I and some pals from the Professional Speechwriters Association were quoted in an Atlantic piece on commencement speeches titled, “The Best Graduation Speech Is One Nobody Remembers.” I’m not pleased with the piece, starting with its clickbait headline.
Mine is the oldest story in the world: In an approximately hourlong interview with the author, Ian Bogost, I expressed three decades of hard-won philosophy on speeches, commencement and otherwise. He got all that out of me because he seemed genuinely curious, and receptive to a complex view of the psychologically and socially subtle art of oral rhetoric. Which probably didn’t fit into his word count or his need for a provocative, singular thrust. So he cherrypicked quotes that fit, and juxtaposed them with his words, that I would never say. And we get passages like this …
A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter.
Dispensing memorable advice is “good in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions …
The interview was over a month ago, so I don’t remember everything I said. I can’t list contrary points I made that Bogost failed to insert. But I’m pretty sure I did tell him what I often say: that when I was young, I thought speeches were generally boring old things for boring old people. And that it was years into my adulthood when I slowly came to understand how and why speeches work singularly on an audience, emotionally—even spiritually. And that even a speaker who is not providing new intellectual insight—as commencement speakers rarely are—can galvanize a community in a meaningful and lasting way if they say the words the audience wants, needs, craves to hear.
So, pretty much the opposite of what Bogost ended up writing.
I’d say I’m sadder and wiser as a result. But if I know myself—and my unjustified but unshakeable faith in my ability to get across nuanced views so powerfully that writers will be compelled to include them in magazine and newspaper articles—probably just sadder.
The first speech I wrote, which was also the first speech I delivered, was my Grade 8 Graduation Validictorian address, in June 1958.
I’m having lunch with some of the audience members in a couple of weeks, and I’ll ask them about the longevity of my words. It’s only been 68 years, and they should know if they took my advice, and how things turned out.
–BAK–