There is a Jewish custom of writing an ethical will in which we convey our hopes and concerns to our children. I wrote a speech when my son, Leo, was born, expressing my hopes for his life. I’m doing the same for my second son, Axel, on his first day of school.
Axel, you’re going to school today. A big moment for your mum and dad, and for you.
A Christmas Stocking 2020
– a commonplace selection by Brian Jenner
The Challenge
This week I gave a 20 minute keynote presentation to a speechwriting conference in Vilnius in Lithuania via Zoom from a studio in Southampton, England.
Radio 4 is running a series of programmes about The Anatomy of Melancholy in the coming days. Here is a speech I wrote in the late 1990s about the book.
Robert Burton was a man who knew a thing or two about depression. He wrote three volumes, nearly 1500 pages, about its causes, symptoms and cures. His book is called The Anatomy of Melancholy, and he devoted almost his whole life to writing it. He was born in 1577, making him a contemporary of Shakespeare. He went to Oxford University in 1593, and never ventured much further than the library, until his death forty-seven years later.
Do you want to get better at speechwriting?
Most professional speechwriters learn on the job. They don’t have any formal training.
That works, over time, but during lockdown, I discovered a way to rapidly speed up the process.
It’s been a very weird March.
We’ve gone back 50 years in less than 30 days.
‘Lockdown’ has returned me to my childhood.
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Over ten years ago I ran a business networking group for creatives.
It seemed to attract ‘conflicted’ people.
People who had a job – maybe working in a bank or an insurance company – but who had an artistic talent.
Who are you?
I’m a speechwriter, with a yearning to be more involved in public life.
I was told by a friend (a graduate of Sandhurst officer training) that I should do The Mastery of Self-Expression weekend. It was the best workshop he’d ever done. I trusted him, paid the fee and showed up, without doing much research into what I was letting myself in for.
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My love of speechwriting is very much connected to my love of learning languages. I studied French, German, Latin and Russian at school. An indispensable tool for anyone learning a language is a vocabulary book.
I had narrow green exercise books in which I collected words with their definitions, with some trite quotations copied in the back.
1) The Greatest Literary Culture in the World Launched a Speechwriting Network Last Year