“Jon Meacham, the presidential historian and biographer, has been helping to craft President-elect Joe Biden’s speeches, including writing the acceptance speech that Mr. Biden that he delivered Saturday night from Wilmington,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Meacham is currently not expected to join the administration. But his role crafting Mr. Biden’s biggest addresses has shades of the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s relationship with President John F. Kennedy. Mr. Schlesinger had gone to work for Mr. Kennedy’s campaign and as a member of his White House staff.”

A must-read: 101 Ways to Open a Speech: How to Hook Your Audience From the Start With an Engaging and Effective Beginning by Brad Phillips.

President Obama smoothly dealt with a heckler at a speech in Israel today.

[Read more…]

The Guardian uses the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to track the reading level of every State of the Union address.

Jon Favreau is ending a seven-year stint as Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Favreau is considering “trying his hand at another form of drama — as a screenwriter, perhaps in Los Angeles. The departure subtracts a vivid personality from the president’s operation, defined since the beginning by Obama’s spoken words and the team that wrote them.”

David Brooks looks at James Pennebaker’s new book, The Secret Life of Pronouns — which studies how people use words like “I,” “me,” and “mine” — and concludes that “when people are feeling confident, they are focused on the task at hand, not on themselves. High status, confident people use fewer ‘I’ words, not more.”

“Pennebaker analyzed the Nixon tapes. Nixon used few ‘I’ words early in his presidency, but used many more after the Watergate scandal ravaged his self-confidence. Rudy Giuliani used few ‘I’ words through his mayoralty, but used many more later, during the two weeks when his cancer was diagnosed and his marriage dissolved. Barack Obama, a self-confident person, uses fewer ‘I’ words than any other modern president.”