Writing Boots

Why should more African Americans become speechwriters? Asked and answered, at Howard University

Professional Speechwriters Association studies repeatedly show that African Americans represent less than five percent of an already tiny speechwriting community.

That means you can practically count black speechwriters on two hands.

And so a significant percentage of those scribes took the stage at the first Black Speechwriters Symposium at Howard University October 23 in Washington, D.C. to introduce their obscure communication specialty to PR majors and other students at Washington's leading historically black university.  

Convened by undergraduate legal communications major Michael Franklin with support from the PSA and its members, the panel got off to a fine how-do-you-do.

"What inspires you to write?" came the first question.

"Money?" answered former State Department speechwriter Desson Thomson, before going on to describe some of the intellectual pleasures of the job.

Thomson's similarly frank co-panelists—left to right, Fortune 100 corporate speechwriter Janet Stovall, [Thomson himself], independent speechwriter Cheril Clarke, Ashley Mitchell of We The Action, Andreya Davis, presidential communications chief at Howard and Larae Booker, a longtime speechwriter at the Society of Human Resource Management—told the two-dozen Howard students gathered in Founders Library Browsing Room that speechwriting is indeed more lucrative than other communication specialties. 

That's because it's more difficult and dangerous than other communication specialties, so directly and intimately does it serve powerful heads of huge institutions.

But being a speechwriter gives you the unique chance, as one panelist put it, to "sit with people of power and shape what they say ... to be the power behind the pen."

"It's not just writing for somebody," another writer told the students. "You're being put on the shoulders of a giant." 

And it's about time African-Americans had that chance to have that voice. Long past, in fact. (At a panel the 2016 PSA World Conference, the first black White House speechwriter, Terry Edmonds, realized he was also the last black presidential scribe. He worked in the Clinton administration!)

The Howard meeting ended with a discussion on how to accelerate that change. West Wing Writers managing partner Vinca LaFleur said the speechwriting firm offers 21 annual internships, and encouraged the students to apply.

And of course the PSA is always at work making speechwriting more broadly known, making speechwriting skills more accessible and making speechwriting jobs more attainable and welcoming for all kinds of practitioners—nontraditional practitioners, especially.

That work continues, apace.

Going as a writer for Halloween

The tyranny of the two-part question

The truth is, I've never been a big fan of the Q&A portion of the speech. Mostly, questions are either veiled statements or deliberate speaker-stumpers. I'm less of a Q&A fan than ever, now that it's better called the Q,Q&A. Because suddenly, everyone who asks one question, asks two.

"I have a two-part question!"

"I actually have two unrelated questions!"

You would think that no one who has been in the speaker's situation would ask a two-part question. And surely no speechwriter would do it! Yet, many if not most questioners at the 2019 World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association last week asked two questions.

Here's what's wrong with the two-part question: You're not only putting speaker on the spot in front of dozens or hundreds of people by asking them a question they may not have anticipated, but you're making the speaker memorize your first question, consider your second, then answer one of them and then (somehow?) answer the other!? Meanwhile, the crowd struggles to focus on the content of the exchange while simultaneously gauging the speaker's ability to juggle chainsaws on a unicycle.

I ask you honestly, customers and colleagues and friends, because I do not know the answer: Is it that you simply cannot decide which of your two questions is more important? Or has CNN's Jim Acosta made it seem somehow unassertive to ask a one-part question? 

Or is there a third answer: You've simply never been a speaker before and you can't imagine what it's like to arrive, gasping, at the end of a talk you've prepared months for, and be Gatling-gunned to death by the audience, two questions at a time?

Dispatch from the Rhetorical Deep State

"Hey, how did the big conference go?"

I'm asked by my wife, my kid, soccer moms and dads, by speechwriters who couldn't make it this year. I stare off into the middle distance.

Maybe it wasn't the gore that kept gramps from talking about the war. Maybe he just didn't know where to begin.

I'll begin at the beginning, and I'll do my best. 

The day before the 2019 World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association was the annual PSA Speechwriting School, where Papa Hemingway lookalike and Ted Sorensen write-alike Fletcher Dean and his all-star faculty made writers into speechwriters. (And made speechwriters more confident.) Among the 60-some participants in our fifth Speechwriting School were eight scribes from the U.S. State Department and an equally large cohort of undergrads on PSA scholarship from Howard University.

Meanwhile, the speechwriters began to gather, in preparation for their annual reunion at the World Conference. A group of women scribes, for instance, has been meeting for dinner before the conference for a couple of years. But they act like they went to college together.

