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If you are going to be willing to go to the effort of creating, practicing, and then delivering a speech, you may as well make sure that your audience experiences the importance of public speaking and understands you. What’s it going to take in order to make this happen? For one thing, the speech that you are going to give is going to have to be clear. What does this actually mean? What is means is that you are going to have to engage in some clear thinking in order to do some clear writing which will result in you being able to speak clearly. Now just exactly how can we go about doing that?
Brainstorming
When you’ve been asked to give a speech, you now have the responsibility to create a great speech. More often than not, you are starting from a blank sheet of paper – what do you want to say and how do you want to go about saying it? What you need to do is to start out by coming up with the basic set of things that you’ll want to cover in your speech. Think of these as being the “big ideas” that your speech will contain.
In order to determine what these basic big ideas are, you are going to have to spend some time doing some brainstorming. This is something that you can do by sitting with yourself or by spending some time talking with a friend. The key is to not throw any ideas that you have away – be nonjudgmental. Since we can’t always be certain when we’ll have a great idea for our next speech, make sure that you carry something to write with at all times. This way you’ll be able to remember each of your great ideas.
Grouping
Most of the speeches that we give are going to have the same basic type of structure. What this means is that we are going to have a main point that we want to make during the speech and then we are going to want to support this point with three additional points. Since we’ve now completed our brainstorming, we’ve been able to identify the main points that will make up our speech. Our next step is going to be to start to organize these points.
What you are going to want to do next is to step through the items that you were able to create as a result of your brainstorming. You are going to want to group these items based on your main point and the three supporting points that you’ll want to cover in your speech. As you place each one of your brainstorming points into one of the four “buckets” that you have, you’ll probably find yourself moving things around as you start to see what other items are in that bucket. When you have completed this task, you’ll have four buckets with points in them. At the same you will have potentially discarded a number of your brainstorming ideas at this stage.
Creating An Outline
The last step in this process has to do with creating an outline using the groupings of ideas that you’ve already created. We all know that every speech has an introduction, a body, and then a conclusion. What you are going to want to do is to create a label for each of the buckets that you’ve identified. This will serve as the topic and the three major headings for your speech.
As you create the outline for your speech, you are going to want to draw on the ideas that you came up with during your brainstorming session in order to initially present your main topic to your audience. In your body, you are going to want to give some background on your idea. Next you’ll want to introduce your main topic and give it some context. Finally, you’ll need to discuss what is currently going on in regards to your main topic. In your speech’s conclusion you are going to want to provide a brief overview of what you’ve already covered and then you are going to deliver a call to action for your audience. What do you want them to do based on hearing your speech?
What All Of This Means For You
The goal of any speech that we give is to use the benefits of public speaking to clearly communicate a message to our audience. However, that can often be easier to say than to do. What we need to be able to do is to create some clean thinking that will allow clean writing and clean speaking. The key is to understanding the process by which you can make this happen.
It all starts with you doing some brainstorming. You need to be able to take the time to identify the main points that you want to be able to cover in your speech. Your next step is to group the items that you’ve decided that you want to cover in your speech. Since you know that your speech will have a main point and three supporting points, you can use these as “buckets” to group your brainstorming ideas. Finally, you’ll want to create an opening, body, and close for your speech. Using the contents of each of your buckets, you can use your brainstorming ideas to create each of these sections of your clear speech.
Giving a speech is a big effort. As public speakers we want to make sure that each speech that we give has the maximum impact. In order to make this happen, we need to ensure that the speech that we give is clear to our audience. Creating and delivering a clear speech requires us to follow a process that allows a clear speech to be created. The technique that we’ve described will allow your next speech to be understood and acted on by your audience.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How long do you think that you should spend brainstorming ideas for a speech?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
When we talk about giving speeches, we spend a lot of our time talking about how we can become better because we understand the importance of public speaking. We look at things like body language, what words we use, and how we go about building the speeches that we give. However, one thing that we never take the time to talk about is what happens if we become too good at giving speeches. In fact, is that even possible? Can we become so good at public speaking that all of a sudden our audiences no longer pay attention to us? If so, then what can we do to prevent this from happening?