**Here are some of my notes from the “speaking to inform” series on selecting speech topics. This is not my speech, but rather an altered version to make it more suitable for reading. **
You’ve been thinking about a speech topic for a long time, you’ve started writing up your speech, maybe it’s already all written up - word for word. Now what?
Ladies and gentleman and fellow toastmasters, tonight I’m going to talk about something that isn’t necessarily my strong suit, but something that is really important - what exactly is my thought process when transferring something that’s written, to something that’s spoken.
Maybe you’ve sat here at AYP, maybe it was this session, or previous meeting where you thought “well I really liked that speech, but felt a bit too prepared”, yet when you hear another speech you might think “wow, this person is a natural, it feels like I’m here having a conversation between friends”. This is; in many regards a very simple litmus test, which might just determine whether you enjoy a particular speech or not (even if the person has absolutely no content at all).
How do you use it
How does this technique work? I like to think of it as, if I wanted to make a particular point more engaging, the CC manual says oh yes we can use rhetorical questions (just like what I just did!), but after a bit it gets…too repetitive. Instead, I like to think “well if I started this section with these two special words, how does that change my message! As an example rewind back 1 or 2 minutes ago. How I began this speech used precisely this technique:
(Image this) You’ve been thinking about a speech topic for a long time, you’ve started writing up your speech, maybe it’s already all written up - word for word.
Instead of something like this:
As you write up your speech that you’ve been working really hard at, you will get to the point where you wonder, what’s next?
Why is this effective?
- grab attention
- emotional
When a person reads a book you can back track! This encourages sentence structures which can be verbose, colourful. Unfortunately this doesn’t translate well into speeches, because you would have to concentrate hard to recall what’s coming out of my mouth.
Rather we grab attention, through short, sharp sentences or at least provide plenty of pauses; this cumulates to the importance of retelling, rearticulating and reiterating what you’re saying.
On the flip-side the presenter has many tools which allow you to tell a story; to persuade others to buy-into our speech. The easiest way is to consider a salesperson - they don’t provide an amazing description a product they’re trying to sell, rather they aim to provide convince you of and ask you to imagine the memories which you would create through purchasing this product.