4 Steps to write a great speech - ArtursAdvice

You will need to hold a speech. Maybe you know it because you have to hold a presentation tomorrow or you maybe don't know it, yet. Sooner or later you will need to hold a speech or a presentation or just need to convince your best friend, that pickles are better on a sandwich than fresh cucumbers. Whatever it is you need to speak about, you might wonder where to start. This blog post is here to help you out. It won't tell you all the cool stuff you can put into your presentation, it will help you make a presentation where you can put cool stuff in.

Step 1: Collect Data

Before you can talk about something you need to know the stuff you are talking about. You don't need to be an expert when you attempt to write a speech, but you should be familiar with the topic when you hold it. You don't want your friend to surprise with a fact about pickles, you didn't know before. In the time of the internet, this is quite easy. Just google the word and open up all results on the first page. Then read it and make notes. The results might link you to more results, which you should also read. Just a small remark: Watch out that your sources are credible. "Pickles will help you grow the beard you always wanted to have", sounds like a great argument, but probably isn't true. If you struggle to find good sources on the internet or just want more credible information, check out your local library for books about your topic. The more you read, the more you understand about what you are speaking about. Of course, the amount of information you should collect depends on the length and importance of the speech. Don't write down 200 pages about pickles for a three-minute speech. All this reading doesn't only increase the information that is contained in your speech, it also increases your self-confidence when holding it by a lot. You know what you are talking about and if your friend has a critical question about pickles, you can answer him with confidence. A last small remark: You are not Wikipedia and nobody needs or wants you to be Wikipedia. If you name every single detail you read about pickles, nobody will want to listen to you, not even your best friend.

Step 2: Choose the core material

After extensive research, you have enough material to talk for hours. That is not what you want to do and that is even less what the audience wants to hear. You have to choose the information you want to convey to your audience. It should be the amount of information you can convey in one speech, so it depends on the length of your speech. This process can be hard because you found out a lot and everything seems important. Maybe everything is important, but the audience just hasn't the mental capacity to understand all the knowledge you learned in hours of reading in a single speech. So just cut it down, be merciless and remove everything but the core material. If you are wondering what the core material is, I can't tell you. It is your speech and it is also you, who collected all the material, so the only person that can make this is decision is, of course, you. There is no wrong answer. Maybe there is a right answer, but you will never come even close to it anyways so just pick whatever feels right. It is still just a speech. The world doesn't depend on it and even if it does, you can always only do your best.

Step 3: Categories the importance

In the last step, you tried to filter only as much material as you can communicate in the timeframe of your speech. Naturally, your estimation will be wrong to some extend. You definitely should practice your speech multiple times and adjust the text accordingly, but things can always develop differently in unexpected ways. Murphies Law, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”, has a lot of possible manifestations. All you can do is deal with it. What is the best strategy for that? Talking faster? That is what most people do, but again the audience has a limited mental capacity like all human beings. You can finish your talk in time by speaking faster, but then the audience won't remember your speech and is that what you worked so hard for? I don't think so. No, just taking longer than you intended to, is also not a great solution for exactly the same reason. Why not instead just skip some sentences? In the best case, you skip the less important sentences. That is why step three is to categorize the core material in "must", "should" and "can". Whatever happens, you must talk about everything in the "must" category. You should also talk about the material in the "should" category, but you can skip it when the time is critical. Finally, you can talk about the "can" material, but it is the first thing you skip when the time runs short.

Step 4: Design the speech

The last steps were to find out what to talk about, the informational content of your speech. Maybe even more important than what to talk about is how to talk about it to achieve your goal. Maybe you are wondering: My goal? Yes, that is what part three is for. Every speech should have a purpose. Maybe the purpose is just to entertain the audience, often it is to communicate a message for example that pickles are better on sandwiches than fresh cucumbers. A speech without purpose is a pointless speech. The details of designing a speech could fill probably even a book or two, so I will just give you seven questions you can answer as guidance.

1. Why is there a presentation/speech?
2. Who is the target group?
3. Why is the audience there?
4. How is the presentation/speech helpful for the audience?
5. Which effect do you want to achieve on the audience?
6. What is the first and last impression you want to leave?
7. Are the six c(concise, clear, concrete, correct, compact, congruent) fulfilled?

There is a lot more I could tell you about holding a great speech and I will in future blog posts, that I will link here. Before I wrap up what you just read, let me give you a piece of advice to number five: Don't try to achieve an effect, that feels unnatural to you. If you a calm person and try to make the audience furious about something or when you try to sell pickles, but believe in fresh cucumbers, then it won't feel authentic and you won't achieve any effect.

In a nutshell, the strategy to get a great presentation is to read a lot about the topic, choose the most core material, categorise the parts according to their importance and then design the speech with the seven guiding questions.

I hope this article helps you to hold a great speech or convince me to put pickles on my sandwiches instead of fresh cucumbers. Please tell me in the comments how it went and have a great day.