5 THINGS TO CONSIDER WHILE PREPARING A SPEECH (week 9)

Hello beautiful people, thank you for stopping by again. If this is your first time, welcome. This is a lifestyle blog that addresses real life issues.

Todays post is about 5 things to consider while preparing a speech. If you are not preparing a speech at the moment, read the post anyways because you know, no knowledge is wasted.

A man on stage, specking to an audience.

Top 5 Things to Consider While Preparing a Speech

1.  CONSIDER THE SUBJECT:

You might have been given a theme or topic to speck on or it may be totally up to you to decide what you will be speaking on. Either way, you need to know what you will be speaking about. Take out time to study the subject. For every minute you spend speaking, you would need about an hour of preparation. So if you have a 10-minute long speech, you need at least 10 hours of study and research on the subject. However, if you are a professional in the field, you might not need that much time to understand the subject of your speech but you will defiantly need time to put your knowledge and experience in order and context of the particular speaking engagement.

2.CONSIDER THE AUDIENCE:

Your audience has sacrificed their time to listen to you, do not waste their time. Do some research to find out more about your audience? Consider the following questions:

·      What is the average age and gender of my audience?

·      What is the education level of my audience?

·      Will my audience be hostile, supportive or neutral?

·      Will my audience have to be convinced on the importance of the subject?

·      What is the attention span of my audience?

No matter how beautiful, well organized, graceful and refined a speech is, the only judge whether or not a speech is good or bad is the audience.

3.  ORGANIZE YOUR SPEECH:

Make sure you have an Introduction, a body and a conclusion. Use good transitions to go from one part of your speech to the other.

4. INCLUDE ANALOGIES:

An analogy is a comparison of an idea or event. It aims at explaining an idea by comparing it to something that is familiar. It can be a real story that emphasizes a concept. As much as analogies are good to consider, it is important to make sure they make sense and can be understood by your audience. You can make sense out of an analogy by explaining how it relates to the concept you are comparing the analogy to.

5. CONCLUDE WITH A BANG:

Conclusions must be short and conclusive. Your conclusion has to be formal and clearly defined. A good conclusion can be used to save a bombed speech. Sometimes a very bad speech is saved by a very good conclusion.

I hope this post has been helpful. This blog post was inspired by some important concepts I got after reading “How To Talk So People Will Listen” by Steve Brown.

I recommend this book for anyone who is interested in developing their communication skills.

You can find the book online.

Five Basic Public Speaking Tips