Early in the Reagan Administration, Leslie Stahl, CBS News' poofy-haired White House correspondent, aired a particularly unflattering piece about the president.
The next day, Michael Deaver, Reagan's image-meister, called her and said thanks.
Stahl said what are you thanking me for? We raked him over the coals.
Deaver said yeah, but the pictures were great and that's the only thing people pay attention to.
As speechwriters, we don't have to worry about audiences gazing mindlessly at pictures and zoning out on the speech, because there usually are no pictures (unless there's PowerPoint). But I worry about audiences zoning out because there are no pictures. So I try to keep them engaged by having my speakers use imagery to illustrate their points. It's kind of like PowerPoint, but the screen is in the listeners' heads instead of on the stage.
Example: To illustrate an assertion that markets need to be more transparent and comprehensible to investors, I had my CEO say: "Imagine a blackjack game where the dealer plays both his cards face-down." That put a colorful picture in the listeners' minds and, I hope, helped keep them focused.
In the same speech, to illustrate the assurance that we, as financial services regulators, are not foaming at the mouth to catch and punish malefactors, I wrote:
Your local fire department would rather give you advice on how to avoid starting a fire than to have to come racing to your house to put one out. By the same token, NASD would much rather give you the education and training you need...."
Again, a clear and evocative picture.
This isn't hard to do. You don't need a great gift for creative writing to pull it off. It just takes a little thought, a little gazing out the window. And if your speakers are like mine, they'll love it.
If there's a downside to this, it's that your speaker(s) might love it a little too much. One of mine wanted to talk about the various internal resources we draw upon to make the bond market more user-friendly. He wanted to make the point that we have to use all of them. So I wrote: "To use only one would be like playing 18 holes of golf with only a five iron." I was ambivalent about this one and considered deleting it before I sent him the speech. But he liked it so much that he's used it in every speech he's given since, even though I've tried to get him to stop.
One caveat: don't go overboard with these. More than two or three in an average-length speech might make your speaker sound a little silly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Brinkley is Senior Writer for NASD, a financial services regulator based in Washington and New York.
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