Columnist John Fund had a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about Reagan aide Mike Deaver, who died last Saturday of pancreatic cancer. At least, the piece was nominally about Mike Deaver. Most of it dealt with how Fund first encountered Ronald Reagan when he was a high school student and Reagan was Governor of California.

Deaver and another aide had cooked up an idea for a half-hour weekly TV series, “The Governor and the Students.” The format was a sort of news conference in which a panel of high school students would ask the governor questions about state and national issues.

Deaver’s rationale for the series was that it would show Regan interacting with young people –- but they would be young people who still lived at home with their parents, who had not yet been radicalized by liberal professors and who still showed at least some respect for their elders.

On the last of these shows, one student asked Mr. Reagan how he prepared his speeches.

Mr. Fund describes what happened next:

“A beaming Reagan sat down and proceeded to explain how he would cram quotes and articles citations on 4-by-6 index cards that he color-coded by issue category. He showed us some of the cards and explained that he could vary their order and selection to create a completely fresh speech from old material. Finally, Reagan had to leave for his next appointment. Deaver turned around as he left with the governor and told us we had just been give n a valuable gift by a master and we should remember it. I did. To this day, I still use Reagan's basic method when preparing my own speeches.”

Reagan was not unique in this approach to crafting speeches. Historian Douglas Wilson says that many of Abraham Lincoln’s closest associates attest to the fact that when Lincoln had a speech coming up, he would make notes on scraps of paper as ideas occurred to him, and then arrange those scraps into a formal speech.

I don’t mean to class myself with such distinguished company, but I do the same thing myself. There’s really nothing remarkable about this technique. For most writers, our subconscious does a lot of our writing for us. That’s the easy part. The hard part is when we have to take these random jottings and fit them together into a coherent whole.