MLK Showed Us How To Craft A Great Presentation

This week, America observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Dr. King was many things — an advocate for peaceful civil disobedience, an agent of change, an educator, an inspirational speaker. He was also a great speech writer.

In the agency business, we craft speeches and presentations for in-house use, new business efforts, and for those clients who commission us to apply our expertise on their behalf.

There’s a lot we can learn from Dr. King’s approach to speech writing.

Recently, Catherine Carr, Vice President of Marketing and Chief Inspiration Officer at Seattle, Washington’s Haiku Deck, dissected the structure of Dr. King’s remarkable  “I Have A Dream” speech in an article for Fast Company. She did a great job of spotlighting several techniques used by Dr. King that those of us in the communications business could apply to our work.

We thought her insights were so valuable that we just had to share.