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“Draft speechwriter”: A dangerous delineation

When we talk about a speaker—Martin Luther King, say—who we don’t want to think of as having had a speechwriter, we now find it necessary to use a new term to describe it: “draft speechwriter.”

As in Dr. Clarence B. Jones, who is described by Wikipedia as MLK’s “former personal counsel, advisor, draft speechwriter and close friend.”

Aren’t all speechwriters “draft speechwriters” in the sense that they write a draft of a speech and the speaker makes it his or her own?

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