Quotation in Speechwriting
The professional craft of placing borrowed lines inside a speech for authority, relief, or transition.
Speechwriters use quotation for specific structural jobs: to open with borrowed authority, to mark a transition between sections, to give an audience a moment of relief, and to close on a line more memorable than the writer could supply.
Placement follows function. An opening quotation must be short enough to be heard before the audience has settled; a closing one must be sayable in a single breath, since a speaker who has to pause mid-line loses the ending.
Verification is a professional obligation here more than anywhere else. A misattributed line in a delivered speech becomes a news story about the speaker, and cannot be quietly corrected the way a published text can.
Common mistake: quoting someone the audience does not know. In speech there are no footnotes, so an unfamiliar name spends time on introduction that the quotation then has to earn back.
“A closing line short enough to be delivered in one breath, from a source the audience already recognises.”
Keep reading the glossary
A formal public speech — the original setting for many of the most-quoted lines in history.
The graduation-speech line, a genre with its own conventions and its own myths.
A short, vivid extract from a longer speech, designed to be repeated by news media.
Assigning a quote to the wrong person — the most common error in quotation.