Having something worthwhile to say is never enough. You need to know how to use words and images to reach your audience’s minds and hearts.
Your speech needs a touch of flair. Flair is partly intuition – which comes from experience, imagination and a willingness to think – and a careful study of this chapter!Every communication is an opportunity to throw a bridge across a void. If you can do this, your speech will have more effect than you could ever have believed possible.
When we face an important interview, we prepare ourselves to make the best possible impression. We look good. So, when we are about to meet an audience, we should polish our words as well as our shoes. We should sound good.Today people’s expectations are high and their attention spans are low. Merely to gain and hold an audience’s attention requires flair. If you want to keep them interested, your speech must sparkle. So let’s get polishing.
1 Preparing Your Script
The best talkers are those who are most natural. They are easy, fluent, friendly and amusing. No script for them. How could there be? They are talking only to us and basing what they say on our reactions as they go along. For most of us, however, that sort of performance is an aspiration rather than a description. Our tongues are not so honeyed and our words are less winged. We need a script.
But what sort of script? Cards? Notes? Speech written out in full? It’s up to you. There is no right way of doing it. Here is a simple method favoured by many speakers:
- Write the speech out in full.
- Memorise the opening and closing lines and familiarise yourself with the remainder of the speech.
- Summarise the speech on one card, or one sheet of paper using key words to remind you of your sequence of anecdotes, quotations, jokes and so on.
2 Using Words To Be Said, Not Read
Most people can write something to be read, few can write something to be said. Indeed, most people are unaware that there is even a difference.
We are used to writing things to be read: by our friends, our relatives, our bosses, our subordinates. Such everyday written communication is known as text. What we are not used to doing is speaking our written words out loud. Writing intended to be spoken and heard is known as script.
Every effective speaker must recognise that there are very important differences between text and script, namely:
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Text
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Script
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• is a journey at the reader’s pace
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• is a journey at the speaker’s pace
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• can be re-read
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• is heard once, and only once
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• can be read in any order
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• is heard in the order it is spoken
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Therefore, you must prepare a speech for an audience which cannot listen at its own pace; which cannot ask you to repeat parts it did not hear or understand; and which cannot choose the order in which to consider your words.
Consider how the same sentiment might be conveyed by a writer, first using text and then script:
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We seem subconsciously to understand the best words and phrases and the best order of words and phrases when we speak, but we seem to lose the knack when we write script.
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Text:
The meaning of marriage is not to be found in church services, or in romantic novels or films. We have no right to expect a happy ending. The meaning of marriage is to be found in all the effort that is required to make a marriage succeed. You need to get to know your partner, and thereby to get to know yourself.
Script:
The meaning of marriage isn’t to be found in wedding bells ... it isn’t the stuff of Mills and Boon romances ... there is no happy ever after. No, the meaning of marriage is in the trying and it’s about learning about someone else ... and through that learning about yourself.’
The lesson is clear: speak your words out loud before you commit them to paper. You will find that each element, each phrase, each sentence, will be built from what has gone before. Instinctively, you will take your listeners from the known to the unknown; from the general to the particular; from the present to the future.