Rewrites

# Chapter 188

Rewrite your first draft - every time. And then if you are really wise, rewrite it again and again. This is the next Lincoln lesson. Those who don’t need to rewrite their first draft aren’t human. We simply get better with practice. This lesson I learned really well as a public speaker. The more times I rewrote my speech the more it smoothed out and was easier and easier to deliver and the more clarity that existed in the words. (see that sentence needs a rewrite!)

Since I was a public speaker for more than 30 years I truly have polished this principle. And then I graduated to a team of public speakers and I discovered that they had no discipline at all when it came to rewriting. They waited to write their speech the night before they were to deliver it and it showed badly. I quickly removed those people from my team. Instead I wanted public speakers who would polish what they had written. Every edit and rewrite made it so much better, and that in fact is the real work of public speaking.

Of course modern politicians don’t write their own speeches like Lincoln did, instead they have professional speech writers crafting their words, and the tools we have to work with today are so far improved, iPads, thesaurus, dictionary and online tools aplenty. But the tools and professionals aside, the real work is in the rewriting, no matter who is doing it.

Lastly the most important tool in the rewriting toolbox is practicing it out loud. When a sentence is spoke out loud it reads differently than a sentence read on a page, as you hear it in your head. And that is a game changer. Then it becomes almost painfully obvious what needs to be changed and rewritten. Better yet, video yourself speaking your current draft, and you will have plenty to rewrite immediately as you listen to yourself.