The Speechwriter February 2014

February 2014 | Volume 14

The Speechwriter

WelcomeWelcome to the fourteenth

edition of The Speechwriter newsletter. The purpose of this publication is to circulate examples of excellent speeches to members of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild. We do this by picking out openings, closings, one-liners and quotations and other topical extracts from newspapers and the internet to identify techniques, stimulate your imagination and provide models which you can emulate.

This newsletter appears quarterly and is available to anyone who is a Standard Member of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild or the European Speechwriter Network.

ContributeWe welcome book reviews,

speeches and articles for the magazine. Every contribution published gets a £10 Amazon token. Please send your submissions to:

[email protected]

W W W. U K S P E E C H W R I T E R S G U I L D . C O . U K • I N F O @ U K S P E E C H W R I T E R S G U I L D . C O . U K

I don’t persuade a person because I use my words, I

persuade a person because I use theirs.

Everyone is different. You have to get inside their head and work them out.

The moment I understand your values, I can impose my values on you.

Body language is a waste of time. The words that come out of your mouth are more revealing. You reveal secrets every time you open your mouth.

I don’t believe in empathy. You can’t know what it’s like to be someone else. Use the words they use.

‘If you’re working abroad, ask your interpreter - what are the five

dumbest things I could do?’ And then don’t do them.

To present, write and share language - first work out the thoughts of the audience.

Contrary to popular belief asking questions is not the best way to get information - it’s just one way.

By not interrupting, comparing or finishing sentences, we are sending a subconscious signal to the speaker that what they are saying is important.

The tone of voice a person uses to tell a story, recount a grievance or tell another that they love them, reveals the true meaning behind the words.

Dick Mullender will be running a session at the Speechwriters & Business Communicators Conference in Oxford on 3 & 4 April 2013.

MASTERCLASS by Dick Mullender

EUROPEANSPEECHWRITERNETWORK

UK Speechwriters' GuildNewsletter of the incorporating

Dick Mullender was the Lead Trainer at the National Crisis & Hostage Negotiation Unit for the UK Police in Scotland Yard. He has written a book Communication Secrets of a Hostage Negotiator.

by Rodger Evans


by Alan Barker

The Rhetorica ad Herrenium lists 65. Quintilian deals with about 96 (some figures look confusingly similar to others). In their heyday, however, the number rocketed. Susenbrotus, in his popular manual of 1540, offered 132; thirty years later, Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence (that metaphor again) included no fewer than 184.

In Renaissance society, the figures

were promoted by the Humanists as essential tools of social advancement. Tudor schoolboys were drilled in them relentlessly; would-be courtiers used them, rather as jazzers use licks, to fill the spaces of their conversation with ready-made wit. The figures helped you cut a figure. That’s why Shakespeare used them: the figures are inherently dramatic.

We moderns tend to neglect them.

Forsyth offers three plausible reasons: we prefer to teach information and technical skill rather than linguistic craft; we distrust rhetoric; and we labour under a confused notion of authenticity inherited from the Romantics, which makes the figures seem hopelessly artificial. But we continue to use them, haphazardly.

Every memorable line – in a pop song, a speech or an advertising jingle – uses one or other of the figures. The figure is what makes the line memorable. And we use them in our own conversations. The better acquainted we become with the figures, the more likely we shall be to use them well – which is what Forsyth wants us to do. “These figures grow like wildflowers,” writes Forsyth, “but they can be cultivated too.”

Offer us too many, however, and we become befuddled. (The impenetrable Greek names don’t help.) Forsyth discusses about 38, though he mentions more without explaining them. This puts him on a par with Jay Heinrichs, whose recent

Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence differs from his

previous bestsellers in two respects. First, it’s 50 pages shorter than either The Etymologicon or The Horologicon, which works to its advantage. Secondly, it does more than catalogue a set of obscure linguistic facts entertainingly. This book might actually be useful.

The title is something of a misnomer. Forsyth himself admits that the figures of speech aren’t really the core components of eloquence, but only “one tiny, tiny aspect of rhetoric.” The descriptive metaphor, historically, has been not so much chemical as botanical: the figures are ‘the flowers of rhetoric’, vivid ornaments that attract the attention and seduce the listener.

