All of us have heard the expression, “Do I have to draw you a picture?”

For speechwriters, the answer is an emphatic “Yes!”

The ear processes information more slowly than the eye. Accordingly, drawing a picture with words will often help the audience to grasp the message that the speaker is trying to convey.

I’ll give you a notable example. One of the most famous remarks associated with President Franklin Roosevelt is, “I hate war.”

This quotation is accurate. It comes from a speech that President Roosevelt gave at Chautauqua, New York in 1936. But it is taken out of context. It is actually the last sentence of a paragraph in which President Roosevelt draws an unforgettable word-picture of the horrors of modern warfare.

The full paragraph reads as follows:

I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line – the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.

Simply saying, “I hate war” would have been a catch phrase. For FDR, who never served in uniform, it would have been a dangerous catch phrase, since it might have exposed him to ridicule.

But Roosevelt drew on what he saw in France with his own eyes when he visited the front lines as Assistant Secretary of the Navy after the U.S. entered World War I. Thus, while he was never a combatant (his requests to serve were vetoed by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and President Woodrow Wilson) he saw the misery of war first-hand, and bore eloquent witness to what he saw.

After the word-picture he drew from his own experience, no one could doubt that his assertion, “I hate war”, came from the depths of his heart.