Archive for the ‘speech writing’ Category

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Speakers Know That To Be Understand, You Need To Use Analogies

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
Image Credit An analogy is like a model – just a different way of talking about something

An analogy is like a model – just a different way of talking about something

I don’t know about you, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in a situation in which I needed to share some information with my audience that was too big, or too strange for them to be able to grasp it. What’s a speaker to do? I knew that if I just told them the fact or statistic that I had, there was no way that they would remember what I had said. I needed a better way – isn’t there some collection of presentation tips that would help in this situation? It turns out that there is a better way – use an analogy.

What Is An Analogy?

Sure we’ve all heard about analogies, but what are they really? It turns out that an analogy is a process by which meaning is transferred from one subject to another subject. This might sound complicated, but good news – it’s not!

It turns out that the human mind is actually very good at both understanding and remembering things like pictures and symbols. However, at the same time, we’re not all that good at remembering words or numbers. Considering the importance of public speaking, we need to find a solution to this problem.

What this means for you as a speaker is that when you are giving a speech, all of those words that you are saying are more than likely not going to stick in your audience’s mind no matter how good their listening skills are. This problem becomes an even bigger deal when your speech contains new ideas that your audience has not encountered before or you introduce very large numbers that your audience will have difficulty grasping.

It should be pretty clear that we speakers can’t just throw our new ideas or big numbers out there and hope that our audience will write them down and remember them forever. Instead, since we now know that analogies are the way to go, it sure looks like we need to find a way to work analogies into our next speech.

How To Use Analogies To Make Your Point

Some of the best speakers out there use a lot of analogies when they give a speech. What happens when they do this is that their audiences “get” what they are saying and everyone leaves the speech with a head full of images that will stay with them long after the speech is over.

You need to start to use analogies when you give your next speech. By doing so you will be able to communicate your concepts in less time and create both a better understanding and a longer retention of what you said.

One of the classic areas that we see analogies being used all the time is when it comes to trying to communicate to an audience how large a computer storage system is. It turns out that the complete printed works of Shakespeare would occupy 5 megabytes and the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress would occupy 10 terabytes of computer storage.

If we needed to create analogies to show how large these analytical sizes are, then we could tell our audience that the complete printed works of Shakespeare could be stored in about 0.036 inches of shelf space. The 10 terabytes that the U.S. Library of Congress would require to store would take up 10,000 yards of shelf space.

What All Of This Means To You

The role of any speaker is to communicate new ideas and information to your audience. Often this requires us to share a fact or statistic that is so hard to imagine, our audience is not going to be able to grasp it.

It’s our job as public speakers to find a way to connect with our audience — this is one of the benefits of public speaking. This means that we need to make sure that they’ll remember what we say. In order to get complicated ideas to stick with our audience, we can use analogies that allow us to transform complex concepts into memorable pictures that our audience will be able to remember for a long time after we’re done speaking.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it’s possible to use too many analogies in a speech? How many should you limit yourself to in a 30 minute speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m sure that you’ve heard this before, but your audience is sizing you up once they lay eyes on you. Sure, we hope that they have good listening skills, but this may not matter. You’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds or so to make a good first impression. It’s not just what you say, but even more importantly it’s what your body is saying to your audience that is going determine what they think about your speech. Sure seems like we should figure out what your body is telling them…

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Learn To Write Better Speeches In 5 Simple Steps

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012
Image CreditUse these tips to get your ideas across to your audience

Use these tips to get your ideas across to your audience

You’ve just had the best idea that you’ve ever had for a great speech. You can see it in your mind’s eye so very, very clearly. Now if only you could write a speech that would allow you to get this idea across to your audience as clearly as you see it. Hmm, perhaps there is a way. I’ve got 5 speech writing tips for you that just might help you turn your idea into your audience’s idea…

Don’t Change The Way That You Speak

When we go to write a speech, we often change both the vocabulary and the tone of the words that we use. We start to write to impress, instead of focusing on trying to inform our audience. The next time you write a speech you need to be careful to not do this – no matter how good your audience’s listening skills are, they won’t be able to pay attention to what you are saying if you use the wrong words.

Instead, try to use the words that you normally use in conversation and make the flow of your words match the way that you normally talk. Doing this will make your speech sound more natural to your audience and it will be that much easier for you to read it.

