Keys To Creating A Great Speech

Make sure that your speech has a central message for your audience
Make sure that your speech has a central message for your audience

Image Credit: Jonas Löwgren

Nobody ever said that giving a speech was going to be something that would be easy to do, but sometimes it sure seems like it is a lot harder than it should be. What makes creating a speech so hard to do is what we want the speech to do for us: we want to be able to reach out, make a connection with our audience, and then share with them the valuable information that we have for them using the importance of public speaking. Getting a single speech to do all of these things can be quite a challenge. What is the best way to create a speech that will work for us?

What’s Most Important?

When we are putting a speech together, we need to take the time to think about what we believe is going to be important about this speech. There is generally a single idea that we want to find a way to convey to our audience. Our goal as a presenter is to be able to create a speech that we’ll be able to wrap this idea up into. The thinking is that if we can do this successfully, then our audience will be interested in what we have to tell them and they’ll pay attention to our speech. By doing this, when we share our main idea with them they’ll be ready for it and they’ll absorb it and understand what we are trying to communicate to them.

This, of course, leads to the classic question of what part of your speech is the most important: the opening, the middle, or the closing? It’s sorta a trick question – they are all important. However, as speakers we need to understand that the most important part of our next speech will be a strong central message. Knowing what this message is will be a critical part of how your go about preparing your next speech. You have to be crystal clear on what you want to communicate to your audience. Knowing what this idea is will allow you to stay on track as you pull your speech together.

Knowing what the main point of your next speech will be is a critical piece of information. It will allow you to create a speech that will have a clear message as you go through countless edits and all the way up until you deliver it to your audience. Understanding why you are giving a speech is very important. You have to know what you want to say if you are going to have any chance of making sure that your audience understands what you want to say. Keep your focus on your main point and it will come through in the speech that you build.

Create A Circle

As we create a speech, all too often what will happen is that we’ll be able to create an acceptable opening, a good middle, and then things will grind to a halt when it comes to creating the ending. We understand that this is an important part of our speech, but we just don’t seem to be able to find the words to wrap up the idea that we are trying to communicate. As speakers we realize that the last words of our speech are the ones that will be ringing in the ears of our audience as they leave our speech, this makes them even more important. However, it’s not always clear how to get these final words to work with the rest of our speech.

One strategy that works for creating a compelling ending to a speech is to go back to the beginning of your speech when you are creating the ending of the speech. This is the time for you to take the time to re-read the opening of your speech. What you are going to be wanting to search for is how you started your speech off. Key questions to answer include determining if you used a story or a fact to start your speech? You need to make sure that you understand why you chose to use this technique to start this particular speech. Understanding the decisions that you made when starting your speech are going to help you to create an ending for it.

As you take a look at the start of your speech, you need to understand if the ideas that you shared at the start resulted in any takeaways for your audience. As you build the conclusion of your speech, you are going to want to find a way to reference what you said in the introduction to your speech. If you can find a way to make this happen, then you will have found a way to provide your speech with a sense of completion. Your audience will remember what you said in your introduction and they’ll hear what you say about the same story or fact in your conclusion and this will bring it all home for them. The end result of all of this is that you will satisfy your audience.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to “wow” an audience, first we have to be able to create a speech that will grab and hold on to their attention in order to show them the benefits of public speaking. This can be a challenge for any speaker. We generally have a single idea that we are trying to communicate, but creating a speech that will do everything that we need it to do can be very difficult to do.

As we are creating our speech, we need to create a speech that will allow us to wrap up the key points that we want to make to our audience and then deliver it successfully to them. The most important part of any speech is that you have a strong central message. Speakers need to be crystal clear about why they are giving a speech in order to make sure that they can communicate this point to their audience. One of the most difficult parts of any speech to create is the ending. We’ve built a great speech so far, now we just need to come up with a way to wrap it up. A good way to go about doing this is to go back to the beginning and understand how we started things: did we use a story or a key fact? Once we know this, we can reference it again as we build the ending and they will provide our audience with a sense of closure.

Creating a really good speech can be a challenge for any speaker. We need to make sure that we understand why we are giving the speech and we need to make it clear to our audience. When we are wrapping things up, we need to create closure for our audience. If we can accomplish both of these things in the same speech, then we will have discovered the secret to creating a powerful and effective speech!

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

Question For You: Do you think that we need to provide a conclusion for our story in the ending or just reference it once again?

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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

So here’s a quick question for you: have you ever head of an “elevator pitch”? If you haven’t, then perhaps I should introduce to you what it is and why it should be important to all of us. The thinking behind an elevator pitch is exactly what its title implies. The thinking is that if you found yourself traveling on an elevator with a very important person who’s attention you wanted to get, what would you tell them? An elevator pitch is designed to allow you to use the importance of public speaking to make an impression in less than 60 seconds. As speakers who don’t always control how much time we have to give a speech, it turns out that mastering the art of the elevator speech is a critical skill for all of us.