The Lost Art of the Great Speech: How to Write It * How to Deliver It

Editors-R-Everybody

If you're a speech writer working in a corporate or government environment, you'll have plenty of ''editors''—probably more than you want or need. Everyone, it seems, is a frustrated writer and cannot resist the impulse to edit someone else's hard work.

Peggy Noonan, the talented writer who crafted some of President Reagan's best speeches, relates some of her White House experiences in her book, What I Saw at the Revolution. In the book she tells of writing a speech for the president to deliver to students in Shanghai. In her first draft of the speech, she included this paragraph:

My young friends, history is a river that takes us as it will. But we have the power to navigate, to choose direction, and make our passage together. ...