How to plan for speechwriting spontaneity
September 13, 2015
John Kenneth Galbraith rewrote every speech 12 times. And then ...
Spontaneity comes later. Argonne National Laboratory speechwriter Elizabeth Austin tells us, “When Sylvia Hewlett was a graduate student at Harvard many years ago, her faculty advisor was the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a famously riveting public speaker. His secret, he once told her, was that he rewrote every speech 12 times. Then, he said, ‘I introduce a note of spontaneity in the thirteenth draft.’” —DM