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 »

Great Speakers Aren’t Afraid To Stumble On The Way To The Top

December 6th, 2011
Image Credit
Great speakers always slip up before they become great

Great speakers always slip up before they become great

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to get up and give a speech if you knew that it was going to turn out badly? Even though we all know the importance of public speaking, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – speakers who do a good job get asked to speak again, those who don’t are never asked back. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

How To Kill Your Public Speaking Development

In your speaking opportunities right now, what would happen to you if you failed? That post event review would be a tough one to sit through, right? Let’s face it, failure is not something that is rewarded in our speaking opportunities and in fact it’s something that we all actively avoid if we possibly can. The benefits of public speaking are great, but failing at giving a speech is something that none of us wants to do.

However, maybe we’re just setting ourselves up for a much bigger disaster. Can we all admit that the world as we know it is changing? What audiences are looking for in a speech is changing and in our world of iPhones, Blackberrys, and Twitter we are now competing with many other sources of information al the time. We all know that the way that the world used to be is long gone.

Something else is changing also: what is asked for when you give a speech. The first speech that you ever gave probably wouldn’t be asked for these days – things have moved along. The speech that you may be preparing to give, no matter how many clever presentation tips you are planning on using, probably won’t asked for in what, 2, maybe 3 years from now. This all means that you are going to have to change and change involves risk and along with risk comes the very real possibility that you are going to fail.

How To Become A Success By Failing

Well, that failing stuff doesn’t sound like it’s going to be any fun. But wait, has anyone else ever failed? Turns out that yes, in fact most successful people can look at their past and point to failures that helped them to get to where they are now.

The poster child for this kind of “good failure” would be Howard Schultz – the guy who founded the Starbucks chain of coffee shops. We all know and love the Starbucks store today, but when Howard first started it he really blew it. There were no chairs, he played lots of opera music, and his menu was in Italian. Clearly he quickly realized that he had failed, adjusted, and went on to become a big success.

You can do the same. You just need to learn to make lots of small bets when you give a speech. Some of these bets will pay off, and some won’t. It’s through what you learn from the failures that you’ll be able to make tiny changes to your approach and try, try again.

If we keep doing things the same way that we’ve always been doing them, then we will eventually stagnate and then we’ll go into decline. However, if you have the courage to start to fail and to learn from those failures, then the future contains limitless possibilities for both you and your speeches.

What All Of This Means For You

Speakers who are afraid to fail will never become a true success. Oh sure, they may do ok for a few years, but when things get really rough, they’ll wash out.

If you are willing to adjust how you view failure, your speaking can take off. If you can start to look at failures as being simply being learning experiences that are not be feared, but they are to be used to become a better speaker then you’ll be able to grow and become better at what you do.

No, you can’t be an idiot about this and do silly things that cause your speech to fail – don’t try to test your audience’s listening skills, but if you try your hardest and your speech still fails than you will have learned what doesn’t work. The big deal is that it takes courage for you to be able to do this.

Speakers who are a success have to had failures in their past. It’s from the forge of failure that the steel of success is formed. Learn how to make small bets so that you can learn what works and what doesn’t. Do this well and you’ll become a successful public speaker.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to get the person who has invited you to give a speech to become comfortable with failures as a sign of success?

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

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!)

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Posted in Howard Schultz | No Comments »

Show The Importance Of Public Speaking: 3 Ways To Use The Power Of Poetry

November 29th, 2011
Image Credit
Poems Can Bring Real Power To Your Next Speech

Poems Can Bring Real Power To Your Next Speech

After you’ve given a few speeches, it’s entirely possible that you’ll find yourself falling into a rut. You know the routine: write a speech, give a speech, write a speech, give a speech. Sure you are speaking, but are you really connecting with your audience? You can tinker with incorporating different presentation tips, but that’s not going to make a big impact. Looks like what you need is some “special sauce” – how about some poetry?

What Makes Poetry So Special?

It’s pretty bold for me to call poetry the “special sauce” of public speaking. Maybe I’m going to have to back that statement up. Perhaps we should start with a definition of just exactly what poetry is:

Poetry (from the Greek ‘poiesis’/ποίησις [poieo/ποιέω], a making: a forming, creating, or the art of poetry, or a poem) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.

Ah ha – now we’re getting somewhere. Clearly poetry is more than just words. It’s carefully selected words that have been put together in a particular way in order to generate a response in people who hear it.

I like to think of poetry as being a very concentrated form of communication. If it was a beverage, then I’d think of it as being similar to Turkish coffee – very strong and best enjoyed in small doses. It’s these very qualities that make adding some poetry to your next speech a great way to capture your audience’s attention.

How Do You Use Poetry In A Speech?

Poetry is powerful stuff. Just like high explosives, you are going to want to be careful in how you handle this stuff lest it get out of control and damage your speech. Dian Duchin Reed is a poet who has studied how poetry can be delivered to an audience. She’s come up with a number of suggestions:

  • Poetry Needs An Introduction: most of us don’t encounter poetry during our daily lives. This means that if you are going to use some poetry in your next speech, you’ll need to take the time to prepare us for it. Provide some background on why you chose this poem to include and let us know what you’d like us to get out of hearing the poem. Doing this helps your audience to do what you want them to do.

  • Take Your Time: did I mention that poetry is powerful stuff? What this means is that every word in a poem is there for a reason – all of the extra words have been cut out. You are going to want your audience to both hear and understand every word that tumbles out of your mouth. Help your audience improve their listening skills by taking the time to speak slowly while reading the poem. Make sure that you also speak very clearly.

