Public Speaking Skills

Public Speaking Skills


Great public speaking skills amount to the art of storytelling.

Consider what happened when a doctor and a lawyer both eulogized the same close friend at a funeral. With clinical precision, the doctor recounts how the viral strain proved incompatible with life: "A precipitate diagnosis had discounted toxicology results, but led to the dilatory discovery of a broader panacea vis-à-vis that pathogenic virus which altered modern medicine indelibly." Believing he just informed hundreds of people that this man’s death ultimately saved the lives of millions, the doctor is surprised to see that nobody cares. In fact, many are dead from boredom.

The lawyer, on the other hand, spends his time at the podium reliving the game in which his best buddy scored the only two points of his otherwise forgettable high school basketball career: "Back then, they called him P.S. -- short for Popsicle Sticks because he was so skinny -- and one night, with just seconds left, an errant bounce put the ball into his hands. He tripped over his own shoelace and started to fall. Whether it was, as P.S. insisted later, a latent instinct for the hoop or, as his friends believed, simple self-preservation, he chucked the ball just before hitting the hardwood. Swish. Throughout his entire life, P.S. always had an undeniable flair for the dramatic."

Both these men discussed the same topic: their friend. But you wouldn’t know it. Ultimately, no matter what the oratorical opportunity -- presentation, lecture, eulogy or wedding -- you have only one instance to pay the proper respect to that topic. If you have the luxury of preparing for the occasion, you should do so exhaustively -- even commit it to memory. If you don’t have that luxury, you can apply the following general tips and techniques on the fly to tighten up your public speaking skills and deliver a substantially better presentation.
what to say
When it comes down to the words you choose, you must clarify. In order to ensure you get your point across, reduce what you say to the bare minimum.
Simplify
Overestimating the intelligence of your audience, regardless of its size, is a far bigger mistake than the contrary because you risk losing their attention immediately. Keeping your points simple and direct maintains audience attention, even if you’re relating things they already know.
Economize
In the famous words of Strunk and White, “Omit needless words.” What qualifies as needless? Anything that strays from your main point and contributes to a muddy, convoluted sentence. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is strike parts you really like, but if they don’t directly contribute to your main theme, you need to lose them. Active verbs in particular provide a prime way to economize.

Instead of saying, “Comrade General Secretary, in this instant I demand that this geo-political mortar-and-metaphorical hindrance be retracted,” Ronald Reagan simply said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
Emphasize
Focus all your points around a single, memorable theme. You can never hope that everything you say will cross the barrier from your voice to the minds of your audience; some, even much of it, will not make the trip. You can hope, however, that they will remember your theme, and the best way to ensure this is to drive that theme into them through emphasis and repetition.

When Martin Luther King spoke in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he repeated one sentence: “I have a dream.” Even if you’re not certain about what he said in between, you still know precisely what he was talking about, and you remember his greater point.

Show, don’t tell
Most of us endured our share of “show and tell” in grammar school, and almost invariably “tell” was the boring part: A kid got up and, three words in, you were focused on the kid a few seats ahead nurturing her pet turtle. Sweeping generalities and broad statements require the kind of details that show you things.

In dealing with what you say, you can show your point through body language with greater efficacy than merely telling your point. If you say, “In the first quarter sales were down by one-third,” you have told your audience a fact in the kind of ordinary language that most of us tune out. By relating the impact of those sales -- people who were laid off, budget cuts, etc. -- you’ve shown your audience that same fact, but it becomes memorable.
how to say it
More important than what you say is how you say it -- the manner in which you deliver your words. Having reduced those words to the bare minimum to get your points across, consider your audience, keep an ear on your tone, and when it comes to your topic, be the smartest person in the room.
Include your audience
Keep your listeners engaged by drawing them into your examples. This doesn’t mean to pick on individuals; rather, cast a wide net and include them as a group when possible, using the word “we” more often than “I.”

Consider Winston Churchill’s many speeches during World War II; they comprise the most thrilling call to arms in human history. They were inspirational because they often related to his fellow countrymen stories of English bravery that had yet to happen, drawing the listener into the speech as an active participant, and in effect eulogizing his enemies: “We will fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Using the word “we” is attention-grabbing because it makes your listeners feel involved.
Know your audience
Apart from including your audience, you should also know and understand them, and there is at least one effective way to do this: Take cues from them by breaking off your prepared speech to field questions or revisit a particularly complex section. Engaging them through direct address is an immediate method of seeing just how well you’re doing. Judging from those results, expand on certain points or actively trim down others.

In the example from the funeral, if the doctor were speaking at a convention for physicians, he would have hit a grand slam and enjoyed a standing ovation. Instead, he was addressing a widely disparate group whose grasp of medicine was nil. The lawyer’s decision to center his speech on basketball hardly meant anyone needed to know much about the sport at all because it wasn’t his focus. Rather, everyone understands drama as well as human foibles; they are universal themes.

Watch your "ums" and "uhs"
Most people are ignorant to the many "ums" and "uhs" they use, and in human speech they act like shrapnel and tear apart effective oratory. Line up a recorder to hear yourself, but be sure to sit down because you won’t like what you hear and you'll have to address your flaws. This kind of mumbling happens most often when you’re nervous and unprepared, so keep in mind: The more prepared you are, the less nervous you’ll be.

Now, you can’t pay too much attention to these things when you have little time to prepare, but you’ll be less likely to pepper your speech with them if you pace yourself; try not to rush through anything and keep your focus. The more deliberate and properly paced your speech is, the better it will be.
Enunciate
You should speak warmly but with audible deliberation. You are, first and foremost, serving as an entertainer; second, you’re a vehicle for information. Sometimes nerves or a lack of confidence get the better of us and lead to mumbling or speaking quickly. Neither trait will benefit you.

Returning to Winston Churchill, ostensibly his voice was drab and boring compared to more fiery speakers, but Churchill always got his words out through effective enunciation; he modulated his tone according to emphasis and never wavered, delivering each word with warm but clear deliberation.
Know your stuff and stick to it
Have you ever been to a wedding in which the best man’s toast meanders without direction right into an inappropriate story? It was an instance of poorly placed bravado; the best man believed he could improvise. He couldn’t, and neither can you. It’s a fool’s assumption that one can extemporize; before you know it, you’ll be spitting out "ums" and "uhs" and finding yourself totally lost -- and your audience, also lost, will tune you out.

The greater point is to be the room’s expert on your topic. When you start to stray, you scatter the force of your speech, the punch of your point. You can keep an audience on the edge of their seats only if you remain focused; a digression or an aside makes for dangerous territory, and once you’ve ditched your audience, there’s no getting them back.
Animate
In short, let body language and visual aids take the place of words, either to make a point or to accentuate one. Your voice doesn’t have to do all the work. This is the difference between reading a speech and public speaking.
Practice
The final word on public speaking is practice. Do it often, even if you don’t have much time. There is no substitute. At the very least, you can benefit from memorizing your opening statement -- it gets you off on the right foot and helps settle your nerves. Now, while you should always practice formal presentations many times, consider incorporating these skills into daily conversation. Your public speaking skills will grow dramatically as a result.
say it loud and say it proud
If no one has ever told you that you’re a great storyteller, you probably aren’t. The inference then is that you lack the public speaking skills to convey with efficacy any message or opinion to others. This may seem to matter less in general conversation with friends or colleagues, yet you never know when or in what manner it can hurt you.