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Of buzzwords, catch phrases and downright plagiarism |
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Written by Al Hollingsworth
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Saturday, 01 November 2008 |
With two elections behind us and, with any luck, a provincial vote at least a year away, those who follow current events will be for awhile spared those god-awful speeches we are forced to endure. I swear if it weren’t for buzzwords and catch phrases many of our elected leaders would be speechless.
Forgiveness can be granted those at the civic level because they do not employ speech writers. Tune in to Eastlink any Tuesday evening and prepare to be entertained. There are several who, I am convinced, like the sound of their own voices and are led of the Lord to speak on everything and anything. But at least they haven’t paid someone else to construct their tortured sentences.
A new book has hit the shelves. The initial review I read on author Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates is compelling and makes me anxious to read this bestselling writer’s latest potential masterpiece.
I am anxious to see how she “traces how the Puritans’ profound thoughts about community turned into shabby sound bites today,” which has personal relevance to me, because in another life I wrote political speeches. This was a very challenging and rewarding experience.
Vowell contends that the conservatives of the USA have co-opted the sermons of the first governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, in particular one of his most famous sermons: A Model of Christian Charity. His preachings have, over the centuries, appealed strongly to Republicans and the Christian Right.
Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters in particular lifted and twisted from Winthrop. Vowell points out that they even plagiarized the Sermon on the Mount, and we all know who holds the copyright on that one. Vowell contends, and I would agree, that the eloquent and well thought out sermons of Winthrop and other notable Puritan preachers have been cheapened by the process of being boiled down and reduced to the modern sound bite.
As reviewer Guy Dixon in the Globe and Mail points out, and as Vowell writes in her book, Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity describes “an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It’s called Canada.
And we think Americans don’t pay attention to Canada, that they know little or nothing about us. Well one New Yorker, Sarah Vowell, apparently does.
Speechwriting is an interesting craft, to say the least. My speechwriting years took place prior to the development and proliferation of the internet, before it became apparent that this was going to be the greatest research tool ever invented. Speechwriting must be considerably easier today, especially if you are given to cheating. But this ease is a bit of a trick; the glib use of the words of greater writers does not fool anyone.
The mistake most writers make is having their boss speak in someone else’s voice; they may be cribbing from Winthrop, or Kennedy, or even (heaven forbid) Reagan; they may even have the candidate speak in the speechwriter’s own voice. In local politics, where we tend to be up close and personal with our politicians, that can stand out like a sore thumb.
I have heard muttered voices asking “who is he pretending to be?” or words to that effect, when a politician takes his seat after delivering a speech. The listeners are not stupid; they can usually detect artifice, and it sounds to them like dishonesty.
No, to write an effective speech you have to get inside the speaker’s head, think like him/her and eventually write as that person would speak. Unless, of course, you have a Frank McKenna or a Joe Ghiz; politicians with the talent to hold audiences spellbound while speaking from the heart.
I recall one afternoon being asked to go to the airport and pick up the man who was then the Premier of Prince Edward Island, the late Joe Ghiz. He was to be the guest speaker at the Nova Scotia Liberal Party’s Annual Dinner.
As we drove to his hotel, he asked me for information on the local hot topics. I referred to a story in the Globe, and we discussed it briefly and in passing. That evening he had his audience of 800 in the palm of his hand as he addressed the issue I had pointed out in our drive back to the city. He did not have one word put to paper. It was amazing, and far better than anything a speechwriter could have crafted. And it didn’t contain a single sound bite.
Remember the quote “axis of evil,” the sound bite from hell, crafted by a White House hack? For me, those three words symbolized the unraveling of the George W. Bush presidency. It was all downhill from there.
(Al Hollingsworth is a retired journalist and broadcaster who, in a very weak moment, wrote speeches and other nonsense for the Leader of the Opposition)
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