5 Secrets To Writing A Better Speech

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 »

Dr. Jim Anderson To Be Featured On Iowa NPR Radio Show “The Exchange”

January 2nd, 2012
Iowa NPR Show The Exchange - "Inspirational Presidential Speeches"

Iowa NPR Show The Exchange - "Inspirational Presidential Speeches"

 

On the day of the 2012 Republican National party’s caucus in the state of Iowa, Dr. Jim Anderson will be participating in a discussion of political speeches, past and present.

Here’s how the Iowa NPR radio station describes the discussion:

Do inspirational words of the past fit into the politics of today? We attempt to answer that question by examining some of the most influential presidential campaign speeches of the 20th century. Ben’s guest is Michael Cohen, whose book Live from the Campaign Trail brings to life the words that have shaped American politics over the last century. Consultant Jim Anderson joins the conversation to reveal the science of successful speech writing.

You can listen to the program both live (Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 1:00pm – 2:00pm EST) or in recorded format. Click here for the link.

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Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off!

December 27th, 2011
Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume next week…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time you enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness next week.

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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This Is How A Speaker Is Supposed To Make Good Eye Contact

December 20th, 2011
Image Credit Hey Speaker, How You Doing On That Eye Contact Thing?

Hey Speaker, How You Doing On That Eye Contact Thing?

As speakers we are always being urged to “connect with our audience”. Now this sounds all fine and good; however, as with everything else in life the devil is in the details. Just how is a speaker supposed to connect with a room full of people who are staring at him or her? It turns out that you already know the answer – you need to use your eyes. As simple as this seems, all too often we do it wrong…

The Right Way To Make Eye Contact

What’s so funny about eye contact is that as speakers we’ve always been told that it’s important to make eye contact with our audience; however, we’ve never really been told how to go about doing this. In fact, a lot of us do it incorrectly.

All too often speakers decide that what they need to do is to make eye contact with every single person in their audience. Many times. This leads to what I like to call “machine gunning your audience”. The speaker quickly, and all too often in a very predictable sequence, quickly makes eye contact with each member of the audience. The effect of doing this is that you make no real contact with them, but you do succeed in creeping everyone out as they wait for you to come back around to them again.

So what’s the right way to handle this eye contact thing? Here’s what you really want to do. It turns out that your audience can’t really tell exactly who you are looking at. When you pick someone out of the audience and gaze into their eyes, the 20 or so people sitting around that person all think that you are gazing into their eyes.

Once you’ve located a person in the audience, look at their eyes and make your point. This should take anywhere from 10-30 seconds. You are not trying to stare them down, rather you are looking at them as though you were having a conversation with them and them alone.

When you do this, you achieve what every speaker is looking to do: you become intimately connected with your audience. The members of your audience feel as though you are talking directly to them and nobody else.

How To Tell If Your Message Is Getting Across

Making a connection with your audience is a critical skill to have, but it is really only half of the story. Not only do you want your audience to hear what you are telling them, but you want them to be able to tell you if they are comprehending what you are saying.

The best way to go about doing this would be to halt your presentation, take a trip down off the stage and out into the audience, pull up a chair, and have a chat with your audience to see if they are really “getting” the points that you are trying to make.

Since in most cases this really is not a practical thing to do, we need to come up with a different plan. It turns out that if you know how to pay attention to it, your audience is already telling you if they are understanding what you are saying.

What you need to start to do is to read your audience. Their eyes and face will be telling you all that you need to know about how your speech is being received. You need to pick up on everything from smiles to frowns, boredom to excitement. This steady stream of information from your audience to you gives you the information that you need in order to adjust the speech that you are giving on the fly in order to become a more effective speaker.

What All Of This Means For You

They say that our eyes are the windows to our souls. I’m not sure if that’s really true, but when it comes to your audience their eyes are the key to understanding if they are understanding what you are telling them.

As speakers we need to ensure that we are making good eye contact with our audience. This means taking the time to connect with individual members of the audience – not attempting to connect with everyone all the time. We also have to take the time to read what our audience’s eyes are trying to tell us.

So much of our daily human communication is based on what the other parties’ eyes are telling us. When we get up to speak, the same rules apply. We just need to learn how to read what’s in our audience’s eyes.

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

Question For You: How long do you think that you can continuously stare at one member of your audience?

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

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.

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

3 Secrets To Writing A Really Great Speech

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 »

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