A Young Person's Guide to Speechwriting

My name is Stephen Krupin. I had the honor of writing for President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the United States. And today I write speeches for politicians and leaders and CEOs and teach speechwriting at Harvard University.

My name's Jess Cunniff. I'm a speechwriter. I used to work at Number 10 Downing Street, and now I work for the former Prime Minister David Cameron.

I'm Lindsay Hayes, and I am a speechwriter from the United States. I've worked in government, in the White House, in the US Senate, for a cabinet official, and for the last 10 or so years, 12 years, I've worked in political and business and nonprofit. I'm a speechwriter. Why are speeches important? Speeches are important for a lot of reasons. I personally believe that speeches are a form of leadership. I think they're a form of action in the world. I think there are countless examples that you can look at even today where the words that people speak, particularly our leaders, have serious consequences. But they also can inspire us to do amazing and wonderful things. It wasn't until I went to graduate school and I went to a rhetoric program that I read Peggy Noonan's book, What I Saw at the Revolution, which is her memoir of writing for President Reagan. When I read that, I thought, ah, I think I could be good at that. I think that's a job I could do. I'd always been interested in, not so much even in politics, but in debate and public affairs and policy, public policy. But I also really liked music, and I really liked literature and art and poetry. And so to me, it seemed like a perfect merging of all of those things. And, and so I thought, okay, I'm gonna give it a try. I'll see.

I was always better at English than I was at math, and I found it a more interesting challenge and a more enjoyable way to spend my time. I think the first speech I ever wrote was running for class president in 5th grade. I ran against a 6th grader, and she beat me. And it was a good lesson in political communication. And if I could go back and rewrite that speech now, I think maybe I'd have a chance of winning. I think I first started to learn how to speak in public when I was speaking one-on-one with voters, when I would go door-to-door and knock on people's doors and ask them to vote for a candidate that I was supporting. And it was a way of teaching me what is the most important information that I need to convey in a short amount of time.

I was a newspaper reporter on a local paper called Luton on Sunday. It doesn't exist anymore, but it was a great training for me because I learned how to write concisely. I learned how to speak to people who were much older than me or who I was intimidated by. I went to court, I interviewed people, I spoke to politicians, and I heard a lot of speeches during my time as a journalist. I wrote my first speech when I started working for a Member of Parliament. After I'd left journalism, I decided to work for an MP in order to go and write his speeches. I had to do lots of other things as well, but I was really in it for the speeches. I ended up working at 10 Downing Street because I applied for a job there. It wasn't completely out of the blue because I had been working in politics as a speechwriter for some time. And I went for an interview there, and then I went for a second interview and a third interview, and that third interview was with the Prime Minister, which was pretty nerve-wracking. But the Prime Minister then, David Cameron, was a speechwriter himself once, so he understood what, what the job's like.

Well, my first kind of unofficial speechwriting job, I was 25 years old and I was the world's oldest living unpaid intern in the Bush White House. I arrived at the White House in 2000, it would have been the early days of 2002. I arrived at the White House 2 days before the State of the Union address. And that was post-9/11. It was, you know, the United States had just been through a very awful terrorist attack. And, and so it was a very, it was a very formative experience, not just in terms of, it was a great boot camp for how to research and write and annotate and, approach speeches and approach the process of speechwriting, but it was also a very impactful time in terms of the importance of speeches to the country at that moment.

The best speech that I've ever heard is a speech given by Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of John Kennedy, in 1968 announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King. It is a remarkable, spontaneous, speech in which Kennedy marries both a profound historic moment with his own personal family history, and the fact that it was done off the cuff to an audience of people who were learning through Kennedy about this tragedy is a remarkable speech. The test of any good speech is whether it moves an audience to do something different or think about something different. When they leave the room. The way that Kennedy asked his audience not to respond to this tragedy with violence but with peace and love and saying a prayer for one another and the King family turned out to be a call to action that his audience answered, and in every major city in America that night of Martin Luther King's assassination, there were riots except for the city where Robert Kennedy spoke.

