A shortcut to story structure: ‘And, but, therefore’ offers a speechwriting roadmap
Douglass Hatcher, a speechwriting guru with experience at Mastercard and on Capitol Hill, shows how a good speech relies on structure to deliver an unwavering message.
When it comes to speechwriting, storytelling structure is everything.
“The one thing every good speech has got to have is story structure,” says Douglass Hatcher, founder of Communicate4impact and a former vice president of executive communications for Mastercard. He made his case for structure—and offered some shortcuts to help writers find the essential elements of their speech quickly—in his presentation for Ragan’s Speechwriting and Public Affairs Virtual Conference on March 4.
To support his argument about making a speech a story, he offered the scientific research of the psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel from 1944. The researchers showed students an animation of geometric shapes moving across the screen and asked the students to describe what they saw.
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