They have a certain notoriety. For a start, how many figures are there?

Word Hero covers about the same number. Max Atkinson, in Lend Me Your Ears, concentrates on just three.

The best strategy in becoming better figure-users may be to collect them, like specimens. We could start with Atkinson’s core triad: antithesis, tricolon and the rhetorical question (of which Forsyth lists no fewer than 16 variants, although he discusses only about seven). It’s easy enough to spot metaphor, irony and isocolon (all those bullet lists in parallel construction); listen to a few speeches and presentations, and you’ll soon find chiasmus, and even anaphora (“the king of rhetorical figures,” claims Forsyth). Point them out and users will be intrigued, not to say flattered; suggest that they use them consciously, and they’ll soon develop the taste to use them well.

Forsyth has written an entertaining field guide. Thorough, he isn’t (which is, I suppose, hyperbaton). He resolutely avoids any talk of classification: no tropes or schemes here (scesis onomaton). He provides the shortest of reading lists, and no index (which makes the asking price of £12.99 look a bit steep). But then, unlike Heinrichs or Atkinson, he has no overt didactic aim. As a result, he treats the subject more fully than Atkinson and more elegantly than Heinrichs. If you really want to up your game in figure-spotting (anthimeria, m’lud), you probably need all three.


BOOK REVIEWS

The Speechwriter

Newsletter of The UK Speechwriters’ Guild

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The Elements of Eloquenceby Mark ForsythIcon Books, 2013, £12.99

The Speech: The Story Behind Martin Luther King’s DreamBy Gary Younge Guardian Books, 2013, £6.99

The story of how Dr King’s immortal oration came to be is

one of fortitude, intrigue and Marlon Brando brandishing a cattle prod. The Wild One’s role is but a walk-on



The Speechwriter


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TELL A STORY

Jeffrey Zeig in A Teaching

Seminar with Milton H. Erickson, lists some of the values of using anecdotes in therapy as follows:

Anecdotes are non-threatening

Anecdotes are engaging

Anecdotes foster independence: the individual needs to make sense out of the message and then come to a self-initiated conclusion or a self-initiated action

Anecdotes can be used to bypass natural resistance to change

Anecdotes can be used to control the relationship

Anecdotes model flexibility

Anecdotes can create confusion and promote hypnotic responsiveness

Anecdotes tag the memory - “they make the presented idea more memorable.”

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part in a twinkling cast that includes JFK, Harry Belafonte, Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Barack Obama, Shakespeare and God (c/o the Old Testament). Yet there’s no doubting the most stellar presence.

“Though he was extremely well known before he stepped up to the lectern,” said his aid Clarence Jones, “he stepped down on the other side of history”. King’s was the final address at the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington DC on August 28 1963. By the year’s end Time magazine anointed him Man of the Year and 12 months later the Nobel Peace Prize carried his name. At the time of his murder in 1968, however, his star could be found in the gutter – literally so; he was in Memphis supporting striking garbage workers. His anti-poverty campaigning and outspokenness against militarism led to him being shunned by mainstream America.

How then MLK’s reputation and this particular speech came to be revisited, co-opted, misread, sanitised, and, 50 years on, sanctified should be a fascinating tale. It is. The author, a Guardian journalist relocated to the US, has immersed himself in the back pages – as well as what King termed “the fierce urgency of now” – of the civil rights

movement. Younge’s research is meticulous, his narrative compelling and the analysis not without detachment. If there’s a flaw in the speech, he suggests, it lies in the absence of detail – the Promised Land can be glimpsed but the directions are sketchy. But evidently he believes in King’s dream. As Baldwin wrote: “…perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony.”

And that belief is what enables him to place the reader centre stage before 210,000 demonstrators, black and white, in the shadow of the

Lincoln Memorial. Perhaps not on the podium, that would be something else, but close enough to share a coke with Paul Newman and hear the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson twice exhorting her friend: “Tell them about the dream, Martin”.

Here’s the crux. When advance copies of That Speech were circulated to colleagues and the press, the Dream segment didn’t feature. “It’s trite, it’s cliché,” one adviser told him. Whether he always intended to discount that view or spontaneity took hold is impossible to say. What’s clear is that nobody today refers to The Bad Cheque Speech (another metaphor deployed on the way to the mountain top) or The International Association for The Advancement of Creative Dissatisfaction Speech (a line he wisely chose to skip).

