SO YOU WANNA DELIVER AN EFFECTIVE SPEECH?

ENGLISH STUDENTS

Ways to convey your message

 

The whole point of giving a speech is not just to make it through all your index cards, but to also communicate something to your audience. Consider these suggestions to help you out:

• Treat the audience as a single entity. One trick of the trade is to pretend that the audience is just one person. When there’s only one person that you have to worry about, you feel more of a personal connection to him/her. Your speech will take back seat to the fact that you want the person who’s listening to you to really understand what you’re saying. So imagine that you’re delivering your presentation to a fat, multi-headed creature.
• Make eye contact. Nothing makes an audience more alert than a speaker who can stare down a crowd. Making eye contact means making a connection, and that is your number one goal. So let your eyes wander up from your notes as often and naturally as possible (this will get easier with practice).
• Consider letting the audience participate. It’s not applicable to all speeches, but letting members of the audience participate during your presentation will warm up a crowd. It’ll encourage them to pay attention, thus making you easier to understand. Participation can range anywhere from asking for a show of hands to dividing the group into little clusters and giving each cluster a task. However, you should never call on someone who is not prepared to answer, nor should you ever embarrass anybody (even if they deserve it).

2. ORGANIZE YOUR SPEECH Writing a strong speech is so complicated, that we could write an entire SYW about it. First off, you need to organize your speech properly. Most speeches have three main components: The introduction The body The closingThe introductionThis is possibly the most important part of your speech, because you want to grab your audience’s attention from the start. So come up with something clever, shocking, or interesting right at the very beginning. Here are some possible techniques to use:

• Be dramatic. Say something like, “I’m about to reveal a plan that will drastically alter the face of humanity as we know it!” when your presentation is really about a new brand of facial soap.
• Tell a joke. Getting people to laugh will loosen them up and make them feel inclined to like you and hear what you have to say. Don’t try this if your jokes are usually met by silence or groans. Test your opening out first on your most brutally honest of friends.
• Tell a story. This will make the audience see you as a person instead of a boring public speaker, thus giving you an air of accessibility. Two things to keep in mind about opening your speech with your story: keep it short (under a minute) and keep it relevant to the rest of your presentation. The point of the story is to lead the audience into your speech, so if your anecdote ends with your dog saving the day, and your speech is about bank mergers, you might have a hard time segueing from the your intro into the rest of the speech. Unless that story serves as a kick-ass analogy.
• Pose a question. Asking the audience for their input will make them feel involved, even if you’re going to answer your own question.

The bodyThis is your speech. Everything you want to say should come out here, in an organized, untrivialized fashion. Here are some possible techniques:

• Use a formal outline. You can prepare for writing the content of your speech by outlining your major points with those fun Roman numerals. Most good speeches have two or three main points, each of which has a couple of sub-points or examples. Formally outlining your speech will make sure that your logical flow makes sense and that your audience doesn’t get lost. It will also help you figure our where the holes in your speech are, in case you have to do some last minute extra research.
• Mind-map. A technique developed by a British brain researcher in the 1970s, mind-mapping is a less stiff version of writing up an outline. Instead of making a list, you write the main topic of your speech in the center of a piece of paper, and draw branches extending from it that highlight your key points. Then draw more branches from the key points to elaborate on the sub-points. The good thing about mind maps is that they don’t confine you to listing your ideas in any particular order; you can just use your creative juices and let the ideas flow. Then once you’ve mind-mapped, you can create a more formal outline.

However you create your body, the key point is that you are ORGANIZED. The audience must be able to follow your thoughts.The closingThe way you end a speech is almost as important as the way you begin it. The audience will be most restless at the end, and you have to find a way to tie everything together so that they don’t walk away remembering how badly they were fidgeting. So sum everything up for them in approximately a few concise sentences and leave ‘em with a witty line. If appropriate, you should also ask for questions. This doesn’t mean saying, “Any- questions?-No?-I-didn’t-think-so,” and then running away. Instead, after you ask for questions, give the audience at least 10 seconds to respond. If there are questions, keep each response short (under a minute), and never take a guess at an answer. If you don’t know how to respond to something, take down the questioner’s e-mail or phone number, and tell the person you’ll get back to him/her soon. Or you could just say, “Honestly, I don’t know,” and leave it at that.