(Conversely, although former White House Speechwriters Eric Schnure and Bob Lehrman have been working and teaching together for three decades and co-wrote the second edition of The Political Speechwriter's Companion, Lehrman doesn't seem to know what Schnure is going to say or do next, and he doesn't have very high hopes.)

On the morning of the conference, the speechwriters crossed a catwalk into a wooden spaceship, where they will speak an ancient alien language for two days, that only other speechwriters understand.

In that language, they spoke of strange things.

Like how strange it is that most speech anthologies contain 100 men for every woman—and how wonderful (and useful) it is that suddenly most speeches that go viral these days are speeches by women. That was the thrust of the keynote by standup comic, TV personality and author Viv Groskop, who celebrated the idea that women speakers how have a variety of oratorical styles—extroverted, introverted and quietly powerful—to study, and make their own. (Groskop also got the conference off to a bracing start by answering the very first question asked during the Q&A, "Boo fucking hoo.")

And did you know that yesterday's ear candy is today's green beans—and how instead of stories, we should be serving vivid scenes. There were lessons on "vivid preaching for visual listeners," from the brilliant and quietly humorous homiletics guru Alyce McKenzie.

And in fact, the effectiveness of speeches can be quantified, behavioral scientist Noah Zandan told a simultaneously skeptical and curious crowd, transforming them into a simultaneously skeptical and nervous crowd.

And Howard University legal communications undergrad Michael Franklin (he/him/his) taught some middle-aged dogs some pretty new tricks for bringing more color (and other kinds of inclusion) into our lily-white profession.

And of course I talked and talked and talked and talked. (About my work organizing speechwriting communities around the world. And about the results of a new PSA study where we asked speechwriters' bosses what speechwriters could do to be better.)

And talked and talked and talked and talked. (About the meaning and the purpose of modern speeches.)

But the speechwriters seemed much more interested in hearing from one another.

And getting a few things off their chest. (This is the silent profession no longer.)Meanwhile, we heard from Jaina Pareya about the state of speechwriting in Mexico.
And Isabelle Gaudeul-Ehrhart about the state of speechwriting in Europe.
At the conference cocktail party, Cicero Speechwriting Awards grand winner John La Rue used his terminal earnestness to make all the speechwriters cry. (Oh, and I sang a country duet with speechwriter/cabaret singer Karen Gross, no biggie.)

And in the end, the organizers were tired but very happy.

And that wasn't the half of it. And if this summary feels inadequate? Well, you'd best make sure you don't miss the next World Conference, which will take place right here, just a few weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election—an inevitably traumatic moment in rhetoric when you'll want, when you'll need to commune with your fellow speechwriters.

"What an amazing group of people," Viv Groskop said in an email to me this week. "In a world of political despondency and apathy, it was great to be amongst people who still care and want to make a difference, no matter how hard that might be or how long it might take."

We are. The rhetorical deep state.

***

Photo credits to speechwriter and conference social media chief Lauren Mueller. —DM

Found in translation

This week at Writing Boots will be a series of reflections, commentary and gonzo recollections concerning last week's wondercrammed PSA World Conference, and events surrounding it.

We begin, today, with an unintentional insight among many intentional ones, from the masterful Amélie Blackaert.

In discussing modern leadership communication technology, she pointed out that Donald Trump is "the first twit president," and was befuddled when the room suddenly went up for grabs.

Friday Happy Hour Video: A song I've always liked, well performed

'Only a Dream in Rio' - The Tonight Show (1985) from Neutral Daisy on Vimeo.

Friday Happy Hour Photo: Backstage preview of next week's PSA World Conference

With the worst imaginable timing, PSA executive director David Murray (left) explains his latest brainstorm, while PSA operations chief Benjamine Knight (right) patiently wonders how long it will take Murray to realize his idea is yet one more elaborate workaround to a problem she gracefully ironed out at the conference two years ago.

Best word I've learned this year? "Locknote" has my vote

I’m giving the last speech at next week's World Conference of the Professional Speechwriters Association, at Georgetown University.

The speech asks why, with so many infinitely more efficient communication media, we still give speeches and people still listen to them. For speechwriters, that's an existential question, and I figure the head of the big speechwriting association ought to dress up nice and attempt an answer. And it seemed like a good way end the conference.

Now, of course, I'm terrified that everyone including me will be so tired of my voice by that late stage of the conference that I'll wind up mumbling like Dylan Thomas in his cups at the White Horse Tavern, "Somebody's boring me. I think it's me."