  • Speak In Tongues: well, ok, maybe not tongues but at least use some vocal variety when you are delivering a poem. If for no other reason than to set the poem off from the rest of your speech, you need to vary the sound of your voice while reading the poem. If there are multiple people being discussed in your poem, then try to give each of them their own voice.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

It’s all too easy to get up in front of an audience and then sit back down after you’ve given your speech having made no impact on them. If you find yourself falling into a speaking rut, then it’s time to change things up a bit – add some poetry to your next speech.

Keep in mind that poetry is powerful stuff. It’s words that have been refined to such a point that just a little bit can have a powerful effect on your audience. This means that you need to be careful in how you use it. Make sure that you introduce your poetry before you deliver it so your audience knows what’s coming. Deliver it slowly and very clearly – with poetry every word counts. Finally, use all of the power of your voice and include vocal variety where appropriate in order to maximize the power of your words.

In our everyday lives, there is precious little poetry on a daily basis. If you take the time to do some research you can find poetry that can be incorporated into your next speech in order to truly connect with your audience. Choose the right poem, deliver it well, and you will have found the right way to share the benefits of public speaking with your audience.

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

Question For You: How long of a poem do you think would be appropriate to include 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

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to get up and give a speech if you knew that it was going to turn out badly? Even though we all know the importance of public speaking, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – speakers who do a good job get asked to speak again, those who don’t are never asked back. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

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Posted in passion | 4 Comments »

Happy Thanksgiving — Take The Week Off!

November 22nd, 2011
Image Credit Here's Hoping That This Week Is Special For Everyone

Here's Hoping That This Week Is Special For Everyone

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

For my readers in the U.S., you know that this week is all about family, turkey, and of course football. I’m not sure what it is about turkey that always seems to make everyone fall asleep, but I’m hoping that when I wake up this year the global recession will be but a distant memory, gas will be under $3.00 / gallon, and just maybe the world will have settled down for awhile.

For my international readers, pretty much all of the United States will be taking time off this week to celebrate the arrival of Europeans into the New World. For better or for worse, it’s what has gotten us to where we are today and we think that that’s a good thing.

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

- Dr. Jim Anderson

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

3 Secrets To Telling A Great Story

November 15th, 2011
Image Credit When you tell a story, you need to know how to bring the pages to life

When you tell a story, you need to know how to bring the pages to life

Babe Ruth was great at baseball. Michael Jordan was fantastic at basketball. Joe Namath was a master of the game of U.S. football. As public speakers we’d like to be known as being the best at what we do. All of these sports stars had talents that made them better than everyone else. Guess what – there’s a speaking skill that can make you better than every other speaker out there!

Why Storytelling Matters

When you are giving a speech, you know that one of the benefits of public speaking is that you are in a position to both entertain and motivate your audience. The trick is finding a way to do both of these tasks effectively.

Speakers have a number of different skills that allow them to understand what their audience both wants and needs: listening skills, a presentation tip or two, and storytelling. Of these, storytelling is the most powerful.

The reason that spending your time developing your storytelling skills is well worth the investment is because stories are the way that mankind has been exchanging information since the beginning of time. As humans, we are hardwired to listen when someone tells us a story. This is exactly what you want your audience to be doing when you are speaking.

The importance of public speaking is that you can connect with your audience and, with a little luck, change their lives. If you have the ability to do a good job of telling them stories that make your point, then making that connection just got a whole lot easier to do.

3 Secrets To Telling A Story Well

Saying that you want to develop your storytelling skills is one thing, finding out exactly how to go about doing it is something else. Craig Harrison is a professional storyteller who has studied what it takes to tell a good story. He has three suggestions for how we can become better at this critical speaking skill:

  1. Use Your Voice: When we are telling a story, one of our most powerful tools is our voice. When a story has multiple people in it (and what story doesn’t?), if you take the time to make each person’s part of your story sound different, then your audience will be able to follow along much easier. No, we may not be professional voice actors, but it doesn’t take that much of a change to create a unique “voice” for each character in your story.

  2. Take Over The Stage: Your body is another important tool that can really help your audience get into the story that you are telling. In order to use this tool most effectively, you need to use the entire area that you’ve been given to speak in. Different parts of your story can take place in different parts of your stage. Moving from one location to another can show your audience that a change is happening in your story.

  3. Don’t Say Anything: As speakers we often spend a great deal of time thinking about what we’ll say next. When you are telling your audience a story, you need to spend your time thinking about the next time that you are going to stop talking and pause. The silence that comes along with a pause is a powerful tool that allows your story to sink into your audience’s heads before you move on to the next part of your story.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to become a speaker that everyone wants to hear, you need to develop the skills that will make you want to be heard. One of the most important of these skills is the ability to tell stories well.

It turns out that storytelling is an art that can be learned. Three of the most important skills that you’ll need to develop include using vocal variety when telling your story, using your entire stage to support your story, and discovering how to use pauses to draw your audience into your story.

It’s not impossible to become a great storyteller, it just takes practice. By focusing your practice time on developing these three skills you can transform your next speech. You’ll become the storyteller that everyone wants to hear from so that they’ll be able to find out how the story turns out in the end!

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

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to use too much vocal variety while giving a 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

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to get up and give a speech if you knew that it was going to turn out badly? Even though we all know the importance of public speaking, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – speakers who do a good job get asked to speak again, those who don’t are never asked back. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

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Posted in storytelling | No Comments »

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