[dctoedt]

My late senior partner was a world-famous (in our field) speaker and writer and leader. He'd be 88 years old now. He was old-fashioned in many ways, and insisted on telling us newbies exactly how he did public speaking, so that we could do likewise:

1. He wrote out every word, in the type of language he would use in conversation. The resulting "script" was double-spaced, with Python-like line breaks and indentations to signify the pauses he wanted.

2. Then for rehearsal, he read the entire speech aloud, to himself, ten times, practicing the cadences and the emphases he wanted, editing as he went. He said that reading the speech aloud to himself was critical, because that's what embeds the phrases and cadences and emphases in something like muscle memory.

He would also sometimes say that Churchill's supposedly-extemporaneous remarks were the product of enormous polishing and rehearsal.