| SOC class offers real-world speechwriting lessons BY MATT GETTY Washington, D.C., city council candidate Anthony Williams [no relation to the mayor] got some stump-speech advice from two of Washington’s top political communication advisors on campus last Monday evening. Al Gore’s former chief speechwriter, Robert Lehrman, told him he needed “more concrete detail.” Eric Schnure, a freelance communications consultant Roll Call dubbed Washington’s “most sought after political humor writer,” urged him to give the speech “more story.” No, AU wasn’t a campaign meeting site. This was a session in a new School of Communication speechwriting class team taught by Lehrman and Schnure. When an assignment to write a five- to seven-minute stump speech fell within weeks of his first campaign speech, Williams—an AU student who’s also running for city council—jumped at the chance to get help from a couple of pros. “It’s rare that you can sit down and learn from people this established and accomplished,” said Williams, who’ll earn his MA in broadcast journalism this May. “It’s not just that they know the principles they’re teaching; they’ve been successful with them themselves.” Lehrman, who was also the chief speechwriter for the 2004 Democratic National Committee and has crafted statements for Martin Sheen, Courtney Love, and Susan Sarandon, saw the opportunity to stress the course’s real-world focus. “We see this class as the auto-mechanic 101 of speechwriting,” he said. Schnure, who worked with Lehrman as a Gore speechwriter and has more recently been a communications consultant for Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), agreed. “I don’t think we’ve brought up Plato once,” he added with a chuckle. Though the class, which is now in its second year, stresses the basic principles of persuasive writing known as “Monroe’s Motivated Sequence,” it focuses less on the principles themselves and more on how they play out in actual speechwriting. Instead of Plato, Lehrman and Schnure have brought to the class their own experience as well as that of other seasoned wordsmiths like Noam Neusner, a former speechwriter for President Bush, who spoke to the class about the State of the Union speech days after it aired. The real-world focus, both Lehrman and Schnure agreed, helps stress the importance of such crucial but often overlooked speechwriting essentials as detail, story, and simplicity. “I think there’s a sense that because it’s political it has to be very serious, and that leads to a lot of vague boilerplate language,” said Schnure. “It’s great for us to bring in these guest speakers and real examples because it validates what we’re teaching,” added Lehrman. “Students can see firsthand how the right detail and the right anecdote give a speech power.” Judging from their comments on Williams’s speech Monday night, it looked like the students have gotten the message. Where he referenced his ward’s “substandard schools, lack of services, and fractured community,” nearly a dozen graduate and undergraduate students urged Williams to name specific schools, describe community problems in detail, and possibly include an anecdote from his own childhood in D.C. to help prove his points. Nodding at such suggestions and carefully jotting down notes, the candidate took the critique in stride. “When you’re really passionate about the issues, sometimes you get away from the principles, so it’s helpful to get this kind of feedback” said Williams, who himself worked as a speechwriter for Sen. Norman Coleman (R-Minn.) a year before enrolling in the class. “Now I’m going to go back and really put myself into it—put in stories that connect where I’ve come from to where I want to go.” At the end of the critique, when Lehrman asked Williams if he’d perform the same speech next week after revising it, Williams agreed, obviously eager for more help on the speech he’ll deliver publicly at the end of the month. Though some might shy away from bringing their life into the classroom for this kind of scrutiny once let alone twice, Williams said that he sees it as central to his education. “This is why you go to AU,” he said. “To put yourself out there.” |
