The Accidental Communicator » speech writing

Learn To Write Better Speeches In 5 Simple Steps

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:00:53 +0000

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…

Request To Have Dr. Jim Anderson Write Your Next Speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfF0yULVgGA The next time that you are asked to give...
What Transformers 3 Taught Me About Giving Speeches A little while back I went out to the movie...
Learn To Set Goals In Order To Succeed As A Speaker Congratulations – you can give a speech in public without...

5 Secrets To Writing A Better Speech

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:00:04 +0000

Image Credit

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?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

3 Secrets To Writing A Really Great Speech When it’s really important that a speech that you’re giving...
3 Secrets To Telling A Great Story Babe Ruth was great at baseball. Michael Jordan was fantastic...
Video: Persuade An Audience Using 3 Secrets Used By Presenters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUB0PYL7H9U Dr. Jim Anderson investigates how a speaker can persuade...

3 Secrets To Writing A Really Great Speech

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:00:32 +0000

Image Credit

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?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

3 Secrets To Telling A Great Story Babe Ruth was great at baseball. Michael Jordan was fantastic...
Video: Persuade An Audience Using 3 Secrets Used By Presenters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUB0PYL7H9U Dr. Jim Anderson investigates how a speaker can persuade...
Great Speakers Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail?...

What Transformers 3 Taught Me About Giving Speeches

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:00:36 +0000

Image Credit

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?

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

No related posts.

How To Write A (Good) Political Speech

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 04:01:59 +0000

Image Credit

Often It's A Good Political Speech That Gets The Vote Out

Political speeches, for the most part, are forgettable. Except when they aren’t. If you’ve spent any time listening to the types of speeches that politicians are giving these days, they are basically junk (the Phil Davison, GOP Candidate, Delivers Stark County Treasurer Speech on YouTube is a classic bad political speech). The question is whose fault is this: the speech writers or the speech givers? I’m willing to bet that the art of writing a good political speech has been forgotten by far too many speechwriters. I’m going to solve that problem right now…

What Is Rhetoric?

Political speeches are a specialized form of speech. According to Wikipedia, rhetoric is the art of using language to communicate effectively and persuasively. What this means for us is that when we use rhetoric to create a political speech, we want the speech to accomplish a goal – convince an audience to vote our way.

If you want to dive in deeper to rhetoric, you can explore the three audience appeals: logos (reason), pathos (emotions), and ethos (knowledge). For our purposes here we’ll stick with the understanding that a good political speech needs to win over an audience no matter how you go about doing it.

What’s Wrong With Political Speeches Today?

Most speeches given by politicians today suffer from the same fatal flaw: they are completely forgettable. Exactly who’s fault this is has not been resolved: is it the speechwriter’s fault or the speech givers? No matter, both are probably partially to blame.

Where did things go wrong? Jeff Shesol who is a political speech writer believes that one of the reasons that political speeches have lost their punch is because of how speech writers are writing them.

He points out that it’s all too easy for political speech writers to focus on the sound bites that they hope will be captured out of a speech. In order to make this happen, they over use such tools as alliteration (repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of a series of words and/or phrases: “economy, employment, empowerment”) and cliches (an expression, idea, or element of an artistic work which has been overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect: “there’s no place like home”).

Even worse, too many speech writers / speakers believe that if they keep saying the same thing over and over again it will eventually become true. The reality is that the audience tunes out the speaker and the speech ends up being quickly forgotten.

What Does It Take To Write A Good Political Speech?

All of this negativity talking about political speeches might make you feel as though there is no hope – maybe it’s not possible to create a political speech that has an impact. The good news is that history shows us that this is not true. Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, etc. have shown us that political speeches can still change the world. They just have to be created the right way.

The first thing that you need to realize when you are sitting down to write a political speech is that the speech needs to have a point. What is the main goal: do you want the audience to take some action, vote a particular way, etc.? A political speech without a point is just a waste of everyone’s time.

Next, you had better take the time to organize your speech in a way that your audience will be able to follow what you are saying. Sure, you might believe that what you are asking them to do is the right thing, but if you don’t lay out your reasoning in a way that they can follow then they won’t come along for the ride.