Use Understandable Words

More important than any presentation tips that you use, your ability to connect with your audience is going to be based on the words that you use in your speech. Since you have a limited amount of time to both give your speech and to keep your audience’s attention, make every word count.

When you are writing your speech use precise words. Back up the statements that you make with concrete data. Doing this will make it easy for your audience to understand and to accept the points that you make.

Build On Your Audience’s Experiences

The audience that sits before you during a speech probably shares something in common – that’s why they are there. Take the time while you are writing to picture your audience and ask yourself what it is that ties them together.

Once you know what this is, work it into your speech. Use their shared experiences as a building block for the points that you are going to be making. Doing this helps them to more easily accept what you are saying.

Variety Is Your Friend

The importance of public speaking is something that we all take for granted – it’s important and so that’s why we’re doing it. This also means that the one thing that your audience doesn’t want to be is bored. Take the time to make your sentences different from each other. This means that you need to make your sentences different lengths, and they need to use different structures.

The one thing that you need to be very careful about is introducing too much variety when it comes to the words that you use. If you make your audience have to think about what a word means, then they’ll spend their time doing that and not paying attention the message that you are trying to get across to them.

Write An Invisible Speech

Finally, the best kind of speech is the one that your audience can’t even see. If you do a good job of writing your speech, then your audience won’t be able to remember that they are listening to a prepared speech, they’ll just think that you are up there talking to them.

The key to doing this well is to go light on the number of facts that you include in your speech. Too many facts and you’ll end up reminding your audience that you are reading a speech to them. Just enough facts and they’ll accept you as an expert in the area that you are talking about!

What All Of This Means For You

Speakers who want to connect with their audience need to write speeches that will clearly communicate the points that they want to make – this is one of the benefits of public speaking. In order to make this happen, the next time you write a speech you need to use the 5 tips that we discussed here.

These include writing the way that you speak, you should use precise terms, you should build on the experiences that your audience has had, make use of variety, and write in a way that your speech doesn’t get in the way of your message.

Take the time to use these suggestions the next time that you are writing a speech and you’ll create a masterpiece that allows you to truly connect with your audience and change their lives.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to test a speech that you’ve written to see if it will really work with your audience before you give it?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So how hip and cool are you? If you are both hip and cool, then I don’t even have to tell you what “Pecha Kucha” is because you already know. If, however, you are like the rest of us, then you might be scratching your head right about now and saying something like “I’ve never heard of it and, by the way, how do you even pronounce that?” I’ll answer your questions in reverse order. It’s pronounced “Paw-Chalk-Ahh-Cha”. Now what it is will take just a bit longer to explain…

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5 Secrets To Writing A Better Speech

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
Image Credit Before you can give a great speech, you have to write it

Before you can give a great speech, you have to write it

We’d all like to be seen as being great speakers. We imagine ourselves as the next Tony Robbins, standing in the middle of a huge stage with a large audience hanging on our every word. I fully support your dream, but perhaps we need to have a talk about how you are going to go about achieving it. Before you can give a great speech, you are going to have to learn how to write a great speech.

Keep It Short!

The first rule that you’re going to have to both learn and live will be to change how you write your sentences. How long should you be making your sentences? Speech writing author Philip Yaffee suggests that you shoot for sentences that are between 15-18 words. He points out that some of your sentences can be longer than this, but on average this is the size that works best for audience retention.

Keep It Simple

When you are choosing the words that you are going to use in your speech, make sure that that “word of the day” desk calendar is nowhere that you can see it. You don’t want your audience to have to work to understand what you are saying. Instead, you want your words to be immediately understood and your ideas absorbed.

Keep It Familiar

This one is pretty simple – don’t go getting all fancy with your speech just because you can. Yeah, yeah – they’ll know what the word means, but it’s going to come out of you sounding funny – they’ll be wondering what boarding school you went to.

Keep It Lean

When we are writing speeches all too often we get into a mode where we stop writing to be heard and start writing to be read. Nobody is ever going to read your speech so don’t do this. Trim out all of the fat – drop any word that is not absolutely necessary.

Keep It Active

When you are giving a speech, you want to be able to reach out to your audience and motivate them to come around to your way of thinking. If this is going to happen, your words are going to have to motivate them to make a change. This means that you’re going to have to use a lot of verbs – this is going to make your message very, very clear.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to become a great speaker, you are first going to have to learn how to write a great speech. The good news is that this is something that any of us can learn to do if only we follow the rules.