King transports us, then as now, with imagery, rhythm and intensity. And when he reaches that third and final “Free at last!”, well, you half expect that white marble giant of the sixteenth President of the United States to leap up and lead the ovation.

Rodger Evans works for the Scottish Parliament

February 2014 | Volume 14The Speechwriter


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It is a complicated, diverse, politically correct, world. Also,

there are ethical considerations, security issues, and people who sit there waiting to take offence. Some speakers worry that humour in a presentation is like tap dancing in a minefield: risky.

I understand. I have written for some key people since I started The Jokesmith in 1984. I identify with Will Sommers, court fool to Henry VIII. Henry fancied himself quite the wit. He demanded that Will be funny – but, if the joke went wrong, poor Will would have a bad day. However, it never happened. Will was a professional. He brought to the selection of his humour the same common sense, good judgment, consideration, and awareness of his audience that he brought to surviving all the other challenges of his world. He kept his head, and retired old and honoured.

A Pentagon official once told me that he conducted a top-secret briefing and used a story from The Jokesmith to lighten the mood. After his talk, a student approached and

asked him to tell that joke again. The student wanted to tell the joke to his friends, but wanted to stay away from anything that smacked of disclosing classified information. Who would have thought of that one? The good news is that I got another subscriber.

Some speakers worry that humour might diminish the dignity of their office. Some very dignified people used humour in their talks. I think of JFK, Churchill, Pope John XXIII, Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln skirted the ethical issue. He quoted from comic authors of his time without crediting the writer. Once, a reporter tried to trap the president by asking if he composed the funny lines that he used. Lincoln laughed. ‘Of course not,’ he said, ‘I’m a performer, not a playwright.’

Once, years ago, Queen Elizabeth II toured New Zealand. An extremist tried to get her attention in a rude and dangerous way. He threw an egg. It splattered the Queen in a very unseemly way. The next morning, Her Majesty addressed the New Zealand

legislature. She began this way: ‘While I do enjoy the occasional egg, I prefer it with my breakfast meal.’ That was a joke. The Queen of England told a joke, and the wonder of it, like Samuel Johnson’s talking dog, was not that it was done well, but that it was done at all.

Consider: The Head of State had been humiliated. She knew everyone was waiting to see her reaction: Threats and reprisals? Tears and a shortened agenda? Off with ‘is blinkin’ ‘ead? No! The Queen settled the matter with a little joke. She dealt with the issue up front, put it behind her with humour and good grace, and moved on. She showed that the Queen of England is human and sensitive. She displayed what a leader is all about: dignity, strength, and courage in the face of ill will.

If a little well-placed humour can work for the Pentagon, Henry VIII, the Pope, Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth II – it can work for you also. And, if you happen to use the occasional joke that isn’t funny – well, at least no one is going to laugh at you.

I’ll close with my favorite speechwriters’ joke: a certain speechwriter worked diligently to give his principal a memorable speech for a very important audience. The speechwriter could not attend the event and afterward asked his principal how it all went down.

The principal replied: ‘It was a mixed reaction. You opened strong, built to a powerful mid-section, but after that it got repetitious and, frankly, a bit tedious.’

The speechwriter thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Sir, I gave you two copies of that speech.’ Ed McManus The JokesmithEmail: [email protected]

THOUGHTS FROM THE JOKESMITH: ON USING HUMOUR

For many years Ed McManus edited a quarterly comedy newsletter for business and professional speakers called The Jokesmith. He looks back on his career.



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acknowledging them as a devious way of creating rapport.

Comedians often tell the audience how great they are. Guy Browning has a line, ‘It’s very rare that I talk to an audience as good-looking and intelligent as this one. Hands up who is sitting next to someone good-looking and intelligent?’ This has the benefit of flattering the

audience, and getting them involved.

Sporting success is something that people feel deep emotions about. So it’s smart to associate yourself with any recent national victories.

