How To Write A Speech
To know how to write a speech, you need to know first how to make it sound amusingly. At least that was what a friend of mine told me when I asked him for help. Of course, this led to a very short but informative conversation, which I very consciously ended up by throwing a pillow at him.
I could see and understand his point of view, but it didn’t sound valid to me. To know how to write a speech, you don’t need to write it in an entertaining manner. One thing you really need to do is to be able to compose your speech coherently. The entertaining part, at least in my point of view, comes out when you have to deliver your speech. Even the best pieces of comedic speech can sound as dry as dust if delivered in obscure tones.
So all that put a stop to that way of thought. But then we were left with the small stipulation of my needing to get my speech ready in a great and entertaining manner in less than a week, not to mention that I had to see on how to write a speech that would be convincingly good and not put my audience to sleep!
This point became the starting point for my speech, which was unnaturally enough. I wrote in big bold letters on my block, that I did not want to put my audience to sleep. Then I went on to list all the things that I did and did not want to be in my speech, and what I ended up with was a nice mish-mash of things. My high school English teacher would feel really despairingly by reading that.
But in spite of all this I got this job done. It got my writing essence to burst into blossom and gave me the impact to first of all get something down on paper. And that, as I felt, was the first thing everyone should know about, on how to write a great speech. Don’t think overmuch hard, don’t worry about what you have to write, just get something down on paper and before you realize it you will have what will be known from now on as the first rough copy of your speech.
Once you got it all done, I strongly recommend that you leave your speech aside and do something more interesting such as having a cold one at the nearest watering hole. That was the second item on my list of to-be-done things to write a speech. This as I found was a very good way to clear your mind of the confusion that has been growing since you first recognized you had a speech to write.
After that, when you are in a adequately clear mindset, most probably the next morning, (or maybe afternoon!), you can then get back to the first draft, read it thoroughly through, take the relevant bits and pieces of the speech which sound at least halfway acceptable to you, and work on a second, third or even fourth draft, until everything sounds just right. And that is how to write a speech for any matter, on the fly.