5 Tips For Speeding Up The Speech Writing Process

culled from:http://weneedaspeech.com

• I don’t know about you, but I am the world’s worst proofreader when it comes to proofing my own drafts. That’s where I find someone else reading back my drafts to me aloud, as I check the text, so useful. But since people are not beating down my door to fill that role, I let Microsoft Word do the job. Just go to the View menu, then Toolbars, and scroll down to Speech, and there you go. A wretched but otherwise impartial voice will read your wonderful words as you follow along. You will be amazed how many more errors you will pick up. Incidentally, if a wretched computer voice is reading back your speech – and it sounds not awful – then with a half-decent speaker the rhythm and pacing are probably already about right. A very crude measurement tool to be sure, but not to be ignored.

• Encourage your clients who are giving you feedback on your speeches to use Track Changes. It encourages them to be specific in their comments. Much better than a generic concern like, “Fix this, I don’t like it.”

• For all its faults, I find voice dictation software incredibly useful for the writing of the first “puke” draft. So the 5% or so error rate of the leading brands of software – Dragon for PCs and MacSpeech for the Mac (recently bought out by Dragon) doesn’t really matter. You just want your ideas on paper as quickly as possible. After all, the puke draft will soon become irrelevant to the final product. It’s all in the re-writing.

• Most freelance speech writers can find themselves handling a half dozen or so speeches at any one time, each one at a different stage of development. It can be an organizational challenge. That’s why I tape record all my interviews. Trust me, six weeks later, when you begin work on the speech, you will be glad you did. Tape everything.

• Those tapes need transcription, and a good transcriber who can act independently and who is trustworthy, is worth his or her weight in gold. MacSpeech has just released Scribe that purports to be able to do just that. I haven’t tried it yet, although I am dubious, because unlike my puke drafts, I really want my transcriptions to be very accurate. So transcribers of the world likely need not fear for their livelihoods – yet.