But I think I found a way to spice the speech up! I'm going to call it the "locknote" address, a term I just discovered this week, in the very nick of time. Definition: “the last presentation in an academic or business conference with a broad thematic overview." The locknote! As opposed to the keynote!

Now, the etymology is a mess—keynote is a musical reference, and has nothing to do with opening locks. But never mind. I just like the sound of “locknote,” and I’m going to use it all the time.

Until the end of time.

Until the locknote of time.

The past isn't past, and the dead send you emails

Like you, I get many emails from organizations that got my name at one point, and I've been too distracted to unsubscribe. Eventually, I'll get around to it.*

One such organization that I won't unsubscribe to is a political group that somehow thinks Murray is my first name.

The latest email begins:

Murray -- I wanted to reach out to you personally ...

It cracks me up, and it reminds me of a cleaning lady my elderly dad once employed, named Big Stoop.

Big Stoop wasn't actually her name, but she talked really loud all the time, cleaned badly and broke everything she touched—including once, the bathroom drain?—and she always called my elegant father, Thomas Dwight Murray, "Murray."

"Murray!" she'd yell, startling my poor 80-year-old dad at his computer. "How many books you wrote?!"

So he called her Big Stoop behind her back, in reference to a cartoon from his 1930s youth. As in, "I have Big Stoop coming at 9:00, so I can meet you at the Y at 9:30." Or, "You know that Messerschmitt ME 109 you built me? Well, Big Stoop tried to dust it the other day, and broke off a wing."

So every time I get those spam emails that call me "Murray," I think of Big Stoop, and my dad, and I laugh.

So they are personal, after all.

(And when I tell people whose loved ones have died that they haven't really gone anywhere, this is the sort of thing I mean.)

* Speaking of which, my dad got so annoyed with the people who worked at his ad agency telling him they'd do a thing when they got around to it, that he manufactured and distributed round drink coasters that said "TUIT" on them.

Don't call yourself a communicator, and then write like a troll

I felt an increasingly familiar annoyance yesterday when a speechwriter posted a link to an article in my Vital Speeches of the Day LinkedIn group under his own headline: "Buried beneath the Ukraine hysteria, news of real consequence."

Because I'm working on a book titled, An Effort to Understand, lots of people seem to think I'm one of these mincing "civility" twerps no one can stand. I find myself spending a lot of time convincing you (and reminding myself) of the difference between surface "civility" and honest communication.

But we do need a modicum of the former to facilitate the beginning of the latter.

If you call yourself a communicator—because you're a professional writer, or the head of an association of professional speechwriters, or just a person who was told as a kid, "united we stand, divided we fall"—I think you shouldn't indulge in purposely insulting, dismissive language these days. Not casually, anyway.

This is rich, coming from a writer who spent his 20s falling in love with H.L. Mencken, who purposely, bombastically and hilariously dismissed whole swaths of the country—the South, for example—merely in order to "stir up the animals," as he put it. And the same guy who delighted in reading—and to an embarrassing extent aping—Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote that the nation was largely populated and ruled by greedy "waterheads" and "pigfuckers."

My first boss Larry Ragan followed the P.T. Barnum dictate: "If you want to draw a crowd, start a fight." He once made an offhand remark in his newsletter that drew letters from one third of the readership. I still don't mind a healthy argument. And a healthy argument still puts butts in seats; witness the effect on Writing Boots readership of my analysis of Greta Thunberg's speech a couple weeks ago.

But it seems more and more important to incite one's battles carefully.

For instance, these days I cringe when communicators on my Facebook feed (and thus in my political tribe) call all Trump supporters idiots. Do they think they're doing more good (perhaps giving their friends the courage of their convictions) than harm (making it just that much harder for American reconciliation after Trump is gone)?

And what was the speechwriter who posted in my forum attempting to achieve by offhandedly referring to "the Ukraine hysteria"? Does he incorrectly assume all our readers think the Ukraine story is hysteria? Or is he aiming at those of us who take the Ukraine story seriously, and starting his persuasive appeal with a backhanded slap across our mouth? Or is he in Social Media Magical Thinking Mode, where you post stuff and picture only friendly followers seeing it, and the rest of the people not seeing it?

In any three of those scenarios, the speechwriter is not thinking like a communicator. If he's thinking at all, it's like an instigator.

And boy, have I loved me some instigators in my day.

Not these days, though.

These days, we need communicators. Careful communicators, who seek more constructive results than "stirring up the animals."

Because the animals are already stirred up.