How to Write a Campaign Speech

Delivering Your Own Student Council Speech

Speak slowly. Remember the audience is hearing the speech and not reading it. When you write a campaign speech, it's very important to keep in mind that how you write for listeners is going to be much different from how you would write for readers. A lot of people get nervous when they give a speech, and when people get nervous they talk fast. But fast talkers seem untrustworthy. So if you get nervous, space out your words (literally, put five spaces in between each word on the page) to keep your speech measured.

Talk to the audience like you're having a conversation. Even though you're not actually having a conversation with someone, it should sound like you are. Don't worry about eliminating contractions, splitting infinitives, or leaving modifiers dangling. Don't go overboard with informality. You're asking to lead your peers, so they need to trust you can do that. Most people can't lead well, so to convince them you can lead well, your speech should also reflect that you're more capable than an average person. You need to strike a balance. Speak at a level just above the level of a typical conversation.

Keep your words simple and direct. Student audiences have especially short attention spans and limited vocabularies. As a good rule of thumb, keep all of your sentences at fifteen words or less. Instead of: "We need to address the way we schedule our lunch breaks in a reasonable but fair way, because the way we do it now isn't fair to anyone." Try: "We have people eating lunch at 10:30 am. They're still serving breakfast at Burger King at 10:30! It doesn't make sense! By the time 2:00 rolls around, the early lunch kids are starving. There is a better way. We all know it."

Read it aloud to see how it sounds. People may only hear your speech once. Read your speech aloud exactly as you want it to sound when you’re giving it. You’ll probably find words and phrases that sound clunky to the ear or trip up your tongue. Rephrase them. For even more focused practice, try speaking in front of a mirror or in front of a camera.

Structuring a Campaign Speech

Tailor your message to your audience in specific ways. Before you start writing, think about the audience you are addressing. Are you addressing the entire student body? Just one grade? A classroom? So, if you’re talking to one classroom, don’t only talk to the classroom about a general problem the school has. Talk to the classroom about how that general problem affects them and how you can change it. For example, don’t say: “The breaks in between homeroom and first period aren’t long enough.” Say: “Everybody in homeroom has gotten at least one demerit for being late to first period. We can’t get all the way from North Campus to South Campus in time. Elect me as homeroom representative, and I won’t let the administration forget it.”

Outline your speech. All writing has a beginning, middle and end. Outlining your thoughts first will help you stay on track as you write the speech. The beginning needs to catch people’s attention and raise the questions you’re going to answer. The middle needs to provide the answers, and the end connects the answers back to the questions. In very simple terms: You tell them what you’re going to tell them. Then, you tell them. Then you tell them what you told them.

Make your point quickly. Open your campaign speech with your theme, or main idea. You don’t stand anything to gain by beating around the bush, because people naturally want to pay attention to themselves. You have to convince them to listen to you. For example: Don’t say: “My name is Joe Blow, and I’m running for City Council. I’m a member of…” Instead, get right to it. Say: “Not a single person in this city thinks the parking situation on Main St. is adequate. No one.” There's a lot of ways to get this done. You can use a story, a challenge, a joke, or just vividly describe a problem. You just need to get the audience's attention quickly. Earn their attention, don't expect it to come to you.

Support your theme. Once you’ve got their attention, don’t let go. The middle of your speech needs to explain the issues you raised in the introduction and convince people that you can do something about them, but you need to vary the way you tackle the issues. You want to have a good mix of facts, feelings, and action. If you only talk facts, your audience will get bored. Only talk feelings, and you’ll wear them out. Only talk action, and it invites disbelief, because you haven’t offered enough factual and emotional support for your argument.

Raise the stakes at the end. The conclusion is just as important as the introduction. It's the last chance you have to leave an impression, so make sure they remember you by raising the stakes. To continue with the parking example, don’t end your speech talking about the width and number of parking spaces on Main St. Make it bigger than that—something that makes them feel weaker for not supporting you and stronger for supporting you. “This isn’t just about parking spaces. The parking situation is just a symptom of everything that’s wrong with the Council in this city. We’ve asked. We’ve begged. We’ve done all we could. Now we have to send a message that they can’t just ignore us.” With this kind of appeal, you put the listener in a position where they are either a person who votes for you or a person who lets themselves be ignored. Most people will take the first choice.

