At the Pro Rehetoric website there is an article on October 29, 2014 with an address to the European Speechwriters Conference in Amsterdam by Jan Sonneveld titled How speechwriting changed me. His concluding paragraphs say:
“Fellow speechwriters:
If there is one thing that summarizes best all the things I’ve learned over the past three years, it is this: words matter more than we often imagine. If we do our work with great care, then human speech is at its most powerful. We shape ideas into words and stories, creating worlds in the hearts and minds of so many people.
It is not easy. The world is easily deafened by cheap opinions, quick anger and fear. And our daily work is one of too many deadlines, bad public speakers and PowerPoint. But when you see a speaker meet an audience just where they are … When that happens, it is – as the American writer Anne Lamott said – the sensation of unmerited grace.
We can make that happen: if the words we write for others – and those we speak ourselves – offer sincerity, honesty and vulnerability.
And we can make it happen if our words, as the Dutch poet Henriette Roland Holst wrote on the walls of this room (beside her husband’s murals), ‘bear the hope in our hearts / that makes the dark world light.’ “
The cartoon was adapted from one at Wikimedia Commons.
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