Category: Pros on Prose

Some speechwriters might have resented it when I criticized Jon Favreau and Lovett for what I saw as the glib, snarky style the former Obama speechwriters showed on...

Anyone working freelance in today’s publishing industry is in a double bind. (And you can be forgiven if you feel doubly blindsided, too.) Not only is a...

“People need to be reminded,” said Samuel Johnson, “more often than they need to be instructed.” Commencement speakers struggle to come up with a speech, when “everything’s...

Most great writers aren’t great successes, as the world counts success. Write anyway.  A few weeks ago* my son and I drove down to Richmond to see...

Looking back over my three decades of ghostwriting, I realize that every bad client experience I had was really my own fault. In each case, I ignored...

In America, we engage in frivolous rhetoric because we can afford to. That’s not a boast. That’s a failure of character. It’s along these lines: The comedian...

I took a Robert Kennedy biography on spring break, and all I got was six lousy insights on speechwriting. Actually, not lousy at all, thanks to author...

In this space a couple of weeks ago, an outsider might have thought speechwriters were complaining about the unreasonable—or unreasonably numerous—demands that organizations place on them. As a...

Merritt Tierce has a great name but it doesn’t begin with J, so I’m a little unclear as to why she assumed she could make a living...

Hands down it was the greatest writing lesson in my illustrious almost thirty years in the journalism/publishing business. It was just one simple sentence of sage advice...