I personally do not think that reconstructed speeches belong in an autobiography. Reconstructed speeches bore me in autobiographies, and I don’t think they belong there. Today I’m going to talk about some better techniques for conveying the same topics in an autobiography that you discussed in a speech.
Autobiographies are much more broad than an individual speech. I feel like an autobiography is almost jolting when you go from a (fairly) fast paced run through your life, to a crawl that lasted you a few hours, and then back up to that pace. I feel like it is boring and doesn’t communicate the topics of the speech in an appropriate manner.
These speeches can be approached in a much better way if you’re putting them in an autobiography. All you have to do is simply summarize, rather than copying the speech verbatim. Take Booker T. Washington’s book for example; He reconstructs a speech he made to the people in Atlanta about the future of black people in our society. He repeats the speech verbatim, and it feels long and drawn out. Instead, he could have taken the bullet points he used to create the speech, and written it into a page in his autobiography instead.
In conclusion, I think that speeches have no place in biographies. They are boring, and there are better alternatives, like summarizing the speech to make it suitable for readers instead of listeners.