Practical Steps on How to Prepare for and Give a Speech

Giving a speech can be one of the most nerve-wracking, stressful things you may ever have to do.  Whether it is just a classroom presentation or addressing a large audience of people, speeches can really make most of us quite apprehensive.  Here are a few easy steps, which if you follow them a lot of the anxiety connected with giving your discourse will be lessened and your subject matter will be better received by those who will surely perceive you as a pro.

Before you start the process of gathering, organizing and preparing your speech it is important to have a direction and a goal.  Oftentimes a thesis question will help to guide you towards a specific point.  Formulating a question in your head and then proceeding to answer it with the materials you gather will give you a firm foundation to build your speech upon.  It lessens the vast ocean of possibilities that often overwhelm us when doing a research paper, which is in essence very similar to preparing a address.

It is imperative that you know your material.  It is important to research the subject, in depth, in order to make the content second nature.  You want what you are going to say deeply engrained in your knowledge base so that when you speak and explain your subject it flows naturally and doesn’t seem foreign or forced. 

One way to research is to find simple, concise material that explains what you will be speaking about in uncomplicated, understandable terms. This will help you learn your material and provide a bare bones skeleton on which to hang the flesh of your speech.   When writing a paper or giving an address on a particular subject, it is sometimes helpful to use a children’s or adolescent’s book as a starting point, read it to get a grasp on the subject matter and then fill in with more in depth information from other sources. Children’s authors’ have already done the work of simplifying the subject matter into an understandable outline. Some of the places to gather further information are the Internet, library and periodicals.  Make sure that the information you gather is verifiable, scholarly and not opinion or hearsay.

If your information is technical and specific to your work, look for handbooks and outlines that explain what it is you are trying to convey.  If you feel you have a firm grip on the information yourself, than writing your own outline explaining your theme in clear-cut terms will take the place of outside sources.