Quora Answer: What is Some Advice You Would Give to an Aspiring Speech Writer?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What is some advice you would give to an aspiring speech writer?” 

The first thing to do when writing a speech is to begin with the end in mind.  What is the purpose of the speech?  Is it meant to inspire?  It is meant to set out policy?  Is it meant to paint a strategic picture?  What is the specific takeaway that you want for the audience? 

The second thing to do is to consider the audience itself.  What is their level of education, knowledge, seniority in an organisation?  What would be in their self interest for them to subscribe to the takeaway and support it?  What is their level of understanding of the subject matter? 

The third thing to consider is the length of the speech, and the occasion.  The tricky thing about speeches is that few people actually pay attention to long speeches.  The average person has an attention span of between five to seven minutes.  In that time, you need to seize their attention, give them an opening statement, set forth a personal experience to relate it to them, and them circle back to the opening statement so that they have that takeaway. 

If a speech is a keynote speech, and takes anything from twenty minutes to forty minutes, then expand on the stories, and flesh out important details.  Treat each story as a distinct speech within a speech.  Alternatively, break up the speech along distinct themes to be covered, and treat each as a speech within a speech. 

When writing a high level speech, it is important to consider the finer points of rhetorical devices and how to use them.  Allusions are useful for bringing the audience to the side of the speaker, utilising the speaker persona to invoke the allusion that he speaks for them, not to them.  Alliterations, anaphoras and epiphoras, assonance and other plays on language create sound bites within the speech that the audience can recall.  Chiasmus, antithesis, and synecdoches are means to bring across salient points in a way the audience can subscribe to and be invested in. 

An excellent speech writer also considers the use of specific sounds relative to the message in order subtly influence the audience to a position.  For example, to an English-speaking audience, words and names that start with “S’ unconsciously evoke a villain – Satan, snake, Shylock, Saruman, Sith …  This is very useful for speeches where we need to evoke the spectre of opposition against the interests of the audience.  The right word, in the right time, said in the right manner, to the right audience, is powerful.  It moves the masses to a position we want them to, while they are convinced that they arrived at that conclusion by themselves.