Speechwriting at its very core should be a collaboration between you and the person that you're writing for. It's not just a matter of writing a script and then they get up and give it. There should be a give and take there. There should be— they should be providing a lot of information. You should be providing your suggestions, and then you edit and you work together. And so that can take a lot of different forms. I've had some people where They are very short on time, but we— and so they don't have a ton of time to sit and spend with me, but we have a really great email correspondence, and we write notes to each other through the drafts. So I'll send a draft over, and they'll edit, and they'll say, I would never use this word, can you try this? A lot of phone calls. It's, you know, I think in one way speechwriting has gotten more complicated as technology has advanced because— It's not the case where if you're not in the room, you, you know, if you're not in the room, you can still communicate with the principal. On the other hand, if the principal is amenable to it, we have a lot more options and a lot more resources. Just the amount of information that I'm able to glean by looking at if a principal makes a public appearance, I can get a transcript of that within minutes. Whereas before, you would have to wait for someone to come back and tell you how it went, and then their memory of it is, is— kind of shoddy. So, you know, so I think there's a lot of ways that you can get to know a principal and establish a relationship with them. And but it's also a very personal relationship. And so you can be a great writer and just not be the right fit for a principal.

It's been quite a similar process then and then throughout my career writing speeches for other people, sitting down and talking to the speaker about what they want to say, getting an idea of what the event is from colleagues or the organisers of the event, doing a lot of research and coming up with a first draft and giving it to the speaker and allowing them to say what they liked about it and what they didn't like, and then refining that and going backwards and forwards with different drafts.

The role of a speechwriter, the challenge and also the joy of being a speechwriter, is trying to figure out what the intersection is of the speaker, The audience, the moment, and the message. And the best speeches are the ones that can be given only by that speaker to only that group at only that time, which means every single speech requires a lot of research on the front end to match that moment.

There are lots of pressures of working as a speechwriter. Timing is probably the biggest one of them. You're always on a deadline. The other pressure is the fact that you're writing for someone else, so you've got to get into their head. You've got to be creative but also work within the confines of the brief. You also have pressures from other people. They want to get things into the speech to get their own policy ideas or things that they want to push. So the pressures are just obviously keeping people happy, but ultimately remembering that you're writing for the speaker and it's their message you're getting across and ignoring everyone else ultimately.

Writing a speech for someone like the President of the United States is a great burden and responsibility because you know you're writing not just for that person but on behalf of the country and behalf of the people in the country and the values that the country represents.

The highlight of my career so far was probably writing the Prime Minister's Party Conference speech in 2015 for David Cameron. At the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester. I've been watching party conference speeches for years by different leaders. I never dreamed that I would be in charge of actually writing one, and to see it go from the very earliest stages of sitting down with David Cameron saying, what do you want to say, to actually watching him up there delivering it to thousands of people and, you know, potentially millions across the country was quite an experience, and I still can't quite believe that I did it, but it was good fun.

There's nothing like the feeling of walking into the White House or walking into the Oval Office. It is a great honor to be able to speak on behalf of your country and to help someone who you believe in articulate the deepest truths that need to be said at that moment.

I would say to a young person who wanted to work as a speechwriter that you should work hard at English and history and really not just think about writing and perfecting your writing skills, but also work on listening to other people. One good piece of advice someone gave me once is that speechwriters have to be good listeners. They often think they need to be great speakers. They don't. It's all about listening to other people, taking on different points, obviously listening to your speaker. So I would say do that as you go along. There aren't huge numbers of speechwriting jobs, so it's not something you can that easily walk into, but get a foot in the door, start a job in politics, whether it's a political role or a civil service role. and hone your skills there, and there are speechwriting jobs that come up, and you should go for it.

Being a speechwriter is the most fun job in politics and probably in a lot of organizations because you get to learn about everything, you get to write about different things every day, you get to work with everyone, Everybody from the researchers to the communications staff to the policy staff to the speaker him or herself plays a role, and you get to be at the center of it. And so if you love learning and you love coming in every day and trying something new and getting to touch a lot of different areas and reach a lot of different people, there's no better way to do that than speechwriting. What we do every day is bring people together. If we don't use the power of the podium to give voice to victims or the vulnerable, to let them know that they're heard, no one else will. That's a responsibility that we should all cherish. What a glorious job we all get to do. Let's keep listening. Thank you.