Give Your Speeches a Creative Edge & Expand your ability to engage, influence and entertain
This workshop is designed for people who want to build on strategic speechwriting skills to boost their abilities to communicate persuasively. You’ll put some of the speechwriter’s most powerful tools under the microscope, including the lost art of rhetoric, persuasion templates, advanced storytelling techniques and custom-built humour.
You’ll also learn tactics for positioning yourself as both a wordsmith AND a trusted advisor to speakers you support, as well as how to recharge your creativity, use props and repurpose speeches into op ed pieces, newsletter articles and blogposts. In addition to instruction, the workshop includes writing exercises, video analysis of speeches and specific speech techniques and opportunities for discussion.
Here’s what you’ll cover during a fast-paced day.
Make the most of persuasion
How to:
- Connect leadership and persuasion
- Exploit the levels of persuasion
- As well as how to use: Rhetorical devices to heighten impact; Strategic questions to coach listeners; The Monroe motivated sequence, four-part close and other tools of persuasion.
Expand the reach of your speech
How to repurpose a speech into:
- an op-ed
- a newsletter article or
- a blog post
Use story to make speeches engaging and memorable
How to:
- Choose the right story approach
- Borrow from the screenwriters’ toolkit to keep audience engagement high
- Weave stories throughout a speech
- Create original humour or adapt from other sources
- Use humour to do more than entertain
- Elements, rules and pitfalls of humour
- How to adapt from various sources and even create original humour
Boost your creativity behind the scenes and your speaker’s creativity on-stage
How to:
- Get out of a rut when it begins to be nothing but the same old thing
- Work with props
- Take a page from the event planner’s notebook to make it all run smoothly
Wendy reinforces instruction with a multimedia slide and video show and brings theory to life by sharing stories, examples and lessons learned during close to three decades of speechwriting experience. Students also take part in hands-on exercises and engage in discussion. So come with lots of questions. This is your opportunity to get answers.
At the end of the session you’ll take away
• A manual filled with checklists, templates, how-to articles, & other useful tools and resources
• A copy of the 36-minute video tutorial Write The Way People Talk
• A laminated Value Beyond Words Aide Memoire
• A certificate of achievement suitable for display
• A subscription to Pen & Podium, a monthly e-newsletter designed that will help you continue to develop as a speechwriter
Who comes to this workshop?
- People who write, edit, coordinate or contribute to speeches
- Corporate writers & freelancers who want to expand/improve their skills
- Anyone who has just completed Writing Out Loud: Strategic Speechwriting Techniques and wants to invest in a second day to further build their skills
- Anyone who has been writing speeches for awhile and wants a refresher that will move them to a higher level of skill and knowledge