Finally, and this may be the most important point of all, every single word in your speech must matter. This means that there can’t be any phrases that are in there just for filler or just to transition from one thought to another. Instead, ruthless editing is involved and every word that is not contributing to reaching the final goal needs to be chopped out and removed. Shesol points out that an excellent example of this is the speech that Bill Gates gave at the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum in which he introduced “Creative Capitalism”.

What All Of This Means For You

At some time we are all called on to write a political speech. We may not be running for president, but perhaps we’re trying to get elected to the local school board. No matter, there are too many bad political speeches out there – we don’t want to contribute to this mess.

Instead, we want to write a good political speech. To do this we need to make sure that our speech has a very clear point to it. The speech will need to be well organized and every word in it will need to have a purpose for being there.

If we can craft a political speech that has these characteristics, then we will have created a very powerful communication tool. With tools like this, elections can be won and from there, the world can be changed.

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

Question For You: How long do you think a good political speech should be?

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!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So don’t get me wrong, I love Toastmasters. It’s a great organization and I’ve been a member since forever. However, it’s not perfect. They’ll do a great job of teaching you HOW to give a speech, but they won’t help you to do a better job at WHAT you say. That is where tag lines come in…

No related posts.

Why Every Public Speaker Should Be “Tweeting” (This Means You)

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:01:37 +0000

Image Credit
Will these Internet crazes never end? Just in case you’ve been living under a rock someplace and haven’t heard about the “Twitter” revolution, guess what: it’s arrived and this time around as a public speaker you should be an active participant.

Just What Is This Twitter Thing?

If you’re already “tweeting” every day, you can skip this part! In a nutshell, Twitter is sorta like the Citizen Band radios of the mid to late 1970s. Once you set up a Twitter account, you can either use the Twitter web page or download and install one of countless Twitter utilities to send out short messages telling the world what you are doing at any given point-in-time.

The key word here is “short” – a Twitter message (a “tweet” to those of us in the know), is limited to no more than 140 characters. Clearly we’re not talking about sending out emails here.

Just to round out our comparison of Twitter to CBs, with a CB you needed to be on a certain radio channel if you wanted to hear what someone was saying. In the world of Twitter you need to be “following” someone if you want to be able to receive and read their tweets.

Why Should A Speaker Care About This Twitter Thing?

So outside of being the latest Internet craze, why should someone who is interested in becoming a better public speaker spend any time looking into this whole Twitter thing? It turns out that there are three reasons: practice, info, and followers.

One of the most important and challenging things that a speaker does is to write their speech. Although what you want to say may be clear in your head, actually getting the words on paper that will make it clear in your audience’s heads is a completely different matter.

Twitter’s limitation on how much information that you can pack into a single message, 140 characters, is both a curse and a blessing. It’s a curse for those of us (myself included) who are very verbose and who will use two words when one would do just fine.

It’s a blessing in that if you want to clearly communicate an idea in just 140 characters then you’re going to have to do a great deal of self-editing. You’re going to end up throwing away all of that fancy prose that you use and boiling your tweets down to just the core essence of what you want to say.

This is exactly what you should be doing when you are writing a speech – getting rid of the fluff and just leaving the good stuff. By getting involved in the world of Twitter and actually spending time hand crafting your tweets, you’ll refine your skills in this area. Sure, you could pay an expensive editor to help you refine your next speech, but it sure is cheaper to spend time on Twitter and learn to do it yourself.

Say Hello To Info

A nice side benefit to becoming active in the world of Twitter is that you’ll grow a community of people who choose to follow you. This collection of people who may see every tweet that you send out are an incredibly valuable resource.

Pulling together a speech is not an easy thing to do. Finding the information that you need and running what you are going to say by interested people are critical things that you need to do. Your Twitter followers are the perfect source for information source recommendations as well as being able to provide quick feedback on just about anything you want to run by them.

It’s All About Followers

Finally, a speaker without an audience does nobody any good. Every time you open your mouth to give a speech, you’d really like there to not be an empty chair in the house.

