As Yogi Berra once said, if you don’t know where you are going, chances are you won’t get there. One of the ways to determine where exactly you want to get with a speech is to work backwards, from the results you want to achieve. It sometimes helps to ask yourself (or more likely, ask the person who will be giving the speech) if a reporter were writing a news story about the speech, what would you want the lead to be about? What would you want the news headline to say? (It sometimes helps to write two or three alternative headlines to drive the decision-making process.)

Concentrating on the specific results you want is the first step to writing a speech that will get the message across.

Names: Think of the New Deal, the Iron Curtain, the Evil Empire.  By giving your idea or initiative a name, you give people something to remember.

Images and Metaphors:  Look at those names again.  ”New Deal” and “Iron Curtain” each incorporated an image and metaphor into the name.  People are more likely to remember words the conjure a vision in their imaginations than an abstraction.

Popular Culture:  ”Evil Empire” was a reference to Star Wars, which had recently been released at the time Ronald Reagan slapped the name on the Soviet Union.  People are also more likely to remember references to popular culture if only because they know popular culture so well.

There is nothing magical about crafting language that is memorable.  The trick is having ideas and arguments that are worth remembering.