A single line can ruin your speech. Here’s how: Reporters latch on to the one overstatement, the one poorly chosen phrase, or worse, the one misleading claim in an otherwise well received speech. They then quote it in their piece. And that’s all that the public knows of it. Your speech rocked the room, the audience left buzzing, and the biggest, most important audience ends up with the wrong message. Ugh. The best way to avoid this is to edit your speech, line by line. If any one sentence were taken out of context, would it harm your reputation? Or send the wrong message? If the answer is yes, no matter how great it sounds, no matter how much the context explains it away, consider cutting it. You have to remember that you’re not just speaking the audience in front of you: You’re addressing your audience’s audience. #speechwriting #editing
This is a lesson that was drilled into me writing for the Fed, where every.single.word has the potential to move markets. I definitely learned the value of a good fact-checking process!
Good advice for speech writers but a rather depressing reflection on the media and ‘truth’. Humour would seem to be one of the most dangerous areas, the media opting for distorting literalism rather than tone and delivery. I am not surprised everyone from Trump via X to George Galloway in UK with his podcasts has forsaken mainstream media for direct communication. It will be interesting to see how much this accelerates over next few years.
Here's looking at you, "illegal aliens" in the SOTU... (though it doesn't seem to have been as bad as I thought it would be in the moment)
As a former journalist, I can confirm this. We were always on the look-out for that statement that would give our story a unique angle from others and create a buzz.
the greatest wisdom is in silence
S’what I always do with every phrase I say or write. “What dollophead is going to microfocus on this set of words and how can they spin it?” … Yeah, go ahead and spin that.
Use this one to push overstatements and questionable lines out! Even those questionable single words.
Speechwriter and author. Out now: 21st Century Virtues: How they are failing our democracy
6moFlashback happening now…