When writing your next speech make sure that you write your speech to be heard, not read. This means that you’re going to have use short sentences, keep it simple, keep it familiar, cut out the fat, and make sure that you use a lot of verbs.

It’s not that hard to write a speech that will create results. Follow these five rules and you’ll be well on your way to writing speeches that people really want to remember long after you are done.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to find out what words can be eliminated from the speech that you just wrote?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You’ve just had the best idea that you’ve ever had for a great speech. You can see it in your mind’s eye so very, very clearly. Now if only you could write a speech that would allow you to get this idea across to your audience as clearly as you see it. Hmm, perhaps there is a way. I’ve got 5 speech writing tips for you that just might help you turn your idea into your audience’s idea…

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Posted in speech writing | 2 Comments »

3 Secrets To Writing A Really Great Speech

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
Image Credit Writing a great speech is the first step in delivering a great speech

Writing a great speech is the first step in delivering a great speech

When it’s really important that a speech that you’re giving make an impact on your audience, then it’s going to be really important that you do a good job of writing the speech. Hmm, so I’m sure that you can write a speech, but do you know how to write a great speech? It turns out that there are three characteristics that every great speech has (that are even more important than presentation tips!)

Clarity

As we write our speech, we can get caught up in what we believe to be the importance of public speaking and end up trying to use flowery words and fancy descriptions in an effort to “wow” our audience. Author Philip Yaffe reminds us that we need to resist the urge to do this – focus on maximizing your speech’s clarity.

You need to do some planning before you start to write your speech. What you need to identify is what your key points are. You’ve probably heard this before, but it can’t hurt for you to hear it again. You need to start at the end and identify what points you want your audience to walk away from your speech with.

Just as important as it is to take the time to figure out what you want to share with your audience, it is just as important to determine what you don’t want to burden your audience with. Too much of the wrong things can leave your audience confused about what the purpose of your speech was.

Conciseness

One of the main problems that every speaker has is with time. How long should you speak? Your goal when giving a speech is to (sorry for the dated reference) is to make it like a lady’s skirt – long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep interest.

The key will be to write your speech out then have the courage to come back and do some cutting. Your goal should be to remove everything that doesn’t have to be in the speech. If you do this well, then what remains should be just the bare essence of what you want to tell you audience – and that’s perfect.

Density

Although none of us really like to think about our speeches as being “dense”, Yaffee makes the point that what’s important is how you describe things within your speech.

What you want to do is to be very precise – you want to choose your words so that each word conveys the maximum amount of information. You don’t want to have to make your audience have to practice their listening skills. Not only do your words need to be precise but they also need to be linked together – one idea needs to lead to the next. Doing this well will allow you audience to follow along with your speech and arrive at the conclusion that you want them to get to.

What This All Means For You

Knowing how to write a speech is good skill to have. Knowing how to write a great speech is a skill that we should all be working to have. It turns out that all great speeches have three characteristics in common: clarity, conciseness, and density.

Great speeches are clear and easy for your audience to understand. One of the benefits of public speaking is that you can make this happen by ensuring that you emphasize what’s important and stay away from what’s not. You need to make sure that your speech is long enough to cover the points that you want to make, but no longer. And finally, you need to make sure that within your speech you use precise information and don’t make your audience struggle to understand what your point is.

It is possible to write a great speech. The key is to be able to combine the three key ingredients, clarity, conciseness, and density in a way that will allow your audience to understand and connect with your message.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What’s the best way to make sure that the speech that you’ve written is long enough, but not too long?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Posted in speech writing | 2 Comments »

What Transformers 3 Taught Me About Giving Speeches

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Image Credit
Speakers need to find ways to Transform their speeches

Speakers need to find ways to Transform their speeches

A little while back I went out to the movie theater and saw the movie “Transformers 3: Dark Of The Moon”. If you are hoping for a movie review, I’m afraid that I’m going to end up disappointing you. However, it turns out that this movie has a lot of lessons for speakers if you know where to look for them…

What You Can Learn From A Bad Movie

Transformers 3 is not going to win any awards for being a good movie. It’s actually pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, it’s going to end up making a ton of money for the folks associated with it, but when the summer is over, this movie is going to be quickly forgotten.

