Public Speaking Presentation: How To Start & Finish Your Speech

This 'Public Speaking Presentation' is the third part of the article also extracted from an article by Canadian-born Suzan St Maur, who is an international business writer and author based in the United Kingdom. In addition to her consultancy work for clients in Europe, the USA, Canada and Australia, she contributes articles to more than 150 business websites and publications worldwide, and has written eleven published books.

The fourth part of this article, "Speech Writing Skills" continues on the next page.

Public Speaking Presentation: Openers and Closers

Many people will tell you that a powerful opening and close of a speech are terribly important and in fact as long as those are good you can say pretty well what you like in between. I don't necessarily agree. I've seen (and written for) many speakers who have agonized during several sleepless nights over how to start their public speaking presentation with a big bang at the company sales conference, when all the time a simple, sometimes gently humorous opening is far easier - and more effective.

It helps here if we re-examine just why openers and closers are important in the first place. To put it politely, they help to locate the audience, to act as a signal that you're about to start talking to them about something interesting or that you've just finished telling them something interesting.

To put it crudely, sometimes the opener at least has to act as an alarm clock - waking the audience up after a narcolepsy-inducing previous speaker - or as air-raid siren, warning the audience to settle down, shut up and pay attention.

But even if the speaker prior to you has been intensely boring and has had the whole audience shifting from one numb seatbone to the other for 45 minutes, you don't necessarily have to go out there in a top hat and false nose riding a unicycle and playing a trombone at the same time. What will get the audience's attention is for you to go out there and be yourself.

Say something amusing, heart-warming, witty, whatever, as long as it's something you would say in "real life." You probably don't want to say something rude about the previous speaker, although it will be tempting, but an in-company joke if it's an in-company audience, or even a relevant quote by a famous person (there are numerous books and websites where you can find quotes) will instantly signal a major change and have the audience looking forward to what you have to say.

The opener and closer of your public speaking presentation doesn't have to be earth-shattering, but they do have to be part of you and your material. If you're naturally a quiet, private sort of person there's no way you should struggle with a passionate, emotive ending to your speech, even if others think you should be able to carry it off. One very important rule about giving speeches is if you don't think something will work for you on the night, you're right - it won't. Don't be talked into retaining anything you're not comfortable with, because something that's a small hiccup in rehearsals will become a major stumbling block on show day.

On-stage nervousness greatly magnifies any little glitch in your public speaking presentation. If a few, self-effacing words of "thanks for listening" are all you think you will feel comfortable with at the end of your speech then that's what you say, even if you use a speechwriter who tells you otherwise (and some of my colleagues would.)

Spoken Speech

Once you have created your structure and decided how best to open and close your speech, the best way to ensure it sounds natural is to switch on an audio recorder, talk through the structure to yourself, and transcribe the recording. (It's a terrible job, but worth it.) Now, edit that transcript and tidy it up a bit, but don't take out the commas and the periods. Long sentences in speeches can leave you gasping for breath and losing the plot. And don't add in anything you wouldn't say in real life.

Spoken speech is simply, only, what it says it is. It is monologue or dialogue as you would speak, not as you would write the same information or thoughts down on paper or screen. All you have to do is forget trying to write out your speech material (or your drama dialogue or narration) and merely say it out loud or in your mind. Then commit those words to paper or screen, a few at a time or in short phrases and sentences. If it sounds right, it is right, and if it sounds wrong it is wrong even though it may look right on paper or screen.

Even great playwrights interpret spoken speech in exactly the same, uncomplicated way. Where you see their tremendous talent and creative genius is in how they use that simple technique to capture the uniqueness of the characters and scenarios they create. Think Molière, Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Jack Rosenthal, Alan Bennett and many more. Their characters' dialogue may seem unnatural to us when we hear it but that's because the character is surreal and extraordinary - and the dialogue is, in fact, perfectly natural for that character.

I've lost count of the number of public speaking presentations I've listened to (not written by me I hasten to add) that came over as completely different from the personality of the speaker. This happens because many people believe that giving business presentations is a serious artform where the grander the verbiage and more ostentatious and self-important the oratory the more points they'll score with their audience. It also happens because people write bad speeches so they are virtually indistinguishable from bad brochure copy or website text or any other manifestation of overstuffed corporate-babble.

Either way, it's wrong. If you write stuff for yourself to say that reads like it was written for some pontificating old codger or worse still, for some formal brochure copy, you will come across as very two-dimensional, shallow, and dishonest. You will also make yourself very uncomfortable and stumble over the words and phrases, which adds "incompetent" to the list in the previous sentence.

Okay, you shouldn't give a speech in the same ribald style you might use to tell a joke to your friends in the changing rooms at the gym or the 19th hole at the Golf Club. But you must ALWAYS be, and write for, yourself and your own personality. Unless you're a trained actor, the only way you're going to come over well is if you are as at ease as possible with your material. This won't happen if you write words and phrases that may look very eloquent on paper, but which are lumpy mouthfuls to say.

The right public speaking presentation style is always conversational. The best speakers always talk to audiences as if they were talking to a friend over a cup of coffee - a natural, friendly, personal style. Gone are the days when being in a business environment meant that you should never use a short word where a long one would do. Only lawyers and doctors do this nowadays and that's largely because of their respective jargon which they're stuck with. (Can you think of a short way of saying "antitrypanosomiasis?" In fact it might be "drugs to cure sleeping sickness," but even that's pretty long.)

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