Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

My latest on Huffington Post: The courage to communicate

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Why speeches still matter (sez me, in my latest Huffpost, on what I've learned in a year of editing Vital Speeches):

The social utility of speeches is undiminished by technological advances such as YouTube, Twitter and even the Kryptonite of rhetoric, PowerPoint. There comes a time—a crisis in confidence, the crescendo of a debate (and, yes, commencement season)—where everyone knows: One member of the society has to screw up the courage to stand naked before other members of the society and share what he or she believes is true. The act is significant for the same reason it always has been: The audience has the speaker outnumbered and can accept or reject the speech before, during or after its delivery.

And the more communication tools we have to hide behind, the more the public speech comes to matter.

Indefensible, even by Jack O’Dwyer

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I've been one of the champions of Jack O'Dwyer over the years. I like a muckraker more than the next guy and I like a character above almost all else, and Jack is no doubt both of those, in addition to being a convincing curmudgeon and an afflictor of the comfortable and of everyone else who pisses him off.

So it was with fondness about a decade ago, when word came that Jack was retiring, and I wrote a tribute in The Ragan Report titled, "Jack O'Dwyer is retiring, and everyone is relieved."

Alas, Jack's retirement, and everyone's relief, was short-lived. Good! The PR industry needs a nag, and it needs a sense of humor. Jack helped it with both.

But this latest thing he's pulling is indefensible. I'm sure he'll clear it up if I've oversimplified it, but as I read it on his blog, it's just this simple:

Jack publishes a directory of PR firms that potential clients presumably use to figure out what firms they want to hire. Jack is telling firms that he knows have deep pockets that they have to pay him a certain amount of money, or they won't be included in the ranking.

Now, Jack: I'm editor of Vital Speeches of the Day (just like you're publisher of O'Dwyer's Newsletter). Say I decided to start a Vital Speeches Directory of Freelance Speechwriters, so that companies looking to hire freelancers could thumb through and see who the busiest, most experienced scribes are, industry by industry.

And then, after publishing that directory for several years and making an institution of it, what if I told the most successful freelancers that they have to subscribe to Vital Speeches and sign up for an audio conference, or they would be eliminated from the list.

Jack, please explain to me how this would be ethically justifiable on my part. Tell me how I could not expect the executive communication community to tag me as just exactly the kind of Sheister Shit-Heel that you've been accusing so many other publishers and association execs of being all these years.

Say it ain't so, Jack O.

Our big rock candy mountain

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I'll hope to regale you in other posts with yarns and insights gathered during a happy week I spent in Phoenix last week. I was there connecting with my speechwriting peeps at a conference, and also my colleagues at McMurry, the company that publishes Vital Speeches of the Day.

After the "speechwriting jam session" I delivered at the conference, a number of people came up and told me the session had given them goosebumps or made them cry. Same here, I told them. Though I'd seen or read these speech excerpts dozens of times before, being able to share them with other communicators was  emotional for me too.

Many of the discussions with the speechwriters and with my McMurry mates centered on the new community that's growing around the old magazine, Vital Speeches.

I thought of that group of speech geeks, and my happy position as a facilitator and sometime sparker of these conversations, as I read another anachronistic magazine on the flight home.

Ring Magazine was one thing half a century ago, when boxing was still a major American sport. Now that boxing is despised in many quarters and ignored in most others, it may come as a surprise that Ring still comes out every month. What surprised me, a fight fan but not a fight man, was how wonderful a read Ring still is.Image

In fact, it prompted me to ask and answer a pretty old question:

What is a great read?

A great read is when you intend to flip through something but find yourself frustrated by frequent stops, because you never see an article that you ought to be interested in. Quite the opposite: You notice the woman in the seat next to you is looking scornfully at the gruesome knockout photo you've been staring at for a minute, like it's pornography.

"I know," you want to hasten to tell her. "It's really awful, isn't it?"

I guess it's natural to feel a little embarrassed when we find ourselves following our real fascinations, rather than studying the things we really ought to care about.

That's the feeling I want my Vital Speeches pals to have when they go to VSOTD.com and its various social media forums. And it's the feeling I want Writing Boots readers to have when they're here.

The world tells communicators they have to think like business people, that the results are all that matters, that strategy trumps tactics, that language is less important than money.

We accept what we have to of all that, in order to get along out there.

But it's not how we feel.

And fresh off this good trip, I'm feeling privileged to make my living and spend my time creating places for us communication tramps to talk about what is important to us—human beings, and how they talk to each other—no matter what anyone else thinks.