Art Of Great Speaking

In public speaking the pace or speed of your speaking is important, especially the variety of it

Read the sentence below silently. Then read it aloud, trying to picture with your tones, face, and body language exactly what took place:
The ancient automobile chugged as though each turn of the wheel could be the last. But slowly, very slowly, it crept up the mountainside.
It reached the top and then began down. Faster, and faster, and faster, it went. On and on it rushed just like a blurred black streak to the turn at the foot of the mountain. Then suddenly the automobile swerved from the road and crashed into a big tree!
While you speak about the trip up the mountain your rate of speaking will certainly be slower than once you talk about the sprint down. This demonstrates an important aspect of variety, change of rate, or variation in speed during a speech.
When an idea calls for a change of rate, vary the speed of your speaking, not robotically, obviously, but in keeping with the natural concept of the idea that is being expressed. When you talk about a fast thrilling game of football, make the players move with your voice and manner. But if you talk about idle sheep in a field, naturally your voice is going to be lazy and slow. It is as fundamental as that, but many speakers totally neglect this important principle of variety and say everything at about the same rate.
When you say, “The car crashed into a tree!” make it sound like a crash, nothing like a kid peeling a banana. This is another essential kind of variation in speaking – force, or lack of it.

I’ll be writing more in my next post about variety in public speaking to capture the audience’s attention. If you want to learn more about speaking with confidence please check out the resource here: speaking with confidence

Effective public speaking is about keeping your audience’s attention.

Do you paint pictures with your words or do you leave your listeners in a verbal fog?

An effective speaker puts interesting, picture-making details into his stories. He uses specific, concrete words that create vivid images rather than a blur of mental fog.
Some speakers err by talking about what happened rather than picturing it happening.
A speaker could say, “He was emotionally disturbed when he heard that his mother had passed away.” Or this event could be pictured: “The smile faded from young Bill Day’s face as lie held the telephone receiver to his ear and heard the broken voice of his father calling long distance. His fingers tightened vice-like on the receiver, and blood rushed to his head as he listened breathlessly to the saddest news he had ever heard — a head-on collision on the highway. Now the receiver felt like lead in his limp hand. It seemed all the strength had been suddenly drained from his body. With his free hand he grasped the telephone to keep from sinking to the floor. Tears coursed down the youthful lines of his face because his mother had been driving one of the automobiles in that fatal crash.”
Consider this statement, “An animal crossed the road for a serious purpose.” What kind of mental picture do these words paint? Does the listener see a dog, cat, elephant, horse, or any one of a hundred other animals? How did the animal cross the road, quickly, slowly, cautiously? Was the road a wide highway, a dirt road, a narrow trail? And what really was the serious purpose?
Such speaking blurs the mental film. It is like trying to see a drive-in movie at Hoboken through, a London fog. But when the speaker says what he really means, “A wildcat leaped across the mountain path to pounce upon a lazy jackrabbit,” he paints a verbal masterpiece.

I’ll post more about this in coming weeks about using words for effective pulbic speaking.

There are many myths around public speaking anxiety.  One of these is that public speaking anxiety is bad for you. It can in fact increase your level of performance and make you come across better to the audience. In fact it is normal for an audience to rate the speaker’s performance much higher than the speaker themselves.

Here is a great video that discusses the myths of public speaking anxiety and provides information on public speaking. The sound quality isn’t great but it is worth persevering with.

The Confident Speaker by Larina Kase and Harrison Monarth is well written and will help people to speak confidently in front of groups of any size. It is great for beginners and people finding advancement in their careers been held back by their fear of public speaking.

You can find the The Confident Speaker: Beat Your Nerves and Communicate at Your Best in Any Situation here

How do you add interest to your speech? Visual aids and powerpoint slides etc can add interest to a speech when used to support a speech and not in place of it.

However, perhaps the strongest spring of interest any audience can sense or observe comes from within the speaker himself. This spring is the deep personal interest a speaker has in his subject.
A speaker trying to talk about a subject in which, he is not interested is like a boy trying to make love to a girl he despises. Yet every day people try to speak on subjects as foreign to their interests as a rat in China.
For example, a girl from Egypt, at the University of Illinois in 1947, was assigned the task of making a five minute speech on Socialized Medicine.
This assignment was indeed a gruesome task for her. be¬cause, although socialized medicine was a rather popular subject at that time, this young Egyptian cared no more about medicine than an Arctic snowball. She almost would have preferred flying back to Egypt than trying to speak about medicine. She was nerv¬ous, worried, and went to see if the professor would let her talk about some other subject. In a conversation with another teacher her eyes sparkled as she talked about young people in Egypt and about the Pyramids which she had visited. What an excellent talk she could have made on either of those subjects!
On the other hand, perhaps some medical student who felt socialized medicine might soon pinch his pocketbook, could make a spirited talk on that subject.
Expecting a person to speak effectively upon a subject about which he has little knowledge and no interest is about as sensible as inviting a legless man to enter a dancing contest.
Getting extensive knowledge about any subject will usually stimulate interest for that subject, but there must be some basic interest at the start. Otherwise the person simply will not be enthusiastic enough to get the knowledge. And his boredom with the subject will be clearly evident when he tries to speak on it. Anyway a manufactured interest is rarely as dynamic or convinc¬ing as one that springs from a spirit incited by a natural liking for the subject.
So when choosing a subject a speaker should select one that fascinates him. If he is not interested in anything why should he speak at all? Without interest he really has nothing to share. And effective speaking is a two-way sharing process.

When you are interested in the topic and know it thoroughly it can make it easier to speak about to an audience. The audience will also respond to your interest in the topic in a positive way.