The Accidental Communicator

When building a speech, these are three things that you must include
Image Credit: Andy Griffiths

Nobody ever said that building a speech was going to be easy, but sometimes it seems to be harder to do than other times. It is at times like this that we need to be able to take a step back and make sure that we really understand what we need to be including in our speech in order to deliver on the importance of public speaking. It turns out that every speech must contain three critical items. If we don’t include them, then our next speech is just going to fall flat on its face.

Main Points

When we are creating a speech, the main points that we include in our speech are what is going to end up making up the bulk of our speech. At the start of your speech you should have already hinted at what your speech is going to be about. Once you hit the section that will contain your main points, this is where you’ll be filling in the details. You are going to want to order your main points in the same order that you hinted at what you were going to be covering. Doing this will meet the expectations that you set with your audience.

The way that you are going to want to handle your main points is to start things off by stating the main point. Then you are going to want to swing back and do some filling in. You can fill in using reasons, example, stories, and details that support the main point that you have just made. This might also be a good place to share a statistic with your audience that will support your position. The details that you offer will help to make the speech that you are giving both unique and suitable for the occasion that you are giving it at.

Introduction

One mistake that a lot of speakers who are just starting out make when they sit down to write a speech is that the first thing that they do is to write out the introduction to their speech. The reason that this is a mistake is because at this point they really don’t have a good grasp of what’s going to be in their speech. A much better approach is to put off writing the introduction until after the main points and their supporting material have all been laid out. Doing this ensures that you’ll be able to create an introduction that will lead into what you want to say in your main points.

Every introduction has the same set of goals. The first is that you are going to want to write it in a way that will allow you to grab your audience’s attention. The next is that you are going to want to set a tone for your speech. Will it be somber, humorous, serious, or have a note of urgency to it? Your introduction will need to establish your credibility with your audience. Why should they believe what you are going to be telling them next? Finally, as you wrap up your introduction you are going to want to lead into your main point section.

Conclusion

The conclusion to your speech needs to be very obvious. You want your audience to know that you are preparing to wrap up your speech. By doing this you’ll cause them to sit up and pay closer attention because they know that the speech is getting ready to come to an end. In your conclusion you are going to want to provide your audience with whatever they have been searching for by listing to your speech. This can a solution to a problem, an answer to a question, or an explanation of something that they had not understood before.

The good news for you is that you should write your conclusion once you have both the main points and the introduction already written. You really do want to have a good understanding of what you’ll be covering in your speech before you try to wrap things up. In your conclusion you’ll want to once again touch on the main points that you’ve made. Finally, you are going to want to loop back to what you talked with your audience about in your introduction. By doing this you’ll have provided them with “bookends” for your speech and they’ll be left with a sense of real satisfaction when your speech is over.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers, our next speech is only going to be as good as we can write it. When we sit down to create a speech we need to understand that there are some fundamental parts that we need to include in every speech that we make in order to deliver the benefits of public speaking. These parts include main points, an introduction, and a conclusion.

The main points that we include in our speech have to have already been hinted at earlier in our speech. We need to lay them out in the same sequence that we hinted at them. We then need to provide additional details to support each of the points that we make. Our introduction should be written after we get done writing our main points. This allows us to make sure that we have a good understanding of what we want to cover in our speech. The introduction should always lead into our main points. The last part of the speech that we write is the conclusion. This part needs to touch on our main points and then loop back to the material that we covered in our introduction.

Writing a good speech is not an easy thing to do. However, if we understand the parts that we need to include in every speech that we write, then all of sudden things start to become just a bit easier. The next time that you are writing a speech, take the time to lay out your main points, create an introduction and then create a conclusion. You’ll be amazed at how much simpler the whole process becomes!

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

Question For You: How many main points do you think that a speech should have?