Sir Winston Churchill’s Secret To Delivering Memorable Scripted Speeches
by Jerry Weissman
Today marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill, the iconic British Prime Minister who led his nation out of the dark days of World War II to victory. Most often, Sir Winston expressed his inspirational leadership with the oratorical skills he exhibited in the more than 2,500 speeches he gave over his lifetime.
In a prior blog, you read how you can adopt the five principal elements of content and delivery Churchill deployed in his speeches in your own presentations. In this blog, we’ll examine his technique for a special type of speech: fully scripted.
The operative word here is “special,” because fully scripted speeches have a number of pitfalls, among them:
You can sound “read” or “canned.”
You can lose eye contact with your audience.
Your voice becomes muffled when you look down to access the text.
Moreover, there are only a limited number of circumstances where you need word-for-word accuracy:
Legal. Where the words have been carefully crafted by attorneys.
Policy. Where the words have been carefully positioned by public relations counsel.
Lyrical. Where the words must convey an emotional message such as in a eulogy, graduation speech, retirement speech, award acceptance, or patriotic event.
Sir Winston’s inspirational speeches fell into the third category and, because he carefully composed them to have a lyrical, emotional effect, the word-for-word sequencing had to be exact. According to the International Churchill Society, he told his secretary “to present the words on the page in ‘speech form,’ in the style of a poem, with staggered lines and breaks in the text (referred to by others as ‘psalm style’), so that he could see at a glance where to pause, hesitate or add emphasis, when delivering the lines.”
This approach is also known as Vertical Text and it solves the loss of eye contact and vocal power above. Conventional text formatting causes readers to move their eyes in both the horizontal and vertical planes: across the line, down to the next line, and back to start the next line across. Please read the first paragraph of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address below and feel your eye movements.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
In Vertical Text, you reset the tabs of your document to create a narrow column and reformat your script. Define each line as a piece of integral logic, mostly where the commas occur. Now read the reformatted Gettysburg Address below and note how your eye movements have diminished, making it easier to make eye contact with your audience and to keep your head up to allow you to project your voice,
Four score and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation, conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
So unless your presentation is legal, policy, or lyrical, rather than using a full script, consider your presentation as a series of major headlines (and for a memory prompt, put those headlines on your slides). Then, make your narrative an elaboration of each headline. In your elaboration, speak about what you know well. Because the subject is so familiar to you, you do not need word-for-word exactitude.
You need not aspire to Churchill’s greatness, few can; but you can aspire to inspire your audiences.