How To Write A Good Speech

"As of tonight, you're all fired... Oh, do I have your attention now?" Alec Baldwin spits those words out as he tries to get the petulant sales force to focus on him in David Mamet's movie, 'Glengarry Glen Ross'. The babble in the room ceases and all eyes turn towards him. This is the art of the speechwriter.

The most important parts of a speech are the first and last lines opening and closing. Start badly and you've lost your audience. Start well and you'll see them lean forward in their seats. It doesn't have to be dramatic as the opening example. But it needs to engage the audience.

If you can't engage the audience with a speech then you're lost.

So how do you engage an audience? First, you must know your audience. What are their hopes? What are their dreams? What's important to them? Hypnotists are taught to mirror the body language of their subjects to create empathy. If the subject strokes his hair, so will the hypnotist. Discreetly of course.

And so it is with speeches.

Tap into your audience's hopes and desires. But don't do it clumsily. There's a phrase for that kind of behaviour: it's called 'sucking up'. It displays a lack of conviction and self-confidence.

There are other ways. Humanity has a common bond. We are all different but many of our hopes and desires are the same. The health and financial wellbeing of ourselves and our family matter to most of us. There are also industry specific interests. For instance, a video cameraman hopes one day to find the perfect shoulder mount so that operating a camera is both comfortable and stable. It might not excite the rest of us but it would transform his working life.

Once you have your audience's attention, you have to keep it. Two ways of doing this are to make use of what I call 'musicality' and also imagery.

Musicality is not only to do with the sounds individual words make but the rhythm of sentences. The rhythm has to keep changing, just like a good piece of music has fast and slow passages. It keeps the listener on his toes, stops him becoming complacent. Varying the length of sentences is one way to do this. But you should also pay attention to the onomatopoeic nature of the words. I like the word 'clatter'. With its hard consonants it sounds like its meaning.

Imagery must not be forgotten. It's harder to use well but very powerful. The way the human brain works is that we find it easier to remember things through imagery. Many 'memory acts' on stage use this technique. They create a story. For instance, if they want to remember a sequence of numbers and letter that goes: FD2BF, they might create an image of Fred and his dog carrying two bags of food. Try it. It's much easier to remember.

And then there's the ending of the speech. Contrary to popular opinion it doesn't have to be dramatic. Sometimes people try too hard to do this. It helps if it's memorable. But, more importantly, it has to be true to what has gone before. It must make sense.

Speechwriting is the closest to music that writing ever gets.