The more followers that you have in Twitter, the better your ability to get the word out about your next speaking engagement. No, not every one of your followers will be able to attend your speech (it’s a global service after all), but they sure will be able to pass the word on and you’d be amazed at how powerful a force this can be.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s starting to look as though the Internet tool called Twitter is here to stay. As more and more people sign up and start to “tweet”, this is starting to become a genuine communication tool.

Speakers need to dive right in and start to use Twitter. The benefits are three-fold: using Twitter teaches speakers how to concisely express their thoughts, it provides a new way to gather information and test ideas, and finally it is a great way to advertise your next speech.

All new things can be a bit intimidating at first. CB radios had their own lingo and user community when they first appeared. Don’t be nervous about using Twitter, get started and find out just how eloquent you can be in just 140 characters!

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should start advertising your “Twitter handle” to your audiences so that they’ll start following you?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Hopefully we can all agree that as a speaker, you should never start a speech with intention of killing some or all of your audience – your chances of being asked back go way done if you do. Given this, why are you still using such bad PowerPoint slides?

No related posts.

The 100 Hour Secret To Creating Speeches Everyone Will Want To Hear

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:01:56 +0000

Image Credit
Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…

The Secret To Creating Great Speeches

If you want to be able to give a great speech, then you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to create a great speech. I’m not talking about shutting down for a couple of days and holing yourself up somewhere and banging out some fabulous bit of text – that never seems to happen when you need it to.
Nope, what I’m talking about is actually spending the time that it takes to really create a fantastic speech. How much time is that you ask? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours. Oh, oh – now I’ve gone and done it. It looks like you don’t think that this is possible. Turns out that you’re wrong – spend the time keeping a journal and you’ll have all of the high quality content that you’ll need to quickly make a great speech.

How To Spend 100′s Of Hours Creating A Speech

I’ll grant that you are correct that the next time someone asks you to give a speech, the last thing that you want to have to tell them is “could you get back to me after I spend a 100 hours just whipping up a speech for you?” Maybe there’s another way to do the same thing.
Keeping a personal journal is something that all too few of us speakers do, and yet all of us probably should do more of it. Life comes at us fast and if we’re not careful, it will blow right by us and we won’t even remember what happened to us. That’s why a journal is so important.
If you take the time either once a day or perhaps for short times throughout the day to write down what you are doing, how you are feeling, what challenges you are facing, then you will be able to remember everything that has happened to you. This is the raw material that makes for a great speech.

Strong Words Make Strong Images

Anybody can jot a few words down on a piece of paper. It takes a truly skillful speaker to capture just exactly how you are feeling when you update your journal.
One of the keys is to record how you are feeling using all of your 5 senses. Yes, this means taking note of what you are smelling (perhaps your own fear?), tasting, hearing, seeing, and feeling. These are the small details that you will need to use when you use your journal entries to create a fantastic speech.

What All Of This Means For You

The truly great speakers are the ones who have taken the time to create a speech that will resonate with their audience. This means that they have crafted both the words and the stories that will not only allow them to get their points across, but that they have also found a way to get their message to stick with their audience.
You have the ability to create this kind of speech also. What you are going to have to do is to take the time that is needed to create such a speech: 100 hours or more. It turns out that you can do this by keeping a journal – the time that you spend working on the journal will pay rich dividends when it comes time to create your next speech.
By recording everything that you are experiencing at any given moment in your journal, you’ll be able to go back and relive those moments when you are in the process of creating your memorable speech. The secret is to not gloss over how you feel, but rather to record everything that is going on so that you can recapture it. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it will be the best 100 hours that you’ve ever spent doing something…

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

Question For You: How often do you think that a speaker should update their journal? Once a day or more often?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…

No related posts.

Speech Writing Success: How To Make It Happen

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:01:35 +0000

Image Credit
You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

So there you are: you’ve agreed to give a speech and now your mind has gone completely blank when you’ve tried to start to figure out what you’ll say. Where did your energy go? Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to get it back and create a great speech?

It’s All About Your Goals

If you’ve ever read a book or attended a workshop on motivational techniques, then you already know about the power of goals. If for some reason you haven’t, then you’re going to learn now.

