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Speechcraft: Avoiding A Soggy Toast

“Saturday Night Live” photo courtesy of NBC Universal

Chances are that within the next 12 months you may be called upon to deliver remarks in public. Despite the occasion, there are structural elements to speechwriting that transcend specificities of event, gender and subject. The following components are elements every speech requires:

Structure
     Speechwriting is an art that depends on your ability to be succinct without being short; descriptive without becoming pedantic, and; earnest without sounding saccharine or stilted. Speech writing can seem like eating an elephant, and the best way to do that is one bite at a time. Your first bite is developing an outline. 
     The best approach to crafting remarks is often by creating an undergirding and then building upon that foundation. Similar to a term paper or report, creating a simple outline will allow you to expand in an ordered fashion and help your speech take shape. 

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To ‘Get Your Goat’

“Modern Family” photo courtesy of ABC Television.

There’s a phrase I enjoy (in modified form) to describe when my middle daughter employs her black arts to irritate me in some simple, but effective way: “She has my goat in her pocket.”
     The classic saying, “to get your goat,” basically means: to irritate; annoy; make someone feel bad; a successful tease.
     According to several sources, including idiom.com and The Phrase Finder, its idiomatic debut stems from a story reporting on a burst water pipe in The Stevens Point Daily Journal, a newspaper in Wisconsin, from May 1909:
     “Wouldn’t that get your goat? We’d been transferring the same water all night from the tub to the bowl and back again.”
     Its export across the pond is listed in 1924, found within the story, “The White Monkey,” by English author John Galsworthy: “That had got the chairman’s goat! – Got his goat? What expressions they utilized these days!”

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Don’t Bury The ‘Lede’

While typically used in journalistic parlance, the lede is your opening sentence and tells the reader what the subject is; if the lede was a part of your house, consider it your front door. 
     (Lede, which is both pronounced and means the same as lead, is intentionally misspelled, and explained at the end of this piece.)
     An article on the Modern Language Association (MLA) website by Erika Suffern encapsulates the importance pretty succinctly: “A writer ‘buries the lede’ when the newsworthy part of a story fails to appear at the beginning, where it’s expected.” Say, for instance, that two people die in a house fire. The lede gets buried if the reporting mentions the location, time, or cause of the fire before the deaths.
      This maxim is not the sole provenance of journalism. For example, circling back to the housing reference, if you are a real estate agent selling a house, what would be the most critical fact buyers need to know in your write-up?

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The evolution of ‘hack’

When news broke this week revealing an “unprecedented” security breach by rogue state actors breaking into multiple government computer networks — a story that continues to evolve — the word used when describing the criminal act was “hacked.”
     Hack, and its iterations (hacked, hacker, hacking), likely conjures up images of nefarious cybercriminals and their deeds. However, the word has been around far longer than the advent of interconnected computer networks.
     Etymologists date the origin of hack to the time known as Middle English, (between 1150 and 1500) and its evolution is labyrinthian, as you will learn. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hack’s entrée in modern language began several hundred years ago in its original meanings: “[to] cut with heavy blows in an irregular or random fashion.”

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Homophones! The Writer’s Tiger Trap

You’re in the thick of writing and suddenly you freeze. Staring at your screen, you ask yourself, “Is that the correct word; it sounds right, but what if it’s the other word?”
     If that scenario feels familiar, you’ve likely fallen into the lexiconic equivalent of a tiger trap: Homophones!
     It seems almost cruel of English that there can be two (or more) words that sound alike, maybe spelled nearly identical, too, but mean completely different things. Homophones can be the hidden ordinances of otherwise good copy.
     There are homophones most of us learned to differentiate at an early age: dear and deer; to, two and too; sun and son, etc. Others, however, are trickier and can best even the most solid scribes.
     For purposes of this blog, we’ve chosen three of the more complicated homophones to feature. And since brevity is a blog crowd-pleaser, we’ll forsake the rabbit hole of listing every definition.

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6 Tips for better news hygiene

Photo courtesy of NPR

It may be hard to imagine, but the proposition that the press was an impartial disseminator of information was both venerated and deemed important enough that it was codified in the Constitution.
     Objectivity today has rightfully come under increasing scrutiny. How can we be sure reporters are relaying the facts truthfully and with accuracy, without their own biases and opinions? In other words, how do we practice proper news hygiene? 
     Journalism (nay, the media) seeks to hold government officials, industrialists, etc. accountable to us, the citizenry; it has, and remains, a bulwark against civic malfeasance and despotism. 
     A neutral media is the government’s nominal fourth branch. And, while opinion has always been a component of the news landscape, the central tenet of the journalist as impartial remains steadfast.
     The benefits the press provides our nation are innumerable. Consuming news makes us better citizens precisely because we are informed. Armed with information, knowledge empowers us to make educated choices; for example, when we exercise our right to vote.  
     Yet, we are only equipped to excel in the role we play in self-governance if we are reading news that is accurate. Regretfully, and with greater frequency, it is not always the default. 
     The news industry is at a precipice. From shouts of “fake news” to the concept of “alternative facts,” each of us must gain agency and play a more active role in verifying what we read is both fact-based and accurate.

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