Writing a Political Stump Speech

Don’t forget the basics. Just because you’re embarking on a political career, doesn’t mean that you can neglect the basic rules of composition. Your speech needs a clear beginning, middle, and end. The beginning needs to hook the audience, you need to keep them interested through the middle, and the end should leave them nodding their heads in agreement, applauding and on their feet.

Stay on message. Don’t let your speech wander and meander. It is confusing to hear a rambling speech and it makes you seem confused. No one wants a confused leader. Staying on message is about more than repeating yourself. Focus on a problem and then offer a solution. Say your issue is healthcare. That’s a multifaceted issue, so bring up specific problems, and offer specific solutions. For example, start by offering the problem: “Prescription drug costs are too high!” Give a few details or anecdotes to illustrate the magnitude of the problem, and then offer your solution: “And that’s why we’re going to negotiate directly with the drug companies to lower prices.”

Identify with the audience through an associational appeal. An associational appeal is an appeal to people’s sense of group identity on the basis of authority or equality. Associational appeals can be very powerful, so use them anywhere you can. For example, a politician who emphasizes his military service is appealing to group affiliation based on authority. They are one of us and deserve our allegiance because they protect us. A politician who is brings up the fact that their family “has been here for five generations,” or that they are the “child of a single mother” is appealing to group affiliation on the basis of equality. They are one of us and understand us because they have lived a life like mine.

Stoke the passions of your audience with an emotional appeal. Emotional appeals are some of the most powerful appeals, particularly when you want to turn your audience against something or someone. Emotional appeals can turn audiences against things for a simple reason: anger and fear are easy emotions to stimulate. For example, when a politician says: “The system is rigged! They think they’ve got you fooled, but I know different.” They are making an emotional appeal based on stoking the anger of the audience. When they imply that “they” think of the audience as fools, the speaker plays to the audience’s sense of ridicule. This infuriates the audience, turning the audience against “them.”

Make your audience understand with clear logical appeals. Logical appeals are actually the strongest appeals, but they are the slowest to take effect. It takes longer to make someone understand a problem than it does to make them mad--or make them believe you’re a part of their group. For example, "Very few of us would argue with the proposition that 99/3=33. That’s because we’ve been logically convinced of its truth. There’s almost nothing a person could do to convince us otherwise, and therein lays the power of a logical appeal. However, it took us far longer to understand division than it did for us to feel anger or fear, or understand that we were part of a group."

Play to your strengths. Identify which appeals you have on your side and emphasize those aspects of your argument. Should you be lucky enough to have all three, you don’t have much more to do than make sure all the words of your speech are in the right order. However, most arguments are going to be weaker or stronger in one or more areas. If your biggest appeal is associational, your argument is less about specific points than it is about you. Design your speech to emphasize your biography and why it makes you trustworthy. People elect a person, not a set of ideas. If your biggest appeal is emotional, keep your speech short, so that the audience doesn’t notice the logical flaws. Adjust your energy level to the audience's. If they're agitated, start slowly. If they’re bored, then start off at a higher energy level. Always work to an emotional crescendo, however. Never start at the emotional level you want to finish at. If your biggest appeal is logical, break up the facts with feeling. You can’t risk boring your audience to death, so you need to break up your logical propositions into bite-sized chunks. Think of it as the spoonful of sugar principle—a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

Stay conversational. Your speech shouldn’t sound like you’re reciting multiplication tables. You want to sound like you’re having a dialogue, even though it’s a monologue. Therefore, it’s best not to bring a full-text speech, and it’s best not to try and memorize it word for word (at least in the beginning). Instead, bring bullet-point type notes to keep yourself on track. If you will be speaking at a podium or beside a table, put your notes on a piece of paper or a notepad--not notecards. Very few people can shuffle notecards discretely enough to look professional while doing it. If you won’t have a podium and you must use notes, get your notes onto one notecard.

Be brief. Be pithy. The easiest way for people to forget about what you have to say is to bore them, and the easiest way to bore them is to drag your speech out. You want to be memorable, and you want to leave them wanting more. Brevity is the soul of wit. No one is going to remember sixty word sentences. Since you are striving to be memorable, make sure to pepper your speech with short, punchy lines. You don’t want to sound like a limerick, but you do want to use alliteration, assonance, and rhythm to your advantage. For example, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” contains only nine unique words, with seven examples of alliteration.