Speechwriters: How to write for the senses

Speechwriters can put life in their rhetoric by reimagining the past in sights, sounds, touches and smells

The best way to engage an audience is to tap into their emotions.

Why? Because, it’s difficult to control one’s emotions. And if you can tap into this well of potential energy in your audience, you have the ability to get them powerfully motivated, according to Rueben Bronee, former project director for the deputy minister of British Columbia, Canada.

One word, not 50

How can speechwriters do that? One way, Bronee asserted, is to use evocative words to give your audience an intense feeling of the actual scene, a sense of lived experience.

First, choose your words carefully. Select single words that are so evocative, they convey a complex reality by themselves; the words that work on the five senses have that power. Forget purple paragraphs; find the exact right word.