This is the essay for lessons 96-100 in the Autobiographies course from the Ronpaul curriculum. In this blog post, I will be telling you what the pros and cons are to including a speech in your autobiography.

Including reconstructed speeches in an autobiography is risky. If you do it correctly then the autobiography will be better, but if you do it poorly it will hurt the autobiography. This riskiness mainly comes from the autobiography’s structure. Let me first explain why the autobiography’s structure is so important.

The autobiography’s structure is important for an autobiography. The structure helps you convey the overarching message of the autobiography to the reader. It also makes you able to focus on smaller points in the autobiography and show the reader when the autobiography was written. Speeches will most likely hurt the structure of the autobiography, if only a little bit.

The reason you would add a speech to your autobiography is that it adds variety and also it gives the reader a better look at the era when the speech took place. The problem is that unless the speech perfectly matches your autobiography, it won’t mesh well with the rest of the autobiography. That’s why you want to reconstruct the speech to fit your autobiography better. However, even the reconstruction has its drawbacks. Reconstructing a speech increases the structure of the autobiography, but it decreases the benefits of including the speech in your autobiography. If you reconstruct the speech too little, then it doesn’t mesh well with the autobiography. If you reconstruct it too much, then you have a speech that doesn’t give the same effect as the original speech and one that doesn’t add any value to the autobiography. It’s a strict balance between structure and originality.

If you are going to put speeches into your autobiography I would recommend that the speeches are your speeches. If it’s your speech then you can give insight into the speech. Although you could also turn the speech into normal sentences. With your speeches, it is also easier to keep the originality of the speech while still making it work with the autobiography’s structure. This is because you know your speech better than anyone else.

So, should you add a reconstructed speech to your autobiography?
Well, it depends on what kind of autobiography you’re making. If you’re making an autobiography with a strict structure then you probably shouldn’t. If you’re making an autobiography with a loose structure then you could add many speeches. Another idea is to base your autobiographies structure off the speeches that you’re going to include. If you’re planning to add many speeches then you should have a loose structure and vice versa. This method is mainly useful when you want to include a highly important speech, but want to keep it as original as possible. What you can do is make the autobiography have a structure that compliments the speech.