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I really like this blog because it is clear, practical and to the point, and not a lot of waffle--it's easy to find the information you are looking for.

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Insights from former presidential speechwriter Kasey Pipes

Gettysburg celebrated its 182nd Commencement yesterday. Every year, we love hearing the advice and wisdom shared by college commencement speakers across the country.

But what is it about these speeches that we love? That serves to inspire?

As commencement speech season comes to a close, we share thoughts from professional speechwriter, Kasey Pipes, on what elements of a speech - and good writing in general - make it stand out and resonate with an audience.

Pipes is a biographer and historian. Previously, he was a communications and policy advisor, serving as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and chief author of the Republican Party platform in 2004.

Below is an excerpt of the written transcript of the Q&A between Pipes and Joe Lynch, the alumni director at Gettysburg College. You can also watch the full video, which was recorded at the end of April.

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JL: Because so many graduations and commencements are coming up in the next month, we thought that we should take advantage of Kasey's unique background and talk about what makes great speech writing and speech giving, since many of you will probably be hearing a lot of speeches over the next couple months. But Kasey, first welcome, and thanks for being here. Just tell us a little bit about growing up - you grew up in Fort Worth Texas, and I'm guessing you didn't say 'I want to be a presidential speechwriter as a kid,' so tell us a little bit about growing up and your progression after that.
KP: I grew up with a pretty ordinary upbringing and was really into sports, and then as I got into middle school and high school, that was the era of the Reagan years. And so I first got into politics in the 80s, and was fascinated by Reagan, and of course, if you're going to write speeches eventually, that's a good place to start. He certainly was very well adept at not only helping write his own remarks and editing his remarks, but delivering them in a very powerful way. And I can remember vividly watching on the news his Berlin Wall speech in 1987. I can remember his speech at the Bitburg Cemetery in Germany...obviously the farewell address...I mean those are all very vivid memories for me.

And so I went into politics with an interest in the message side of it and the communications side of it and went into high school, got involved in debate forensics and began doing public speaking and essay writing, and then went into college originally thinking I might do ministry, which is something I was very interested in at the time. I went to a small liberal arts Christian School in Abilene, Texas, and then kind of stumbled into politics, really - not by anything I planned.

I had a friend of a friend who introduced me to Kay Granger, who was at the time the Fort Worth mayor and was running for Congress in 1996, and I began to work for her and began to write for her. She decided that she liked how I wrote, and so she was the first political figure I ever wrote speeches for in 1996. I went with her to Washington when she was elected and was her press secretary and continued to write for her then, and then in 1999 was hired by the Bush campaign to work in Austin and wrote primarily for surrogates. On a presidential campaign, these are people that go out in lieu of the candidate to do events around the country. I wrote a lot of speeches for those folks and then spent about three years at the White House from 2001 to the end of 2003, worked on the 2004 campaign, and then moved home, began writing a book, and started a business where I did a lot of corporate writing - writing for CEOs and executives who are speaking and have writing needs. And then in the middle of that, I did Arnold Schwarzenegger for a year, which was fascinating. So I've written for a lot of different people.

And I think if there's any one lesson I've learned throughout this process, writing is sort of a lost art and I would always encourage young people, particularly, to really take up writing because if you can write well it is a differentiator. It will separate you from your competition and lead to other things.

So I've been I've been very blessed.
JL: You were in the White House working for several years. What was it like working in the White House? It's certainly an experience that most Americans don't have.
KP: Yeah, I was I was very fortunate. I worked in an office called Strategic Initiatives, which was sort of a hybrid research office, message office, political office. We did have had our hand in a lot of different things, and I handled a lot of the writing. We did a lot of political speeches, events for the president where he couldn't travel, so we would satellite him in, or in those days, actually tape his remarks and send the tape to the event. So the great part about that for me was my interaction with him.

I got to be with the president every week, once a week, and I was, you know, 27 at the time. I was pretty young, pretty low on the totem pole at the White House, but I got a lot interaction with him. I got to see how the process works. The speech in a White House is a very elaborate process. It takes place over the course of several days. There are many, many rounds of edits. There are many people inside the building who have to sign off and make edits, and then you've got to somehow incorporate those edits in a way that still makes sense to the flow of the speech. And then the boss has to be happy ultimately.

And the president was not shy about saying if he liked something or didn't like something. So it was a great experience for me, and seeing kind of the mechanics of speechwriting and all of the thought that goes into it - getting the policy people to weigh in, getting the communications people to weigh in, getting the political people to make sure we're mentioning all the right people at the top of the speech. It's a really elaborate process.

