Archive for the ‘speech writing’ Category

« Older Entries

Get It Done: Thinking On Your Feet And Building A Speech Real Quick

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
Image Credit
Speakers Need To Know How To Quickly Create A Speech

Speakers Need To Know How To Quickly Create A Speech

If I asked you to give a speech, how much time would you need to get ready to give the speech (including writing it)? Could you do it if I gave you half as much time? How about if I gave you 5 minutes? We don’t always control the situations in which we are asked to give a speech, knowing how to prepare one in just a few minutes is a key speaker skill…

Just Where Do You Start?

I guess the best place to start our discussion about what to do when you are put on the spot and asked to deliver a speech RIGHT NOW, is at the beginning. It’s pretty clear that if somebody is asking you to give a speech all of sudden, then they can’t be too picky about what you’ll talk about.

This is where you get some latitude. In order to pull off this quick speech creation thing, you’re going to have to pick a topic to speak about that you already both know and love. I’m hoping that it’s clear to you that you still need to keep your audience in mind, but because of the short amount of time that you have, this is the one time that you get to start with yourself first.

Since it is so critical that you already know your topic well, pick what you want to speak about and then spend a moment or two trying to think about how you can make this subject appeal to your audience. For example, if what you know really well is how to schedule family vacations and you’re going to be talking to a group of mothers, then focusing on the logistics of what to pack and keeping the family happy during the trip will generally be what you need to focus on in order to make your story appeal to them.

It’s All In The Details

Although you won’t have a lot of time to create your on-the-spot speech, it still needs to be interesting. A lack of time to prepare a speech is not a license to be boring. It’s time to whip out a piece of paper, you’ve got some writing to do.

What you need to write down is a list of things that you will want to cover in your speech. This is an important list because it holds the key to making your speech interesting to your audience. Write down the sequence of items that you want to cover, then take a second look at it.

The key here will be to make sure that the material that you will be covering flows. It needs to start some place and then build up to a natural conclusion. If you aren’t careful, then due to your limited time it will just be a jumbled collection of pieces of information. Use just a bit of your limited time to sort and rearrange your discussion points so that they present a complete story.

Houston, We Have Lift-Off

With picking a topic and creating a list of items to discuss, you will have used up a sizable chunk of the limited time that you have before you’ll be on the stage. What to do with the few remaining minutes that you have left? Simple: rehearse.

As we all know, the first few words out of your mouth during any speech are the most important – this is how the audience makes their decision whether or not to bother listening to you. You’ve got to mentally practice what you are going to say. Try out different phrases and word orders until you come up with something that works best for you.

What All Of This Means For You

Sorry, you don’t run the world just yet. This means that no matter how good of a planner you are, there will be times in which you get surprised by a request to give a speech with little or no time for you to prepare what you are going to say.

See this challenge as an opportunity to grow your speaking skills. Pick a topic to speak on that you already know well. Shape it to meet the interests of your audience. Make sure that you take a moment or two to rehearse what you are going to say in your head so that your first words will resonate with your audience.

In the end, if you believe in yourself and your ability to deliver a great speech, you will do just fine. In fact, who knows, maybe you are one of those speakers who gives the best speech of their life when they have had the least amount of time to prepare for it!

If you had 5 minutes to prepare a speech, what would you spend the most time doing?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So here’s a quiz for you: who has been the best speaker in the past 100 years? Not an easy question to answer, eh? Even those of us who don’t spend a lot of time studying history can come up with an impressive list of names. What made them so good and can we become as good as they were?

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in speech writing | No Comments »

How To Appeal To Your Audience: Greek Lessons

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Aristotle Knew A Thing Or Two About Appealing To Audiences<br> (C) - Michael Schmalenstroer

Aristotle Knew A Thing Or Two About Appealing To Audiences (C) - Michael Schmalenstroer

If you are going to go to the effort of creating and delivering a speech, doesn’t it make sense that you’d want to be able to reach your audience and somehow appeal to them? No matter if you are trying to persuade them or educate them, ultimately the goal is find a way to successfully appeal to them. Good news – how to do this has been known for the past 2,500 years!

Aristotle Knew Everything

Robert Oliver has been doing some research and he’s discovered that most of what we are trying to accomplish in our speeches today is exactly what the ancient Greeks were trying to do oh so long ago.

You’ve got to remember that there for awhile the Greeks were at the height of their civilization – they had invented democracy and really had nothing else to do but sit around and give speeches. This meant that they got interested in what made a speech appeal to an audience (and what didn’t).