Daniel Pink described how he used local knowledge to endear Al Gore to audiences. ‘…say he was speaking in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. We’d find out the most popular coffee shop in Sheboygan and its most popular pastry. Then somewhere in the speech, we’d include a place for him to say matter-of-factly, ‘If you’re talking about health care down at Charley Café’s – and maybe eating one of those cherry-walnut scones – you might wonder whether our Medicare plan covers.’ People love that sort of touch. Homework pays.’

You want to avoid delivering bad news. Cialdini talks about a weatherman who got death threats because the rain wouldn’t stop. Isaac Asimov pinpointed the reasons why likeability reaches so deep.

‘All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality…and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you and when he wins, you win.’

Blake Snyder wrote a book

on screenwriting called Save the Cat. In it he bemoaned the loss of the ‘Save the Cat’ scene. He said they’ve stopped putting it in films. It’s the scene where we meet the hero, and the hero does something - like saving a cat - that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him. It’s the scene that makes you root for the character.

One of the easiest things for a politician or a business leader doing routine speeches is to forget how important it is to be liked. A good speechwriter will put a ‘Save the Cat’ line in the first couple of paragraphs of every speech.

The psychologist, Robert Cialdini, lists physical attractiveness, similarity, compliments and association as key traits that make people likeable.

We know from TV that we like to watch beautiful people. Hence Boris Johnson was told to lose weight for his Mayoral campaign by his advisor, Lynton Crosby. We prefer our politicians without paunches.

Margaret Thatcher used her experiences as a housewife to say ‘I’m just like you’ and to persuade people a national economy is just like a household budget. UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, used his pint of beer as a symbol of how he’s more like the ordinary man, than another one of those lying politicians.

The former Chief Rabbi would pay warm compliments to the institution and key characters hosting him before starting his speech. George W Bush used a technique of pointing to someone in the audience and

LIKEABILITY - THE MOST IMPORTANTTRAIT IN A SPEAKER by Brian Jenner

I recently attended the first conference organised by the

Professional Copywriters’ Association.

For the first time I saw a Visualiser in action. It allowed chalk and talk using a projector. It was a Lumens PS760, which retails at about £1,700.

The advertising guru, Dave Trott, used it to draw small cartoons and it worked extremely well.

Brian Jenner

THE VISUALISER

In his series Pain, Pus

and Poison, Michael Mosley discussed the discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming.

While Fleming made the discovery that penicillin mould could kill bacteria, his idea was not taken up for over a decade later.

Mosley blamed this on the fact that Fleming was a terrible public speaker and so did not communicate his discovery effectively.

ALEXANDER FLEMING



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WOMEN IN PUBLIC LIFE: SPEECHES AND SPEECHWRITING Lady Fiona Montagu made this speech at Portcullis House as part of Parliament Week on 20 November 2013

Good evening everyone,

I believe in the power of speech, and colourful communication; it’s a deeply personal skill. A skill that has the power to make things happen, create a vision, change people’s lives for the better, both locally and globally. We have all been given a stage, in this lifetime, to be of service to humanity ... OR NOT

When I married Lord Montagu almost 40 years ago Beaulieu in Hampshire became MY stage. Not only do I have to handle parts of the visitor business effectively and graciously, like publicity, hosting and promotion, often seven days a week – I am never knowingly NOT promoting the Old Homestead. However my particular passion is education, so ... with that hat on I need to be an effective fundraiser for our education schemes in this glorious corner of England. Fundraising is the bane of my life ... I am sure some of you here this evening chime with my feelings in that direction.

To extract cash or favours from

wealthy folk and organisations requires many skills and a deeply devious, or should I say pragmatic, set of tools. And none of these really work if you do not have the assurance to be fluent, and hopefully funny, in your strategy and delivery.

Thus, very swiftly after my marriage vows, I found a Toastmasters Club that met within walking distance of our London flat! I am deeply lazy, so this was perfect; it was meant to be. The glorious thing about Toastmasters is that you are thrown in with people whose speaking skills are mixed; many are far from perfect, so there is no need to feel wretched and foolish as you stand there squirming, for the first few times, mind BLANK, hoping for an early death.

