In an article published in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Mark Oppenheimer mentions that Dr. Martin Luther King received a C+ in public speaking when he was at seminary.
How then was King able to produce “I Have a Dream” –- one of the greatest American speeches of the 20th Century?
The answer, according to Mr. Oppenheimer, lies in the hundreds of sermons that King wrote, polished, and delivered in the nearly 20 years that led up to the march on Washington in 1963. His speech was not wholly original to the occasion, but drew heavily on the best of his rhetorical efforts up to that time.
Likewise, his delivery reflected decades of practice. Dr. King, undoubtedly, had natural gifts as a speaker, but they took years to perfect –- years that took him from that humiliating C+ at Crozer Seminary to the front rank of American orators.
There’s a lesson here for speakers and speechwriters. Some people may indeed be natural-born orators, but they don’t rise to greatness without years of practice. At the other extreme, some people who are not natural-born speakers –- whether because of shyness, a speech defect or a lack of charisma – can become great speakers through hard work.
Think of Demosthenes, one of the greatest orators of the ancient world. We know that Demosthenes had a speech defect of some kind. He also had a weak voice. There are various accounts as to how he overcame these handicaps. Some say he overcame the stammer by weighting his lower jaw with pebbles. Some say he strengthened his voice by going down to the seashore, where he practiced speaking over the roar of the waves.
These stories may be apocryphal, but what is beyond doubt is that Demosthenes willed himself to be a great orator. So did Winston Churchill. Churchill had a lisp and a stammer that he struggled for years to overcome. But in the end, through hard work and sheer force of will, he reached the point where he was the orator who “mobilized the English language, and sent it forth to battle.”
On the subject of Churchill, it’s also worth recalling that one of his contemporaries said of him that he “spent the best years of his life polishing his impromptu speeches.” That’s because Churchill recognized that there are no good impromptu speeches. When someone is called on to speak without notice and delivers a great speech, that person is almost certainly recycling material that he has used before, and was lying in one of his mental cupboards, ready to be pulled out in an emergency.
In short, there are no shortcuts to success in public speaking. Dr. King started out as a C+ student. Many other great speakers started out with even lower grades. But in the end, it doesn’t matter how much native talent one has, or doesn’t have. It’s hard work and constant practice that make a speaker –- and speechwriters have to work just as hard in perfecting their own craft.