But I think it made me a better writer in the sense that I was a little more kind of a freewheeler before that. I would sort of write something and hand it over to the boss, and you can't do that in a White House. So it taught me process, and I think that's a good thing for any writer to learn.
JL: What do you think the keys are to effective speech writing?
KP: For me, the number one thing was making sure it's in the person's voice. So whoever it is you're writing for, you want it to sound authentic to them, to their voice. So obviously, I wrote very differently for President Bush than I did for Governor Schwarzenegger, because they quite literally talk different. They have a different tone of voice. With President Bush, he was very clear about wanting, as he would often say, simple declarative sentences. He wanted things that were very direct - short sentences, simple sentences. He didn't like being lyrical or poetic. And he actually could do it very well, but with me, it was not ever something that I experimented with with him.

Governor Schwarzenegger was the exact opposite. He wanted flowery rhetoric. He wanted rhetorical heights. He wanted grand metaphors to be used. I remember writing a speech for him one time, and I did this metaphor about California during the recall of 2003, how it had been sort of like a grand old house. The foundation was cracked, and you know the windows were covered up, creating an unclear view to the future - and he called me and he loved it. He wanted to expand it - you know, talk about how the basement was flooding, and go beyond where I had taken the metaphor. And that was great. For a writer that's fun - when the person you're writing for takes something that you've given them and then wants you to build on it. So I think you always want to write in the person's voice. You always want to match your words to their personal brand - who people know they are.

And then I think the other thing, and this is true of any writing, and [that is] all great writing comes down to tension. It's always about solving a problem, fixing an issue, addressing a challenge.

And so a lot of writing is sort of existential, I think. Bad writing is.

You're just sort of writing for the sake of writing, and you're just saying things to sound like a speech. I always try to avoid that. I always try to get right to the point: this is the topic at hand, and this is the challenge we face, and here's what we're going to do about it. And I think that plays well with any audience and really with any speech.
JL: And you can write a fantastic address, but it still has to be delivered by somebody. What do see is the key to delivering an effective speech?
KP: I think obviously practice is a big part of that, and making sure the flow works in a way that they're not going to stumble over words. There's certain words I would always avoid. Particularly is a word I would avoid. It's a really hard word for someone to say, particularly if you're reading from a teleprompter. So there were words I tried to avoid.

But I think getting the speech done in advance, having a lot of practice sessions, that always helps, but again, I think just making sure the message matches the person. If it's something that they're familiar with, if it's something they've said before, or it sounds like them, it sounds like their voice, they're going to deliver it better. And I think any time I strayed away from that it, didn't work very well. So I got to where I tried to just stay within the boundaries there and write something that fit the person, fit his or her message, and it flowed well, and I thought would be spoken well.

Reagan used to say to his speech writers, 'there's a difference between something that's written for the eye and something that's written for the ear.' In fact, there's a story of George Shultz bringing him a speech one time, and saying 'I'm going to give this, does this look okay,' and Reagan read it, and said 'it's fine, but it's not the speech I would give.' And Shultz said 'why' and he said, 'because it's written for the eye, and a speech should be written for the ear.'

So you think about that when you're writing. You think about language and illustrations and stories that maybe wouldn't fit in an essay or a book, but they fit in a spoken context with an audience. And so that was always something I tried to do.
JL: I think that's a great insight to the whole process, where you've got time to develop thoughts, practice, go back and forth. Were there also instances in which you really did not have time because of events, and how do you deal with that kind of pressure?
KP: It happens a lot, and again, you know Eisenhower had this line about 'in a war a plan is useless, but planning is indispensable.' I think that's true of speech writing as well, even if you have a short timeline, the fact that you have gone through the process so many times before with your boss, you know how he thinks, you know how he wants to say things. That benefits you immensely, and I think you can, in a short amount of time, put something together that's reasonably close to what you would have done in a longer period of time.

So I think the process of training yourself how this person thinks, how this person speaks, writing in their voice - I think those lessons are invaluable once you get in a short fuse situation. And it happens to all of us, and you have to just make the best of it. And put something on paper that, again, is consistent with their voice and what you think they would say.

Watch the rest of the discussion, starting at the 12:00 mark.

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These Are the Indispensable Elements of Good Writing

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Insights from former presidential speechwriter Kasey Pipes Gettysburg celebrated its 182nd Commencement yesterday. Every year, we love hearing the advice and wisdom shared by college commencement speakers across the country. But what is it about these speeches that we love? That serves to inspire?