Cynosura

Researching and writing a speech

Creating a winning speech

Long, unprepared and irrelevant speeches bore millions of unsuspecting victims every day and have killed off the real joy of listening to a well crafted speech.

In researching and writing a speech we look at how you should go about preparing for your speech, a little about a typical audience and some thoughts about structure and content.

Most people don’t ask to make speeches, they are asked. Most people are so flattered – or flustered – that they automatically say, Yes! 

When you are asked to speak, step back for a second or two and ask yourself some fundamental questions. Do I know anything about this subject? Do I want to make this speech?  Is this my sort of audience?

If you can’t answer yes to all three questions then you might think about declining the invitation. Don’t assume you have to make a speech just because you have been asked. There may be compelling reasons why you shouldn’t.

On this occasion you feel confident and want to make the speech so you accept the offer.  From this point on you should go into research mode.

Researching for a speech

Your research should start with as much information about the event as you can gather. Below are some obvious first questions to ask of the organiser.

When, at what time and where will the speech take place? 

The time of the day will make a big difference to the type of speech you make.  Is this their third speech of the day, just before lunch or at the end of the day? 

I recommend that you avoid taking speaking slots just before or after lunch. Just before lunch a typical audience is keen to get the session ended and enjoy their lunch. Just after lunch the typical audience is a little drowsy following a good meal. In both cases keeping the audience focussed and interested is more difficult. 

The venue is also an important feature of your early research. Knowing where the speech will take place will help you to decide the type of speech you make. It could be a large modern conference hall or the back of a lorry in the middle of the countryside.

What type of speech is required?

Speeches come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It could be a formal speech, a technical presentation, a light after-dinner speech or a deliberately impromptu speech.

Winston Churchill was said to have devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromptu speeches.  Although said in jest, this holds more than a grain of truth about how well you should prepare even for impromptu speeches.

Whatever the type of speech you have been asked to make, it will dictate the way in which you write your presentation and the material you include.

A technical presentation will require considerable research, careful checking of statistics and a thoughtful approach towards the use of acronyms. On the other hand an after dinner speech can be equally challenging.  Your audience will want to be amused, they will want, wit, anecdotes and humorous stories.

Of course your speech may have a very serious purpose. You may be making a speech to persuade or to sell an idea or a product.  You could be using the opportunity to impart some new knowledge or informing. Alternatively you may just be entertaining your audience. Whatever the reason, your research at this stage will help you to decide the tone and the manner of the speech.

What sort of audience?

Knowing something about your audience will make a world of difference to the type of speech you give.

Are your audience single sex or a mixed audience? Have they come together for a particular reason such as a conference on ‘The growing of orchids in hothouses?’ If so, they will not wish to hear a speech on venture capitalism!

Other considerations might include their age, their occupation, where they come from and if there is an ethnic element.

How big is the audience?

I was travelling around Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s giving speeches to audiences that varied greatly from a few people in a village hall to a few hundred in a lecture theatre at a University.

One night we were sent to a town close to the Polish border where ‘a few people would be gathered in the Town Hall Square’. On arrival I was faced with over five thousand people crammed into the square, having experienced three hours of boring speeches from overzealous candidates. There was an urgent need to adapt the standard speech and give a little ‘punch’ to the end of the evening.  Fortunately we had an excellent interpreter who spiced up the very short (10 minutes) speech with some well chosen words of her own. The evening turned out to be a huge success.

Clearly the size of the audience will matter.  If you are speaking to a room with a dozen people then you can afford to be a little informal in your approach. In a large conference hall you should have the advantage of good acoustics and a clear PA (Public Announcement) system.  Addressing a rally of twenty thousand people or more who may be struggling to see you requires a more deliberate and carefully crafted speech.   

Having asked these questions of the organiser, there are now some questions you need to ask yourself.

What is the purpose of the speech?

Every speech should have a purpose. It might be to educate people about a particular product or a way of life. It is as well to consider what it is that your audience wants to hear and then tailor your speech accordingly.

The speech might be to persuade an audience of a particular approach. Some of the greatest speeches have been of this nature, typically political.

Perhaps this may seem a strange choice for an example, but Adolf Hitler had no difficulty identifying the purpose of his speeches. He wanted to motivate, to enervate and to indoctrinate. Unfortunately for the world he was just a little too good a public speaker.

Your speech may be a commemoration, remembering a particular event or celebrating the life of a famous person.  There is a tradition of holding events where learned speeches are made whilst commemorating the life of a famous person.  The Gandhi lecture might have as a central theme the importance of passive resistance but the speaker will bring the memory of the person alive whilst apprising the audience of a particular current issue.

What do I cover and what do I leave out?

Most budding public speakers want to tell their audience everything they know on a subject. To do so will lead to a tediously lengthy speech. It is better to give your audience a taste of what you know and then leave them wanting more. 

The best sort of speech aims to make a maximum of three points, to expand and develop those three points and then to leave the audience with some tasty morsels covering other aspects of the subject.