I also attempt, globally and locally, via The Club of Budapest, to generally make the world a better place. We build bridges of understanding, co-operation and goodwill, hopefully inspiring, on our troubled planet, many people to grow in the fabric of their consciousness; to accept the interconnectedness and interdependence of all creatures in the embrace of living nature. I have spoken in various countries along these lines and, while I am not that eloquent, I have no fear of hopping up to a lectern and addressing absolutely any audience. For this I thank Toastmasters.

I also learned that the thing to remember is that the audience is on your side! They want you to succeed, give a dazzling speech, entertain not bore them ridged! They are NOT the Enemy. Their time is precious, don’t waste it with nervous, painful, stilted drivel! And if you are easy with telling jokes that is fine, and if you are not, avoid them at all costs!

One is always pathetically grateful for even mild applause. Some smart philosopher once said ‘the clapping of but one person is of considerable significance’. I cling to that pearl of wisdom.

I remember when Jonathan my son was small, about seven years old. I gave a birthday dinner in Palace House and one of the guests was Tommy Steele. I wanted Jonathan to entertain us, before dinner, on the piano. He was very shy, but Tommy persuaded him to tinkle the ivories. LOUD applause! Jonathan was away! Eventually Tommy went up to him and said ‘As an entertainer, you also have to know when to STOP’. Applause can be so intoxicating and gratifying – even if not entirely warranted.

Most people’s speaking skills are so poor that if you give a speech that is barely halfway OK the audience will smother you with underserved praise. This is a good feeling and wipes away the terror and humiliation of those early days at Toastmasters.

There is a marvellous and terrifying section of the Toastmasters’ class which is called table topics. With zero preparation you have to hop up and speak for a few minutes on any subject thrown at you. Here you learn to hone skills of deep deviousness ie swing the topic onto something you do know about, or did today and can therefore chat on about... Of course this is cheating, but what the hell, at least you’re not tongue-tied !

I learned the POWER ... of an effective pause ... I learned not to dress so outrageously that no one present focused on the golden words that fell from my lips. I learned, when assessing others’ speeches, to commend, recommend, commend,



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so that vulnerability is soothed, and bravery restored. I learned to listen attentively to other speakers and refer to points that they made. I learned to dare to be different; but not too self indulgently rattle on and on. Others, far more interesting and accomplished than I, need their moment in the sun.

I have never achieved speechmaking without notes but heck, who’s perfect?

I remember the first time I watched Brian Jenner speak. He was HOPELESS, REASSURINGLY hopeless! And now he is a total STAR up on that stage. However, he was always funny – in a Woody Allen kind of way – and this is a priceless gift.

So mes amis, courage! Grip the nettle of public speaking; embrace the path of effective, memorable speechmaking It can be a roller coaster ride, but FUN and maybe,

just maybe, you WILL make a significant difference is some one’s life. I am an optimist - a pragmatic Utopian, or a Utopian pragmatist. I believe in life you can be an optimist or a pessimist, and it is quite likely you may end up at the same destination, but if you have been an optimist you will most certainly have had A BETTER RIDE.

RHETORBORES Household Heterogeneity and the Transmission Mechanism

Dinner speech by Peter Praet, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, ECB Conference on Household Finance and Consumption, Frankfurt am Main, 17 October 2013.

Distinguished members of academia, dear colleagues:

Thank you for contributing to the ECB Conference on Household Finance and Consumption.

As you know, the Eurosystem has recently released the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) to researchers, a new dataset which gives detailed, household-level information on the cross-sectional distribution of assets, liabilities,

income, indicators of financial pressure, etc. By covering 62,000 households, it is representative of 15 euro area countries, and I understand that plans to conduct the HFCS in the next wave are well advanced in the two, and soon three, remaining euro area countries. We hope the new dataset will encourage research on household

heterogeneity and household finance, in particular from a cross-country perspective.

The central theme of this conference – already the third on the topic that the ECB has organised over the past five years – is that individual households are heterogeneous in many respects and that it is important to measure and analyse this heterogeneity because it can have important implications for aggregate figures.

Some of these implications are of interest not only to the research community, but also to policy-makers at central banks. This is because the interplay between the

heterogeneity across households and differences in institutions and shocks can affect the functioning of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy. It is also of relevance for financial stability.

