DOLE METICULOUSLY PREPARES HIS SPEECH.

Byline: Katharine Q. Seelye The New York Times

Bob Dole signed off on his acceptance speech Wednesday afternoon after almost four months of editing and redrafting and a last-minute scramble for a new ending.

Mark Helprin, the novelist who wrote Dole's well-received Senate resignation speech May 14, handed Dole the first draft of the speech April 22, before he wrote the resignation speech.

Helprin now has left San Diego - and left Dole to his last practice session with a TelePrompTer in his hotel room, where the former Senate majority leader has been rehearsing primarily with his TelePrompTer technician, Pete Bonnefond.

Aides call Dole's speech the most important of his life. It covers three broad areas - economics, morals and defense of the nation - as an attempt to define the candidate in a positive way to a guaranteed national audience that seems willing to take a second look.

``It is a broadly thematic speech that does not follow the laundry-list contours of many of these speeches in previous conventions,'' said John Buckley, Dole's communications director who has been steeped in the editing ever since Dole received it in April. The speech showcases the candidate's values ``even as he defines what his presidency would accomplish,'' he said.

The last time Dole officially faced the nation for a formal speech was in January, when he gave the Republican response to President Clinton's State of the Union message. And he bombed.

Ensconced then in his Senate majority leader's office, Dole was stilted, his delivery uninspired, the lighting awful. The speech did not sound like him.

Dole has traveled light-years from that frigid night when even his friends blanched at how poorly he came across and worried openly about how he would fare in any verbal venue, particularly in debates against the more polished President Clinton.

Perhaps the most important lesson he has learned is that for a big speech, he can't just wing it, as has been his custom.

Dole received a first draft of today's acceptance speech from Helprin as Helprin was secretly writing his speech of resignation from the Senate. The final draft is similar in structure and tone to the original, but Dole has been making it his own, winnowing it down from its original 45 minutes to suit Dole's sparer style.

``Bob Dole has an aversion to 50-cent words, and he will always take a rolling pin to pretense,'' Buckley said.

Dole has spent about 15 hours editing the words, primarily with Helprin and Buckley. In the past week, Buckley said, he and Dole ``worked through the speech very aggressively, with him questioning every comma, phrase and clause.''

The only crisis in the process came Tuesday when Dole decided he still did not have the right ending, and he called in two of his longtime Senate speech writers, Kerry Tymchuck and Richard Norton Smith, who wrote Dole's eulogy for Richard M. Nixon. They rewrote the final four paragraphs.

Dole has been practicing the speech out loud since late July under the direction of Jack Hilton, the speech coach who has been guiding Dole's delivery since the primaries. Buckley said that for much of the past week, Dole's ``primary partnership'' was with Bonnefond, the TelePrompTer technician, and that the two had rehearsed at a house in the La Jolla section owned by a friend of Dole's to get away from the hubbub of the convention.

Paul Begala, the chief speech writer for Bill Clinton's 1992 acceptance speech, said one of the difficulties in writing this sort of speech was that so many other people want to insert something, leaving the candidate with ``a kitchen-sink amalgam of attempts to placate a variety of friends.'' Begala said he failed Clinton by not being able to say no to many of these requests.

Buckley said Dole had sought to minimize this problem by presenting near-final versions to no more than 10 people.

Still, other problems present themselves. For Dole, defining himself may not be a simple matter. His record in support of moderate causes combined with a more conservative campaign - highlighted recently by his capitulation to the religious right on abortion - has left a blurred impression of what he stands for and where he would take the country.

Dole's thematic dilemma, said Ted Sorensen, who wrote many of John F. Kennedy's speeches, including his New Frontier speech, is to meld these two images.

``He must rouse the partisan audience in the hall,'' said Sorensen, the author most recently of ``Why I Am a Democrat.'' ``Without applause and cheers, the speech will go over dead. But at the same time, he has to appeal to the much broader, cooler, more moderate audience watching on national TV.''