Deciding what to leave out can be very difficult when you have a lot to say, but the general rule is to study your audience carefully and decide what it is that they are most likely to want to hear about.

What level of detail and sophistication?

The level of detail and sophistication really will depend upon your audience. If you are giving a learned lecture to a group of your peers in the academic world then you can afford to go into some depth – in fact they would expect this. 

Despite this, you should be careful not to leave people behind. The over use of unfamiliar words and technical data can leave an audience bewildered or lagging behind in your presentation. Too much jargon can also be difficult even for a technical audience, so take your time and make sure that your arguments are well developed in a logical way.

For a lay audience the level of sophistication will be very shallow. Not because they might not understand but because they will be faced with absorbing lots of new material of which previously they had been unaware.

What is the key message I want to leave them with?

Every speech should have a key message.  It is the one and final lasting thing you want them to remember. Audiences forget very quickly, therefore your job is to make sure that a year after your speech they remember one important fact or message.

Only now can you start to write the speech; yes do write it even if you do not intend to use notes. 

Writing a speech helps you to think logically about what you want to say, the sequence in which you will say it and how you start and finish your speech. 

Putting pen to paper

So far you have not written a single word of your speech. You have spent some time thinking about the nature of the speech and what it is you want to say.

Now you need to take the next step. Before you do so there is one question that many people ask. ‘Do I have to use notes to deliver my speech?’

I deal with the delivery aspects of this in some detail later in delivering a speech. What I do advise is that you write down your thoughts or at least the structure of the speech and the main elements in order to help you think through the logical progression of the speech.

Failing to do this can lead to a long rambling and irrelevant speech. Like the good essay you were asked to write at school a speech has the same standard structure.

There should be an introduction, a body and a conclusion. When writing your speech there will be some subconscious messages you should have in the back of your mind.  These are messages that you will want to get across to your audience through the context and content of the speech.  Remember these when writing.

• I will not waste your time.
• I know who you are.
• I am well organised.
• I know my subject.
• Here is my most important point.
• I am finished.

Now you are now in a position to look at each stage of the speech.

The Introduction

Too many speeches open with words such as, “Ladies and Gentlemen I want to tell you what a great honour it is to be here today amongst such a distinguished audience. The honour that you have given to me in allowing me to address you on this important subject of world trade will be a daunting and challenging one for me when there are so many knowledgeable people here”.

This is, of course, tedious fawning verbiage which sends most people to sleep.

Please do not go into a hall and start with a load of old drivel about how honoured you are; those days are over, if indeed they ever existed.  The opening to your speech needs to have your audience electrified, sitting on the edge of their seats and gasping for more. Well, perhaps that is a bit too much to ask, but it should at least be startling, challenging and attention grabbing.

A more appropriate opening might be “In the next twenty years world trade will see our income drop by fifty percent”.

There are an amazing number of errors that can be made in the first opening remarks of the average speech.  Here are a few for your amusement.

• “Unaccustomed as I am to speaking in public . . . “(So this is going to be an amateurish affair is it?)
• “I apologise for having not had time to prepare . . . “(No preparation, so it’s going to be a rambling speech.)
• “I’m not much good at this sort of thing . . .” (So we can see.)
• “I won’t keep you long . . . “(This is going to be a long one!)

If that isn’t bad enough for you then here are a few more howlers that should never be uttered by the professional speaker:

• Never apologise – “I am not really qualified”
• Avoid false humility -“We believe we have tried to..”
• Avoid triteness – “It’s nice to be here in Serbia, er…Southwark”
• Never dither – “I think that’s all I’ve got to say”
• Forget clichés – “At the end of the day”, “I am sure you will agree..”
• Eliminate extra words – essentially, crucially, actually
• Never, ever swear, talk commonplace, make trite statements, or be irrelevant.

Having made your opening remark you should follow through with some information about what it is you are going to tell them; for example “In the next few minutes I will give you three reasons for why international trade is good, how incomes will fall and how living standards worldwide will rise”.

Having prepared your introduction make sure that you learn it off by heart. More speakers fail in their speeches because they freeze in the opening moments of the speech, having forgotten what it was they were going to say.  However, if you learn your opening lines by heart then you will find the rest of the speech will flow.

The Body

The body of the speech contains the argument or information you most want to relate. Three or four points well expanded with a good logical argument will keep the average audience interested without over facing them with too many facts. 

With each point you wish to make there should be an anecdote, analogy or some other word picture to help your audience understand the significance of what it is you are saying.  If you are writing your speech then remember to write as you would speak rather than what is necessarily good grammar. It is OK to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ or whatever other grammatical mustn’t do’s exist in your language. If that is how you speak then it is good to write your speech in that way.

Try to keep your sentences short. Long sentences, especially if you will be reading from a text become difficult to deliver. Short sentences are easy to deliver and make it easier to put emotion and tone into your speech.

