanatory portions and add ‘meat’ in the form of lists of topics.”
It’s not surprising that people remember Carter as blander than he actually was. In an ideal world, his speechwriters would have been able to gently explain that by prioritising lists of information, he was missing an opportunity to inspire.
Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve, is a man who’s often very hard to understand. He is on record as having said:
"I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
Whatever that wonderful quote means, it does highlight the point that the same words can be understood in different ways by different people.
Take the word ‘competition,’ for example. In the minds of a British liberal audience, it might conjure up ideas about efficiency and choice, whereas in France, it would be more likely to evoke ideas about atomisation and a lack of social solidarity.
Anyway, one way to try to prevent these misunderstandings is by trying to write as clearly and accessibly as possible. In his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell went as far as setting out his personal rules for clear writing, and I think they’re a fine place to start. They are:
i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print
ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do
iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out
iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active
v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent
vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
In Alan Greenspan’s defence, at least he was quite self-aware about his verbal fogginess. He’s also on record as having said:
“I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said”.