Having listened to a countless number of speeches,  Aristotle came to the realization that there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” speech. Instead, if you want to appeal to a given audience, you’re going to have to pick the type of speech that will work for that audience. Thankfully, Aristotle went one step further and discovered the three different types of speeches that worked best for appealing to your audience: logical, pathetic, and ethical.

  • The Logical appeal is an appeal to reason that you use to convince your audience that your argument is correct.
  • The Pathetic appeal is an appeal that works on the emotions of the judges themselves.
  • The Ethical appeal involves playing on the audience’s sense of admiration for you.

How To Arrange A Speech To Maximize Your Appeal

Just picking the correct type of speech to use in order to appeal to your audience isn’t enough. You’ve got to take it one step further. It turns out that how you arrange your speech will have a big impact on your ability to reach and convince your audience.

Once again Aristotle found that there were three basic ways to arrange your speech. Each one was a powerful tool – you just had to pick which would work best with your speech and your audience. Aristotle’s suggestions for the three ways to arrange a speech in order to win your audience over are:

  • The Narrative: this is the story format that all of us Accidental Communicators know and love. It doesn’t always have to be a “Once upon a time…” story, rather it can take the form of a parable, an anecdote, a story that is well known to your audience, or even a personal story.
  • Linear Argument: this is the classic courtroom drama style where the facts are laid out from start to finish where a final conclusion is reached. One point to remember here is that the if you are going to use this arrangement style, then just like a jury your audience is going to have to become and stay fully engaged.
  • Dialetic: this is just a big word for a compare and contrast story. You lay out your argument step-by-step but at each step you compare your way to another way to show why your way is better. Careful – if you don’t watch out, this can slide into a negative presentation. Just a note: Aristotle thought that this was the most effective way to present information.

Final Thoughts

As though giving a speech isn’t hard enough by itself, if you want to make an impact on your audience then you’ve got to design your speech correctly. Aristotle had the time back in the day to think about what worked.

His three types of arguments as well as his understanding of how to arrange your speech in order to appeal to your audience still work today. Listen to what the guy from Greece is trying to tell us and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Questions For You

Do you think that you do a good job today of appealing to your audiences? Which type of speech to give more often: logical, pathetic, or ethical? When it comes to organizing your speech, do you like to tell stories or present facts in order? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Interestingly enough, this post has nothing to do with global warming. I really don’t care which side of the “warming / not warming” argument you find yourself on right now. The one thing that I think that we can all agree on is that there is quite a debate going on right now – somebody has done a good job of talking this topic up!

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in speech writing | No Comments »

Presenters Who Use Naughty Words – Good Or Bad?

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Should Presenters Use Street Language In Their Speeches?

Should Presenters Use Street Language In Their Speeches?

If you are under 18 (or if you were at one time), please cover your ears as you read this posting.

Let’s talk about naughty words. What words do I mean you say? I’m talking about all of the common ones like $^#!, *&@^, &%$#, and of course &#&@. Just for good measure we should also throw in some of the up-and-coming modern phrases like $&^%$#@!%&.

If you watch TV, go to the movies, listen to top 40 music, or even read books that are on the top seller lists then you are being exposed to what we can call “offensive language” all the time. The big question is if there is so much of this in our daily lives, can we now start to work it into our presentations?

I say that the answer is “no“. I believe that there are several reasons why.

Gene Perret was Bob Hope’s head writer for 12 years and he’s spent a lot of time thinking about the use of street language in comedy and presentations. I agree with a lot of what he has to say.

The #1 reason why presenters should not use offensive language in our presentations is because it is the equivalent of taking the easy way out. Offensive words shock our audience when they hear them. It’s the same as if you zapped them with an electrical charge. However, it’s momentary and then it’s gone. It’s much harder (and more fulfilling) to use non-offensive words to capture and hold their attention.

Here’s an example: once upon a time Winston Churchhill was at a party when a woman who didn’t like him came up to him and said “Winston, if I were your wife, I would poison your tea.” Churchill responded by saying “Well, you can just go $%#@ yourself”. Oh, wait. No he didn’t. Instead, what he said was “Madam, if I were your husband, I would drink it.” If he had responded the first way, this incident would have been quickly forgotten. However, because of the words that he did use, it has been remembered to this day.

So the next time you are crafting a speech and you’re tempted to throw in some street language just to to show how hip and cool you are, don’t. Instead spend the time and find a way to instead show your audience how memorable you can be.

