If you are writing a speech for your boss, a client or a colleague and your written draft must go through lawyers and other aides in advance, watch out! Your good stuff will be removed.
Lawyers and aides are paid to protect their principals, not make them look or sound good. The lawyers first thought when seeing a potential speech for a client is "what words will get my client in trouble here and how can I scratch out each letter as quickly as possible?"
This is reality; you must live with it. But there are coping mechanisms. For starters, you can write the speech much longer than you know it needs to be; this way when the lawyers hack away, you won't be left with nothing. Next, you may wish to put something in the speech a tad risque or even ribald. You won't be hurting your client or boss because he or she will never get to say the offending anecdote or joke-you know the staff will take it out.
This way you make the lawyers feel useful. "Boy if I hadn't taken that ridiculous metaphor out of the speech today my client's you-know-what would be in a sling," the attorneys can boast at their local bar meeting.
But at some point attorneys will stop chopping because they realize if they keep chopping there will be nothing left and then they might have to come up with something interesting to say. So the trick for you speech writers is to write a great draft speech and then to add on another 30 percent of stuff (both good and bad).
Now the lawyers will have wiggle room, and you will too.
I certainly don't mean to suggest that all lawyers are bad writers or are dim. John F. Kennedy's prime speech writer, Ted Sorenson, is a lawyer. Abe Lincoln was a lawyer.
Each profession has its primary mission. You, the speech writer, must make ideas come alive with meaning and clarity and passion. The lawyer's job is to make sure these ideas don't get anyone thrown is prison.
Unfortunately, it's not a criminal offense to bore your audience with a deadly dull speech. But it should be.
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