How to Give a Speech

You have to stand on that stage feeling a sense of completion and a connection to your audience. You can not be nervous, tight, worried, cold or afraid. If you do that, you alienate your audience and make the speech that much harder. So how do you walk onto that stage feeling as if you are surrounded by friendly people, dying to hear what you have to say?

Have something to say.

Your speech should be so carefully worked and reworked that it not only contains all pertinent information, but you can present it in a comfortable manner. When you start to reel off facts and figures they blur into the excitement of a phone book. Hence you have to place them into your talk so that they roll by smoothly and are absorbed by the listener.

Know your topic.

You must know your topic to the extent you can be woken out of a dead sleep, and like a prisoner of war, reciting name, rank and serial number, begin to discourse.

Learn your speech as an actor learns his lines.

Have your written version in your hand, but the information in your head. Speak to the people before you, not to the paper. This means that when you are advised you are to give a speech five days from now, you spend those days gathering data, putting it into interesting prose, practicing your voice, your posture, your gestures and your mood.

Control your voice.

Bring your voice way down to your diaphragm. Get it down, because nothing is more unpleasant than an amplified high pitched voice. Get it down, under control, and make sure every single word in that speech is properly pronounced. Get rid of tongue twisters, and overly complex compound sentences which might confuse. Too many of the same sounds in one sentence. Too many homonyms, too many six or seven syllable words. When you read your speech outloud, change everything that causes you to stumble or sound incoherent. Your voice should be pleasant to the ear, the pitch and tone change; not abruptly, unless you’re mimicking other voices, but gently. No one should have to guess where an inflection is. Practice.

Your personal presentation.

Once you get your voice in control, stand in front of a mirror when you practice, make eye contact, try to avoid looking at your speech. Each time you go through your speech you’ll be imprinting it on your mind, you’ll be feeling in control of your information, and by smiling at yourself in the mirror you’ll make yourself feel happier. By the time it is zero hour, you will know the speech by heart, where your voice will drop and rise, where you pause, and where you continue.