Why do I say this? The #1 thing that is wrong with this movie is that its plot is just so bad. While you are watching a movie you want to be swept away by the movie. For that brief period of time that you are sitting in the darkened movie theater, you want the cares and concerns of your everyday life to go away while you become one with the movie. While I was watching Transformers 3, this did not happen!

The reason that I’m making this point is that as speakers, we know the importance of public speaking and this means that there is a need to be able to allow our audiences to get swept away by our speech. We need to find ways to allow them to leave their normal lives and become one with our speech. Perhaps we can learn from the train-wreck of a movie that Transformers 3 is.

Here’s one of the key points that throws the audience off track right off the bat. A key character in the first two movies, the hero’s girlfriend, isn’t in this movie (she got fired by the producer). Considering the key role that she played in the first two movies, this is an issue that needs to be dealt with. However, the movie just says that “it didn’t work out” and moves on. Not good enough for the audience – we want to know WHY it didn’t work out. We were invested in that character.

In the previous two movies the hero’s parents played a role as people that things happened to – comedy relief. Ok, I can live with that. In this movie the hero’s parents show up and appear to be poised to once again play a role. However, poof – all of a sudden they are gone, not to show up again. The audience is left confused – why where they there in the first place if they didn’t play a role in the movie’s plot?

Finally, things happen in the movie for no reason. As our hero hides in a building all of a sudden the bad guys start to attack that building for no reason. Yes, it puts the hero in peril, but there is no reason for this to happen except it allows a lot of nice special effects to be shown.

In the end, the audience is left feeling confused. When we give speeches we need to make sure that the plot of our speech holds together. The main point of our speech needs to be there in everything that we say – all of our stories, all of our main points. We can’t introduce topics that have nothing to do with our main point. Finally, everything that we say needs to move our audience closer to our closing – there should be no unexplained parts of our speech.

Why Is This Movie So Popular?

This movie is a stinky movie. However, it’s going to make a lot of money. This bring up an interesting point for speakers: if it’s so bad, why is it going to make so much money?

Frist off, the director used his listening skills to understand what his audience wanted and he got one thing right: the movie has a lot of action. Almost from the get go things move at a break-neck speed. Even though the plot has holes in it that are so big that you could drive an 18-wheeler though, since you are moving so fast you tend to notice this less.

Next, the movie’s hero spends most of his time on the big screen in life-threating situations. You are constantly wondering how he is going to get out of his current predicament. You know that he will, it’s just that you don’t know HOW he will and so you are forced to keep on watching.

Oh yeah, there is that romance thing where its hero gets the girl, hero loses the girl, hero gets the girl. We all like a good love story and so we need to know how they get back together so we must keep watching.

Finally, in all such movies we all know that the good guys will eventually win. We just don’t know how they are going to do it. Therefore we’ll stay until the end of the movie in order to find out.

This is all standard movie stuff. We watch because we get hooked on some part of the story and we want to see how it is going to turn out. As speakers we need to realize that we can do the same thing. This type of control is a bigger deal that just using a few presentation tips. One of the benefits of public speaking is that you control the flow of your speech. In your opening you need to present your audience with a problem or a challenge that you keep coming back to during the speech. Finally, during your closing you need to wrap it up – how can the challenge be overcome?

What All Of This Means For You

So in the end, let’s be honest here. Transformers 3 was a pretty lousy movie. I’m not really sure what I expected, the previous two were not all that good, but this one was by far the worst. It wasn’t the acting that was so bad (but it was pretty bad), but rather the plot.

It turns out that plot really does matter for a movie. Likewise, when you are giving a speech the plot of your speech matters also. There has to be a reason for you to give the speech and that has to form the basis of its plot. You can’t just introduce new characters into stories. You have to tell your audience what happens to the people that you talk about. Additionally, if you choose to include something in your speech there had better be a good reason for it.

A bad movie can still end up making money if it has stars or if it has the latest and greatest technical effects. Your next speech is going to have a much smaller budget than even the cheapest movie. That means that you’re going to have to make sure that the plot of your speech keeps your audience’s attention. Take the time to do this well and you’ll have found a way to transform your next speech!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that your next speech would be more successful if you have a happy ending?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.
P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
 
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Posted in speech writing | No Comments »

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