Of key interest to central bankers is the question as to how shocks – including unexpected changes in incomes, interest rates and asset prices – are transmitted in the overall economy. The survey can bring new insights into how individual households are affected by economic shocks, with due consideration of their demographic and socio-economic characteristics, as well as of the current phase of their life cycle, their income, assets or liabilities, etc.

COURAGE

If this life be not a real

fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

William James



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WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERS? William Cohen analyses the Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese’s new film Wolf of Wall Street has

been described as three hours of uninterrupted corruption and debauchery. What are the features of that debauchery? You see characters taking drugs, going to lap dancing clubs and listening to motivational speeches.

How did motivational speaking get in there?

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a naive young trader who gets to Wall Street and learns some of the sophisticated sales techniques in a smart firm. Then his firm goes bust. He loses his job and ends up at a grubby outfit selling penny shares, where he applies his blue-chip techniques to gull to blue-collar workers.

He’s so successful, he sets up on his own and trains the staff to use his techniques to expand the racket on a huge scale. He generates limitless money for big houses, cars, a yacht, a helicopter and copious amounts of drugs. He achieves because he has the great American gift: persuasion.

Watching it as a speechwriter, you notice he’s got all the tools in

the toolbox. He uses humour, he tells stories, he has a sense of drama, he has a vision and he motivates his colleagues to take specific actions (pick up the phone), but it’s all for illegal ends.

The real Jordan Belfort, after going to jail, now works as a motivational speaker and sales trainer. He’s a changed man, eager to insist that he believes only in ethical persuasion.

Why do such characters make us feel so uncomfortable?

Belfort overcomes some of the objections in his presentations. He talks about how his parents wanted him to be a dentist, but he eschewed that to become a salesman. His parents viewed being a salesman as being a slime bucket. He argues that’s why his parents never had any money.

Belfort’s enthusiasm is infectious. He’s honest and funny. He mocks poor sales people and tells stories about how some are ducks waddling around leading weak, disempowered lives and others are eagles soaring to amazing heights.

Our parents teach us to beware of sales people. It’s wrong to buy too many things. Belfort argues that it’s only limited people who don’t like spending money. It’s good to have nice things.

Yes, you might be conned, but isn’t being conned the first step into understanding that we only learn by testing out other people’s promises. The most effective sales people manipulate our own greed and use it against us.

Does that make motivational speaking and selling despicable?

If you buy a newfangled kitchen gadget, it might end up in the back of the cupboard, but it might prove incredibly useful. Often we can’t tell, but we’re more keen to avoid mistakes than make new discoveries.

Some British film critics see nothing to like about the Leonardo DiCaprio character whatsoever. Well there is the boundless energy, and the philosophy that life isn’t perhaps about being clean and respectable, but getting dirty and finding out where the real value lies.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable bit about American capitalism is that it’s a religion. It’s a faith that you’ve got to live. The Americans have more respect for upstarts who make a mess and then redeem themselves. The British prefer a society where everyone knows their place.

A good motivational speaker urges people to take action to change their lives using promises of success. Most people aren’t prepared to invest the energy and endure the pain and disappointment that’s involved in getting to that place. That’s probably why we find these speakers attractive and repulsive in equal measure.



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TRADE SECRETS

The UK Speechwriters’ Guild has published its first book: Trade Secrets, Jokes, stories and quotations for desperate speechwriters in 2014.

‘This is a pilot project which the Guild intends to become an annual publication, featuring the best lines nominated by its members during the year.’ said the compiler Brian Jenner.

‘Most people, when they stand up in public to speak deliver too much information, in a dry way, often illustrated by poor PowerPoint slides. At the Guild, we champion persuasion, which involves having a conversation with an audience and motivating them to change something. As one quotation from a former Israeli Prime Minister put it:

After being 60 years in politics, I lost my taste for management. I believe to inspire is more important than to manage.’

The book is based on the same principle as the late Bob Monkhouse’s famous joke books.

‘You need to store up your best lines, and then be able to find them on the right occasion. Audiences appreciate even a little humour. Something like, ‘My last talk was to the British Haemorrhoid Association. I got a standing ovation’’.

