Speechwriting

What’s the worst calamity you can imagine befalling your company or country? Perhaps you’re the president of a railroad whose high-speed, 36-car train has derailed in a populous metropolis, killing more than 200 people. The wreckage is spewing the hydrogen gas it was carrying, requiring the evacuation of everyone within a 20-mile radius. Perhaps you’re [...]

The other day I was at our local library waiting to pick up my husband, who was teaching a class on social media there. Being early, I wandered the aisles into the biography section. I picked up An Actor’s Voice, a biography of actor Claude Rains of Now, Voyager, Casablanca and The Invisible Man fame, [...]

Peggy Noonan has a wonderful column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal on the resurgence of important political speech and the Internet’s role in disseminating it. I think the points she makes apply to corporate executive speeches as well. “In the past quarter century or so,” Noonan writes, “the speech as a vehicle of sustained [...]

As one would expect, conversations, blogs and news articles on IBM’s Watson computer taking on Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter have focused on the theme of “man vs. machine.” Or, as the New York Times put it, “Bambi vs. Goliath.” The Times’ argument is, simply, how could Watson not win – with 2,800 [...]