In a nutshell, if you want to accomplish something, like writing a great speech, then you need to first start by creating a goal and, this is the important part, writing it down! Yes, I know that it seems too easy, but trust me – this really works.

Setting Goals Is How You Start To Be Successful

Sure we throw the word “goal” around a lot, but do any of us really know what it means? It can mean many different things, but for our purposes here lets assume that when we talk about goals, we’re talking about something that you want to achieve.

You would think that when it comes to the goal of writing a great speech, all you have to do is to think to yourself “I’m going to write a great speech” and that would be that. Right? Well, actually there is a lot more to it than just that.

The experts say that thinking about the goal is really just the first step. The next (and some argue the most important) step is to write it down. For some reason this has the effect of making the goal seem to be more “real” to us. Finally, the last step in the process is actually taking action to make the goal a reality. There may be many steps that you need to take, but taking the first one is what will get you on your way…

Visualization: Can You See What I Can See?

If you were a professional sports figure, then in the past few years you would have found yourself getting caught up in the “visualization” craze that swept through the sports world awhile back. Simply put, this is where you take the time to imagine yourself being successful before it comes time for you to perform. Since the mind can’t tell the different between real and imagined actions, it thinks that you’ve done this before and you’ve just improved your odds of completing your goal.

When it comes to writing a great speech, visualization can be a big help. Speech writing can take quite some time and so having taken the time to visualize yourself successfully creating a great speech helps you to stay focused and on track while writing.

What sport figures go through is called process visualization. What you’ll go through when you are writing a speech is called outcome visualization. You can “see” what you want to produce and that will help you to get there.

Becoming A Speaker Of Action

In the end, all of the goals and visualization in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t get up out of your chair and take some action. It’s this final step of the goals process that separates the people who plan great things from those who achieve great things.

What All Of This Means For You

You can write a great speech. The key to doing this is to make sure that you have clear goals for what you want to achieve.

Knowing your goals is only the first part of a process. Next you need to take the time to visualize yourself creating that great speech and then, most importantly, you need to start to take the steps that will be necessary to get you to where you want to be.

There is no secret to writing a great speech. You have the ability to do it right now. Go set some goals and you’ll be half way to creating that great speech…!

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

Question For You: What kind of goals do you think would help you to create a great speech?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Can we all be honest here? PowerPoint is a part of everyone’s life no matter how you feel about it. We all seem to fall into one of three camps: we fear it, we love it too much, or we just don’t really know what to do with it. With a little help, I think that I can help you out here…

No related posts.

Speechwriting Magic: 3 Ways To Cast A Spell Over Your Audience

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:01:30 +0000

Image Credit
It Turns Out That Your Speeches Can Be Magical

When you deliver a speech you stand up straight, you speak clearly, and you have fantastic eye contact. What more could anyone ask for? How about a speech that is both memorable and magical…

Do Your Homework

If you want to create a speech that will do the two most difficult things that any speaker can attempt, inspire and motivate your audience, then you’re going to need to write a killer speech. That speech is only going to be as good as what you are able to put into it. This means that you’ve got some homework to do.
If you wait until when you are sitting down to create your next speech to start to collect the information that you are going to need to make a great speech, then it may already be too late. The really good speechwriters are always collecting information. They read everything that they can get their hands on and those items that catch their attention get filed away somewhere they can find it when they eventually need it.
Your ultimate goal needs to have more information that you’ve collected for your speech than you could possibly use. This will allow you to sort through it all and pick out only the best bits to use.

Magic Speeches Start One Word At A Time

What’s interesting about speech writing is that all too often we are our own worst enemies. We all know what a great speech sounds like and as we are creating a speech we quickly realize that our first draft basically sounds pretty lousy. If you aren’t careful, you can get caught in an almost endless loop of editing in which you try to get a sentence perfect before you write the next one.
Don’t do this. Instead just let the words flow out of you as you create your first pass of the speech. One way to make sure that your speech is able to grab your audience’s attention and holds it is to identify 6 or so main points that will grab attention and which have a good story associated with them.
As you practice your speech, what you are going to be listening for is the “rhythm” that your speech has: it has a lot to do with the pace of the speech and how it all links together.