Have you ever used street language in one of your presentations? How did it go over? If you could give that presentation again, would you use the same language? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in speech writing | 3 Comments »

How To Make Your Two Minutes Count

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

How Would You Use Two Minutes To Make Your Point?

How Would You Use Two Minutes To Make Your Point?

When you speak to an audience, how long do you talk for: 60 minutes, 30 minutes, 10 minutes? Any of these are normal answers. What would you do if you only had two minutes to get your point across?

In my neck of the woods, a developer wants to build a gas station at the entrance to my neighborhood. There are good sides and bad sides to such development, but the neighborhood has decided that this is not something that they want to happen.

The way that you stop things like this from occurring is that you go down to city hall and attend a zoning hearing. At this hearing both sides get to present their sides and a hearing master will end up making a decision. The trick is that both sides were limited to 15 minutes of talking. Lots of people wanted to voice their objections so I was looking at having only 2 of those 15 minutes in which to speak. What could I say in order to have an impact?

When I sat down to get ready to figure out what I would say, I realized that I was dealing with no more than about 300 words (150 words /min x 2 min = 300 words). I knew that I needed to throw in some facts and stats for the zonning hearing master, but then I also needed to come up with some sound bites that any reporters who were attending could use as quotes.

So what did I come up with? You be the judge if any of these would stick in your mind if you hear them:

  • If this gas station is permitted to be built, the zoning laws will have to be changed in order to account for the mountain of roadside memorials that will appear due to drunk drivers.
  • The County might be tempted to change zoning rules in order to generate more revenue ; however, just like a teenager who gets a tattoo this would be a bad idea that the County would end up having to live with forever.
  • A gas station that is open 24-hours a day and which is located close to a major highway will act like a bug light for all manner of criminals who are seeking an easy score.

The next day one of my “image statements” was quoted in the local paper. Not too shabby for a two minute speech!

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in speech writing | 3 Comments »

When Presenters Run Out Of Ideas, It’s Time To Read A Book

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Presenters Can Get New Ideas By Reading More Books

Presenters Can Get New Ideas By Reading More Books

Sometimes when we are called on to give a presentation, we sit down to create the presentation only to find that our creative juices have somehow run dry. Oh, oh – this can be a big challenge. What always just seemed to “be there” can go missing just when we really need to draw upon it. What’s a presenter to do?

Despair not fellow presenters! This situation has happened to me and other presenters and we have a fairly simple solution that will get you out of this pickle: read a book.

Katherine Meeks is a New York City based speech consultant and language coach. She’s spent a lot of time with speechwriters and has made a not-so-amazing discovery: those of us who read a lot seem to have the best thoughts, the best style, and the most precise ways of using our vocabulary to make our presentations memorable.

I can hear you now: “Hey, I have a subscription to People magazine – I’m well read!” Umm, nope that’s just not going to cut it.

How often do you work on expanding your vocabulary? Probably  not all that often. It turns out that once we are out of school, the size of our vocabulary stops growing as fast as it once did. Reading turns out to be one of the most effective ways that as adults we can continue to grow our vocabulary. Once again, a word-of-the-day desk calendar is not going to get you to where you want to be.

If you want to become a great presenter, then you have to become a great reader. In order for this to happen, you need to discover interesting books. The best way to do this is to simply ask other people that you know what they are reading.  The key here is to find a way to filter the unending stream of books that are produced every year into a manageable trickle that you can have a chance of reading.

Other good ways to fette possible books for you to read include seeing movies and then reading the book. I was touched by the movie “Pursuit of Happyness” and just had to follow this up by getting and reading Chris Gardner’s book that the movie was based on. Wow – the book was much different from the movie, I was very glad that I read it. Another way to pick out the books that you might want to read is to spend some time with the book review section of your local newspaper – this can be a great way to spot stinkers.

Once you’ve created a list of books / authors that you’d like to read in order to have your presentations become inspired, the next thing that you need to do is to get your hands on some books. This is actually quite easy to do, but you’ve got to remember that you’ve got a lot of choices. Remember when you used to go to the library as a kid? Well guess what – the library is still there. When was the last time that you went?

Other sources for books include your local used book store (why pay full price?), the local Borders / Barnes & Nobel, and your on-line friend – Amazon. It really doesn’t matter where you get your books from, just make sure that you get them and that you read them! Your audiences will thank you…

Do you think that you read enough books? Have you ever used some of what you’ve read in one of your presentations? What types of books do you think help your presentations the most? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in speech writing | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries