My mentee wrote to everyone in an online toastmasters group asking whether there were any taboos regarding language used in speeches. he wanted to quote from the famous, some would say infamous, speeches by Patton in WWII.
The memorable and important gist of the opening of one of his series of speeches is that you do not win a war by dying for your country, but by making sure the soldiers on the other side die for their country.
I read the speech in Wikipedia. Apparently Patton was famous for his down to earth language. However, many of the speeches were reconstructed by combining the accounts of various soldiers who wrote them down afterwards.
Even if Patton used particular swearwords of indelicate terms or ideas, what is apporpriate for a lot of soldiers may not be suitable if it can be heard by a woman with a child on her lap.
Imagine that you are giving the speech to a primary school. Or that your speech is being broadcast in 50 living rooms - which is likely on Zoom with everybody on lockdown.
You can see spouses and children wandering in and out.
As a speechwriter, you should be able to eliminate a word or phrase or find a substitute.
When I was a sub-editor on Woman magazine, I would have had to reword the speech, or abbreviate it, of cut out specific words.
I later wrote articles on WW2 for a Marshall Cavendish partwork encyclopaedia. A partwork is an encyclopedia published in parts, weekly magzines which can be collected and collated in a binder to form an enclopaedia.
The one I worked on longest was translated from an English encyclopadia in English into German and simplified from an adult magazine into one for a reading age of teens from 10 to 16, and had to be understood by those of the youngest age.
Since the articles were from pieces written for an English audience, but now to be read by a German audience, you can imagine that the wording as well as the viewpoint had to be entirely different. Changing the wording was a challenge.
Allies, enemies, and so on - are seen differently and named differently. It was a challenge. But I had to do it. I did it. So I know it can be done.
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About the Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
I and my family have lived in the UK, Spain, the USA and Singapore. I am a trave writer and phtographer and teacher of English A level and English as a foreign language.
Please come to a Toastmasters International Club where the English clubs have a langauge evaluator or grammarian. We also have French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Tamil and clubs based in Singapore and many more online around the world which because of Covid-19 are now meeting online.
I am President of Braddell Heights Advanced, meeting every Wednesday, on zoom the first Wednesday of the month but the other wednesdays are workshops on app learncool.sg
Or quicker, tinyurl.com/BHACOOL
In Singapore we are on the same time zone as Malaysia, Hong Kong, and China (Beijing and Shanghai).
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