Recently a friend shared a link to a TED-Ed video purporting to prove that the plays of Shakespeare were, in fact, written by a playwright named William Shakespeare!
Guessing the "true" authorship of Shakespeare's canon has been an odd sort of obsession for the last century and a half. But those of us who have had the privilege to act in Shakespeare's plays onstage know who wrote them: a man who had a genius for creating living, breathing characters speaking truth for the ages. His varied, complex, unique point of view is evident in every character and every situation. We know these plays are his because they are all written in his distinctive voice. The TED-Ed speakers discovered this same thing by applying linguistic tools, and share their conclusions in the video. But if you have ever studied the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries—many of whom are brought forth as possible authors of his works—you will find none that look and sound like The Bard of Avon.
I'm no Shakespeare, not even a Thomas Kyd, but in my work I often help clients write speeches. We brainstorm together, and I help with organization, structure and flow. Then they draft a speech, using their own words, their own idiomatic expressions. It is tremendously important that the speech is written in the client's own voice.
Recently, a client asked another communications professional look over her speech. Fair enough: if you have time, it is often a good idea to ask multiple readers/listeners for feedback on the clarity of your presentation. But this "feedback" took the form of editing that scrubbed all the personality from the speech. I really deplore that particular kind of wordsmithing, when someone else "fixes" your content. When a speech is constructed this way, it ends up sounding very much like a boring pronouncement written by committee.
The best way to gain and hold an audience's attention is to sound fresh and genuine. No one wants to hear the same old words describing the same old positions. If your content is not earth-shatteringly original (and who is always that lucky?), you can at least speak with an original, authentic voice.
Good speechwriters study their principals' every public utterance, and are aware of how they speak in private, too. They catch the rhythm, the turn of phrase, the vocabulary that is unique to the speaker. That is not always an easy task, but it is essential to the writer's success. While most of us don't have our own personal speechwriters, we do have something even better: our own voices. Use that voice to share your uniqueness and your authenticity with others.
No one else will ever be Shakespeare. But no one else will ever sound exactly like you, either!
Shakespeare, after the Chandos portrait, courtesy Folger Shakespeare Library
