1) What does it all mean?
The title of this year’s conference is ‘Speechwriting in a New Era’.
The job of a speechwriter is to gather facts, policies and ideas to craft sentences linked with the phrase, ‘which means that’.
The question for all of is: Donald Trump has won an emphatic re-election by the American public. Which means that…
Our resident Trump expert, Kevin Toolis, will be analysing the extraordinary impact of the Orange Overlord.
2) To Remember Dr Max Atkinson
Since its inception, our group has been inspired by the studies of political oratory made by Dr Max Atkinson.
Max died in the summer.
His obituarists said that the age of political oratory was over.
Pardon me?
Donald Trump has just broken the mould of the most powerful country on earth through, err, um, through political oratory.
3) The World is Created Through Speech
The rhetorical tradition is the solder that has built European democratic institutions and alliances.
Let’s face a painful truth. They’re disintegrating.
Science isn’t going to help. AI isn’t going to help.
Only persuasive speech will make it possible to create a compelling narrative to bind us together to face the future.
Can we find a new vision for peace and prosperity?
4) Sample Pre-Modernity
The crude assumptions of self-serving corporations that technology is going to make creative writers superfluous is not shared by speechwriters.
The modern workplace is uniform, intolerant, repressive, hierarchical, technocratic and soulless.
Is that sustainable?
What’s going to happen when the power goes off?
Oxford symbolises the enduring power of beauty, heritage, tradition, culture, fellowship, worship and humanistic scholarship.
Experience what we’ve lost, and what we need to find again.
5) Enjoy Non-Digitally-Intermediated Intimate Social Intercourse
Speechwriters need to get out of the office. In Oxford you’ll meet colleagues from a variety of backgrounds in workshops, over meals and in the pub.
Some of our clients are suffering from the delusion that they enjoy broad support and they are doing good.
Meanwhile electorates are voting against them for reasons they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge.
Paul of Tarsus had a dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. Prepare for something similar on the Megabus from Oxford to Heathrow Airport.
6) Stay in a Comfortable Ensuite Room
In previous years, delegates have stayed in Harry Potter Rooms which required ghoulish visits to the toilet in the middle of the night.
All our rooms in Exeter College are ensuite and sited in the same building as the conference rooms.
7) Put Poetry back into Politics
Albert Camus said, the hardest things to give up are the things we don’t want anyway.
Who wants to live in an atomised, lonely Western society, enslaved to economic determinism? That’s what we’ve got through globalisation.
Isn’t it time to break with the past and find the words to usher in new institutions for a new century?
Join us from 26-28 March at Exeter College, Oxford. For full details click here