For me that’s never been true. My worst days golfing are bad, because I feel like I’m wasting my time, and my best days working are fantastic, because I feel at one with the universe.

But how many truly magical days have I spent working? In my experience, such days happen about once per decade.

It’s November 1995, and I’m lying on the sofa in Larry Ragan’s office at 3:00 a.m., trying to grab a few hours sleep before the graphic designer comes in to lay out the memorial issue I’ve been working on in the days since he died. I’m using all the skills my mentor taught me in order to honor him. As I try to sleep through the coffee buzz, I think of the line in a James Taylor song, “No one can tell me that I’m doing wrong today.”

On a wintry day in 2002, I’m riding in a rusty GMC Jimmy with a struggling stand-up comic I’m profiling for the Chicago Tribune’s Sunday Magazine. We’re headed for a two-night gig at a Holiday Inn in Eau Clair, Wis. I’m inhaling the fumes from his Nicorette gum, asking him how he prepares beef stroganoff on a hot plate, and thinking to myself that my competition is exactly no one, because I’m the only asshole in the world who thinks this is heaven.

In spring of this year, I’m holding my first “speechwriting jam session” at a speechwriters conference in Phoenix. I’m playing great speeches and watching the eyes of the writers in the audience fill, as my own eyes fill, as I remember my dead writer dad, who agreed with all of us that communication and love are the same thing.

What was your best moment at work? Communicate it to us here, and now.

Vital Speeches editor David Murray queries executive communication professionals, speechwriters and other rhetoricians on their needs, and how we might fulfill them. (1 min.)

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But to my rhetorician friends, I see a different question to be asked, about when it actually is OK to tell a fib at the lectern.

Have you ever written a white lie into a speech? Told a personal anecdote that was exaggerated? Used a yarn that was probably apocryphal?

Let’s have some examples, and let’s debate: Was it OK?

Sit back, as I did, and listen to former West Wing speechwriters Vinca LaFleur, Jeff Shesol and John McConnell, and University of Texas’ Roderick P. Hart and University of Pennsylvania’s Kathleen Hall Jamieson.

If you’re in a hurry, Jamieson (as usual) has the most to say, in answer to her own question, “How is it that a person generally seen, particularly by the press, as eloquent during the campaign, is now seen as largely rhetorically unsuccessful ….?” (She picks up at about the 18-minute mark.)

Thanks to LaFleur for sending the link our way.

The entire document is 40,000 words, so I did the math and found that “challenges” makes up almost one percent of the words in these speeches.

A wicked smirk pulling on my cheek, I did a similar search for “opportunities.” Nineteen. So about 1.5% of the words in the best speeches in the world are either “challenge” or “opportunity.”

As for why so many challenges and relatively fewer opportunties? Hey, these are tough times indeed.

But I wonder if I didn’t just stumble into a new measure of overall well-being. Mulling over a monthly Vital Speeches Leadership Confidence Index ….

Today the Dow Jones was is up 100 points on higher-than-expected Leadership Confidence Index figures. Vital Speeches of the Day reports that this month in speeches delivered by public- and private-sector leaders, “challenges” outpaced “opportunities” by only 15 percent, the lowest number since Vital Speeches started keeping records, in 2010 ….

Just good are your best practices? Run them by the longtime speechwriter to G.E. CEO Jack Welch. (2 min.)

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But Don Watson, who wrote the Redfern Park speech—about reconciliation with Australia’s indigenous people—sez the speech itself wasn’t a work of genius. “This was something I had written basically overnight,” he said.

What made the speech matter was Keating’s willingess to give the speech. “There was only one politician who had the courage and conviction to deliver it and that was Paul.”

With the speech’s authorship long established, that seems to me to be just about the right thing for the speechwriter to say.

But Keating was not amused, finding “condescension” in Watson’s remarks and claiming that “The sentiments of the speech, that is, the core of its authority and authorship, were mine.”

And besides, Keating added, Watson shouldn’t be going around blabbing. Doing so violates what he called “the contract of participating in the endeavor and the power in return for anonymity.”

Arguing about who wrote what line in a classic speech, two decades on?

Krikey, mates.

In a Salon.com piece about President Obama vs. “speechwriter Obama,” speechwriter Dan Conley suggests they are.

Speechwriter Obama understands the zeitgeist while President Obama seems a prisoner to it. Speechwriter Obama slyly dropped praise of American atheists into a speech about race and religion. President Obama was forced to react to the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and stumbled. Speechwriter Obama promised that his presidency would be the time when the planet would be healed. President Obama signed on to more offshore drilling shortly before the Gulf oil spill and has stood mute while Russia burns and Pakistan drowns.

Speechwriter Obama was a deep reader of Nietzsche, Freud and Sartre as a student. President Obama barely has time to floss and watch Sportscenter. And it shows.

Speechwriters, is there anything to Conley’s characterization of Obama’s inner speechwriter as his better half? Weigh in here ….

Presentation coach Olivia Mitchell tries to do it in a single blog post titled, “Are you ready for the third era in presenting?”

Bet you didn’t even know you’d missed the second one.

Yep.

According to the New Zealand-based Mitchell, there was the “era of the orator,” whose “heyday” she identifies as “From ancient times to the 1990s.” (This several-thousand-year era she characterizes as one where the speaker, hopelessly self-involved, pays attention to one’s “words … vocal variety … and body language.”)

The era of the orator gave way to “the era of the slide” during the 1990s, which is being overtaken—slide era, we hardly knew ye!—by “the era of the audience,” faceless no longer and demanding “a more participatory role in presentations, just as they do as citizens and consumers.”

Never again will audiences sit still “passively listening to a monologue”; they’ve been empowered by “the development of participatory democracy, consumer activism, mass content creation, the backchannel and the advent of Generation Y.”

And Mitchell’s prediction of how speeches will change to adapt to this fundamental change in human nature, and thus human communication?

Speeches will be shorter.

“Guy Vaynerchuck spoke for 10 minutes in front of an audience of 1,000s at SXSW 2010 and then opened up his keynote presentation to questions.”

I bet 1,000s of people were disappointed. They didn’t come to a conference to watch the keynote speaker field questions from a dozen randomly selected showboaters in the crowd. Sounds to me like Vaynerchuck didn’t have much to say.

One of the beautiful things about oral communication is that it resists technological intervention. Mitchell’s “slide era,” while it’s an occasional improvement to speechmaking, is also a frequent detriment. That’s because the nature and social purpose of this game is and always will be the same:

One member of society screwing up the courage to stand naked before other members of the society and share what he or she believes is true. The act is significant for the same reason it always has been because the audience has the speaker outnumbered and can accept or reject the speech before, during or after its delivery.

The era of the audience is as old as the era of the orator, because there ain’t never been, ain’t never going to be, one without the other.

“Are you ready for the third era in presenting?”

Olivia, we were born ready.

Speechwriting wunderkind Caryn Alagno shares the single most important thing she needed to know to go from scared rookie to star speechwriter. (4 min.)

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