‘Some people think that one-liners are a tired way to entertain audiences. It depends. The skill of a speechwriter is to take an old joke and repackage it. By giving it a new coat of paint, you’re updating it for a contemporary audience. Making audiences laugh is a fiendishly difficult thing to do, but if you can adapt familiar rhythms, you’ll find the audience will grasp the joke. I’ve been amazed watching top dramas like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under how they weave old jokes into their scripts.’

‘This is a great way to promote the Guild to outside organisations. We’ve sent copies to Boris Johnson, the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Patten, and Government communications people. We can add a little colour to those dry corners of public debate.’

‘The rule for the 2015 publication will be that any member of the Guild can submit a line that either they’ve put in a speech and worked with an audience, or one that they’ve heard someone deliver successfully at an event. All contributions will be acknowledged and maybe we can market next year’s book as a stocking filler.’

Design and typesetting was done by Rob Havill of Europa Studio and the book was published through Lulu.com.

Every paid-up member of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild and European Speechwriter Network should have received their copy over the Christmas period.



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What font do you use for your scripts?

Cambria and Verdanasize 10-12.

How does it feel to be Dutch? How do you view yourselves vis-à-vis France, Germany and Britain?

My college history professor stated that the Dutch have their origins as ‘marsh-Germans on the North Sea shore’. Later on, the Dutch have been at war with all three countries you named, but also fought alongside them as allies. Deep down we think we’re a great people, but we also love to hate ourselves. And we’re jealous: of the French for the country and the cuisine, of the Germans for their groundedness and ‘gründlichkeit’ and of the British for their history and style. So how does it feel to be Dutch? ‘Fickle’ is probably my best attempt at an answer.

Would you consider a political career of your own?

No. I’m comfortable supporting and advising others with thoughts, ideas and words.

Which British writers do you admire?

W.H. Auden, Julian Barnes, G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, C.S. Lewis, Ian McEwan.

What makes you jealous of other speechwriters in a team?

Creativity, being well-read, a large vocabulary and storytelling abilities.

Have you written for female politicians? Is there any difference?

I wouldn’t know, to tell you the truth. Both the minister and state secretary are women, so I don’t write for men that often. Strangely, I hardly realized this until Denise Graveline’s

What was the first speech you ever wrote?

I think the first thing that qualified as a speech was in a debate class, while studying journalism. The very first ‘professional’ one was a speech on road works, in July 2010. At the time, I worked in communications, wrote short stories for literary magazines and was tangled up in a failed attempt to finish a novel.

What are you hoping to experience at the Ragan Communications conference in Washington?

First, every speechwriting conference is like a support group. I need to hear and learn from other speechwriters about their good and bad experiences. Second, I’m interested to hear about speechwriting culture in the United States. Third, it’s a very nice opportunity to hear Jon Favreau speak about his experiences and his vision on the trade.

Have you given many speeches of your own?

Not much, apart from debate class in college and practising some of my speeches aloud. And I sometimes lead services in a small church, helping me to lose stage fright.

Do you see a connection between speechwriting and psychoanalysis?

I know from experience that in both speechwriting and psychoanalysis it can be difficult and scary to get to the core of the issue. But once you get there, it’s truly liberating.

talk ‘The Lady Vanishes’ at the speechwriting conference in London, last May.

What’s your favourite reference book?

There’s a very good book called A new world; The Netherlands in the 19th century, which I often browse for stories. On speechwriting I love On Speaking Well by Peggy Noonan and White House Ghosts by Robert Schlesinger. On writing in general I recommend a strange, meditative gem by Annie Dillard, called The Writing Life.

Is it easy to write a blog in a foreign language? When did you first start learning English? What good things have come from writing your blog?

To me, writing is the best way of thinking. Every year I write about 10 speeches in English, so I need to keep up my English language skills by reading and writing. The blog is a great way to do that, to ‘digest’ thoughts and ideas on the trade and to get in touch with fellow speechwriters. I’m still wondering, though, how the blog combines with the speechwriter’s traditional ‘passion for anonymity’. From the age of 10, I had weekly English classes for ten years.

Can you give us any tips how to make memorable speeches about the environment?

Always try to turn dry facts into a personal story, however hard it may be. But doesn’t that go for every topic?

The Speechwriter is edited by Brian Jenner

INTERVIEW WITH JAN SONNEVELDSpeechwriter at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment

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The Speechwriter February 2014

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