It’s All About The Ears

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent in the past working on getting my Power Point slides just perfect. It turns out that what I should have been doing. Your audience really isn’t going to remember what your slides looked like after your speech is over. Instead, it’s your words that will stay with them if you choose them correctly.
If you take the time to make sure that your words are used to draw a sequence of mental pictures in your audiences heads then you will have found a way to leave a lasting impression. An important note here is that we write differently than we speak – we use more slang and contractions when we are speaking. If you write your speech out and then read it as you wrote it, it’s not going to come across as a natural way of speaking.

What All Of This Means For You

Finding a way to cast a magical spell over your audience is what every speaker wants to find a way to do. Creating a great speech is one way to make this happen.
The way to make happen is to get into your audience’s head while you are writing your next speech. Once you do this you’ll understand that your audience doesn’t really want to find out just how smart you are (what can they do with that?), but rather what they really want is to know what they can do with the information that you share with them during your speech…

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

Question For You: What’s your secret to writing a great speech?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Humor, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Well, maybe not – simply because although I do like using humor in a speech; however, it’s a tricky beast and it can turn on you at any moment. Just how is a speaker supposed to determine when some form of humor is inappropriate for the audience that he / she is speaking to?

No related posts.

What Could Chris Matthews Teach You About Speaking In Public?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 04:01:13 +0000

Image Credit

Chris Matthews Is The TV Star Of The “Hardball With Chris Matthews” Show

If you’ve ever wished that there was a formula for giving the perfect speech, are you in luck! Chris Matthews is the host of a couple of TV shows including Hardball with Chris Matthews. He gets paid handsomely for the work that he does now, but he got his start as a humble political speechwriter. Based on all of that experience, he’s come up with a way to give the perfect speech…

It’s All In His Book

Chris has written a book called Life’s a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success. In this book he lays out his six-step program for creating the perfect speech.

Step #1: Break The Ice – When you first take the stage, nobody knows who you are. The first thing that you need to do is to put your audience at ease. One of the best ways to do this is to make a small joke that is based on current events: the room is too cold, it’s raining outside, the local sports team just won / lost. Whatever you say the purpose is to relax your audience and let them know that you are one of them.

Step #2: Show Some Skin – Everyone in the audience didn’t just show up there by accident. They are there for a reason – they want to hear what you are going to talk about. Give them a quick “tweet” about what you’ll be talking about just to capture their attention.

Step #3 – Share A Story: You need to be able to explain why YOU are up there on the stage. Tell the audience the story of how you were approached and asked to present. The purpose of telling this story is to get your audience to both settle down for your main speech while at the same time building excitement for what comes next.

Step #4 – Let Them Have It With Both Barrels – Now is the time to give your audience what they came for: your & message and your content. You may be delivering a lot of information so be sure to break it up into bite sized pieces.

Step #5 – Lighten Up: you’ve got to communicate to your audience that the real meat of your speech is now down. The best way to do this is to tell another story, but this time keep it light and make it fun.

Step #6 – Launch Them: At the very end of your speech you want to get your audience excited about what they’ve learned from you. Revisit the reason that you were asked to speak and make sure that you leave them with clear direction on how they can use the information that you’ve given them.

What All Of This Means For You

Ok, so I wasn’t completely honest with you – there’s no magic formula that will work for every speech. However, Chris Matthews does have a pretty good approach.

Taking the time to initially connect with your audience, telling stories, and then sharing the content that your audience desires is a powerful way to get your message across.

Chris’ technique should give you a place to start the next time you have to create a speech. Use these six steps to giving a speech in order to truly connect with your audience.

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should deliver your main content in the middle of your speech or does it belong at the beginning or the end?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you’ve ever gotten any training on how to give a speech, the instructor probably told you that if used correctly, hand gestures can be a powerful tool. However, as with all such things in life, do you think that it’s possible to use this tool just a bit too much? Where should a speaker draw the line?

No related posts.