How to plan for speechwriting spontaneity

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