2011 Cicero Speechwriting Awards winners singular power of oral communication

Last month Peggy Noonan, the most famous living speechwriter, declared that the Internet has โ€œrescued and restoredโ€ speeches as a relevant political force. Today, the more than two dozen winners of Vital Speeches‘ fourth annual Cicero Speechwriting Awards are being announced and released in the free downloadable e-book These Vital Speeches.

They prove Noonan’s point about the power of oral rhetoric.

This yearโ€™s Grand Award winner is a prime example of how sometimes only a speech will do. Itโ€™s a speech by Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The speech took place at Harvard, where Lavizzo-Mourey went to medical school and โ€œwhere the rest of my life really began.โ€ She returned 40 years later to look todayโ€™s students and faculty in the eye and tell them that they ought to live lives of what she calls โ€œpositive deviance.โ€

โ€œDonโ€™t be locked in by the walls of your office or the silo of your job,โ€ she says in the speech. โ€œThere are few things as meaningful as helping, healing and pushing our society to change itself for the good of all of us.โ€

โ€œReading many of these speeches, one realizes that there are some business situations and some social moments when only a speech will do,โ€ says David Murray, program chairman for the Cicero Speechwriting Awards. โ€œThe speeches delivered to audiencesโ€”and submitted to the Cicero Speechwriting Awards every yearโ€”by Fortune 500 CEOs, nonprofit leaders, diplomats and ordinary citizens confirm the enduring power of oral communication.โ€

Legendary JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen died late in 2010 during the 2011 Cicero Speechwriting Awards entry season, but he left a proper coda: โ€œThe right speech on the right topic delivered by the right speaker in the right way at the right moment โ€ฆ can ignite a fire, change menโ€™s minds, open their eyes, alter their votes, bring hope to their lives, and, in all these ways, change the world. I know. I saw it happen.โ€

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