Speechwriting

When you’re preparing an important speech or keynote presentation, do you tend to default to one of these four opening lines? You begin with a long line of thank-you’s to people we may or may not know. You tell a joke you found online the night before. You share the process you used to prepare […]

Worried whether your speech has the power to connect with listeners from very different backgrounds and levels of experience? Jump-start your thinking with these seven steps based on a Cicero Speechwriting Award-winning keynote that resonated with 250 men and women from age 18 to 80.   When Barbara Hayde — former president of The Entrepreneurs […]

Your audience will thank you if you skirt the predictable – and instead give them something to think about or act upon after the evening is over. For many executives, receiving an award is a good news, bad news thing. First, the good news: “Congratulations! You’ve won an award for your outstanding achievements!” (And now […]

Think about the last time you delivered a Big Hairy Audacious Presentation to your management team, customers, prospects or peers. How did your prep go? Were you awash in so much awesome material – that you had to clamor like crazy for focus? What did you leave in? (But more important: What did you leave […]

There we were – stuck in the boardroom on a Tuesday afternoon, three drafts in on a keynote speech – and I’d pretty much wrung all the best stuff out of my executive’s head. He was done. But his speech was not. The holes toward the end were gaping. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking. Just […]

Will your next speech be somewhere far away from home? If so, challenge yourself to find a link to the local region – and mention it early in your remarks to create immediate goodwill with your audience. Here’s how we did it for a European speaker traveling to Atlanta, Ga., for a keynote address to […]

I was interviewing a client for a speech on leadership when he interrupted my latest question and asked, “So what about you? Are you a risk-taker?”  I stopped typing, not often on the end of someone else’s line of questioning. “I guess I haven’t thought about it before. Why do you ask?” “You just set […]

No doubt the most captive audience Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough will ever have during his book tour touting “The Wright Brothers” is the one that flocked to a middle school in Dayton, Ohio, last night to hear him speak about The Bishop’s Boys. After all, Wilbur and Orville were Daytonians through and through. McCullough’s […]

Last Sunday I discovered a way to make sure not one word is wasted when you write your next speech. Imagine someone will have to sign every word you speak for people who are deaf. Last Sunday I watched and listened, on the edge of my seat, in absolute amazement while Fr. Benjamin Jimenez spoke […]

After the applause finally ended, and our amazing breakfast speaker left the stage, my colleague gave me that deer in the headlights look. “Wow – that was incredible!” he said. “Usually these speakers just stand up and spew a bunch of facts at us. But this guy really had something to say!” That we’re reduced […]