Don’t be concerned about repeating yourself. If you think a particular thought or statistic is important then make the point a second or third time, just beware to make the point in a different way each time.

Naturally as you go from one point to the next you will need to find a bridge to cross from one to the next. Here are some simple ‘bridging words’ you could use:

• “Now I want to talk about…”
• “Moving on to the benefits of…”
• “Then there is the debate over…”
• “No speech can be complete without…”
• “I touched on…”

The body of the speech should include research, statistics, definitions, anecdotes and analogies. All of these will help to bring the speech alive in the minds of the audience. Beware too many statistics though, they can become too much for an audience to grasp and some may be meaningless.

If someone said to you 5.4 billion Japanese Yen, or 56 billion Mongolian Tugrik or 50 million US dollars can you imagine how much they would look like? Of course the answer is No! But if someone said that the bonus that banker just received would have built two new schools then the reality of the statistics will come alive in people’s minds.

A good rule for speech writing is the 80/20 rule. For a ten minute speech write as though for eight minutes. That gives you time in which to slow your delivery or add in extra thoughts as you deliver the speech.

When you have completed your first draft, sub edit the text drastically and take out all of those unnecessary words that crept in as you were writing.

Now you are on a roll!  You have done most of the hard work and all that remains is to draw the speech to a close.

The Conclusion

It may sound a bit odd but in the concluding remarks you should tell your audience what you have told them.  No person listens to a whole speech. If you are lucky they will listen to most of your speech but their minds will be distracted. So the concluding remarks allow you to sum up your comments, put them into context and stress once more your key message.

Too many speeches end with a whimper rather than with a bang. Make sure that your speech ends on a high note. Give hope for the future, stress the positive breakthrough that has been made, make one more outrageous joke or finish with a statistic that says it all.

It is easy to spot those people who have not properly prepared the ending to their speech. They will say ‘finally’ and then talk for another five minutes before saying ‘finally’ again. If you are lucky they might stop there, but more likely they will remember something else they have forgotten and you will be treated to another ‘finally’. When you say finally make sure that it is FINALLY and stop talking.

Finally, learn your ending so that you can stop. I sat in a meeting where one speaker came to the end of his speech and said so, but then continued talking for another thirty-five minutes.  Afterwards he told me, “I didn’t know how to stop.

Your audience

There is one more aspect of preparation about which you should be aware – the audience.  No audience listens to 100% of a speech, they dip in and out.  Either they will be thinking about the next meal, the rather handsome man two rows in front, the argument they had with their partner earlier in the day or just quietly slumbering after a heavy meal the previous night. 

So you have to keep dragging them back.  The table below shows the attention span of the average audience.

For the first 10 minutes of a speech the attention span of an audience rises rapidly, especially if you have given them a good attention grabbing opener. After that their attention starts to fall away equally rapidly and will stay down there unless you use attention words and phrases. 

Then as you say ‘Finally’ the attention span rises again in anticipation of the conclusion of the speech.

So what can you do to maintain high attention? First use attention words to pull them back to what you are saying. Then use word pictures, emotion and impression in your voice. Attention grabbers might be phrases such as those below:

• “Mr Chairman, I believe that…”
• “Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to tell you…”
• “Is there anyone here…”
• “To you Mr Stumpfhauser I say…”

Keep your words simple and easy to understand and vary the pitch and tone of your voice. 

Many speakers worry about how much of a speech will be remembered. The answer is that an audience will remember about 60% of a speech after an hour, 40% by the end of the day and about 10% after one week.

So you have written your speech. Thought about how you build in attention words and phrases and built in repetition of your key message. Now we need to look at how you become accomplished at delivering your speech.

Practice, practice, practice

The hard work has been done. You have a speech. But now you need to make sure that it is well delivered. There is no short cut to success.  It all comes down to practice.

All the best textbooks tell us that you should practice at least one hour for every minute of a speech. If you have the time to find eight hours for a ten minute speech then you will have done well. Realistically that is not a viable amount of time for most busy people, the very people who are most likely to be asked to give a speech. 

Nevertheless you should aim to read through and recite your speech at least three or four times a day in the few days leading up to the speech if you are to look at your best when delivering. 

Some people question the necessity of practice; here are six reasons why you should practice:

• Because it helps to give you confidence
• It helps identify flaws or difficult words to deliver
• It provides familiarity and hence easier delivery
• If doing a presentation it helps the planning of visual aids
• It makes it easier to anticipate questions
• It helps timing and the use of pauses.

There are some other short cuts available if you have the technology available. You could video yourself giving the speech then play it back to see how you can improve.  Also you could tape the speech and play it back to yourself, giving yourself one more practice session as you drive to the venue in your car.  This is often helpful in getting the right tone and volume in your voice.

If you are nervous about the content then show the text of the speech to a trusted colleague and ask for their frank view. But do this in time to make changes and to practice those changes.

There is a big difference between knowing the theory and making it happen. For help in implementing your communications practices email us now.