A successful speech can be planned. The goal, the way, the tools: the interplay must not be left to chance.

In this training session, we get to the bottom of things. What means and techniques will your speaker use to achieve his or her goal? How can they best be deployed? Composing speeches is more than writing words on paper. You must know in advance what effect you want them to have.

Speechwriting is a service – in the best sense of the word. It’s the speaker who’ll get the credit. But as speechwriter, you help.

Tips for survival as a speechwriter

A long, long time ago, back in the year 2000, the Berlin newspaper ‘taz’ drew up a list of commandments for the successful speechwriter. They’ll doubtless be good for another few centuries yet.

In the process, it used two very effective instruments: exaggeration and humour.

• Become more and more like your client. ‘The speechwriter must perhaps know the speaker better than the speaker knows himself,’ says former German Vice-Chancellor Hans-Dietrich Genscher…
• You must learn to suffer in silence. Most German politicians and business leaders won’t appreciate you talking about your services in public. In the land of philosophers and poets, it’s still not respectable to get other people to do your dirty work…
• Forget your ideals. ‘Your own convictions are irrelevant.’ This is how government spokesman Klaus Bölling once received new colleagues in the ‘scriptorium’ of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt…
• Don’t be afraid of slumming. You can’t pass off every speaker as having a classical education. Not all speakers are as clever as you…
• Develop schizophrenia. As a speechwriter, you must write things down to sound as if they were never written down. That can’t possibly work… It gets worse: you must pretend you’re someone else. In the long run, this will cause severe personality disorders…
• Make friends with the wastepaper basket. The better the speaker, the worse it is for the speechwriter.
• Take great care when choosing the speakers for whom you write speeches. Some … simply can’t speak, and this unfortunately will rub off on your own reputation.

(Ralph Bollmann, How To Be A Speechwriter, in ‘taz’, 8 September 2000)