Do you want to know important tips for giving a good speech? If you say yes then this blog will be quite helpful for you.
Knowing how to give a nice speech is a skill that can be useful in a variety of situations.
Students’ public speaking guidelines try to alleviate the nervousness that can arise when giving presentations or speeches in class. These suggestions can also help people with a social anxiety disorder (SAD) who struggle to speak in front of a group or tell a tale among friends.
You’ll almost certainly be asked to give speeches or presentations in class. Brief remarks to open gatherings or thank participants are required if you participate in volunteer groups. Then there are speeches for special occasions such as weddings, as well as speeches that you may be required to give at work. Even if they don’t get engaged in an area like politics, where the ability to give a good speech becomes even more crucial, the average individual will be needed to give a lot of speeches.
Tips for Public Speaking
It helps to be as prepared as possible if you have SAD and need to give a speech in elementary school, high school, college, or university. There are, however, tactics you can employ to lessen anxiety and battle the impulse to stay at home and pretend to be sick.
Practice
Even the best presenters prepare their presentations in advance. With a recording device or video camera, practise out loud and then watch yourself to see how you can improve. If you’re feeling adventurous, try it out on a friend or family member and get their opinion.
• Talk about what you know: If at all possible, choose a speech or presentation topic that you are passionate about and know a lot about. The audience will sense your enthusiasm for the subject, and you will be less nervous knowing that you have a wealth of knowledge to draw on when other students ask you questions.
• Focus on your message: Anxiety is less likely to spiral out of control when you concentrate on the task at hand. Concentrate on the main point of your speech or presentation, and make it your objective to communicate it to the rest of your class.
• Attract the audience’s attention: The majority of your peers will pay attention for at least the first 20 seconds, so seize that opportunity. Begin with a fascinating fact or a compelling tale that relates to your topic.
• Stick to one key message: If you stick to one main theme, your peers will learn more. To support your overarching message, tie different aspects of your speech to the main theme. When you try to cover too much territory, other students may become overwhelmed.
Storytelling
Other students’ attention is drawn to stories, which convey a message more effectively than facts and data. Use a tale to explain a point in your presentation whenever possible.
How to Get Ready
If you have social anxiety disorder, being prepared to speak in public is extremely vital. Feeling confident and prepared to deliver your speech might help alleviate nervousness. You can prepare by doing the following things:
• Practice speaking in front of the class: If you have access to the classroom where you will be speaking outside of class hours, go ahead and practise speaking in front of it. Make any necessary audio-visual arrangements, and rehearse standing in the exact location where you will deliver your speech.
• Gain Experience: Volunteer as often as possible to speak in front of your class. When a question is posed, be the first to raise your hand. Each time you give a public speech, your confidence will develop.
• Watch other Presenters: Spend some time watching other speakers who excel at what they do. Practice mimicking their confidence and flair.
• Plan your Speech: Each speech should include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Plan your presentation so that the other students are aware of what to expect.
Take Control of Your Anxiety
Taking actions to alleviate your anxiety might also make public speaking more manageable. Some of the things you can do include:
• Tell someone about your anxiety: If you’re giving a presentation in front of a high school or college class, talk to your teacher or professor about your worries about public speaking. If you’re in elementary or high school, talk to your parents, a teacher, or a guidance counsellor about your anxieties. Sharing your feelings can sometimes help you overcome stage fear.
• Visualize confidence: Imagine yourself giving a confident speech. Imagine being anxiety-free while engaging your students in class. Although it may appear to be a stretch right now, visualisation is a strong technique for shifting your mood. This method is used by elite athletes to increase their competition performance.
• Pick a friendly face: If you’re feeling nervous, find one of your classmates (or someone who appears to be pleasant) and pretend you’re chatting solely to them.
Keep a Clear Head
Keep in mind that your classmates are on your side. Consider a period when you were a member of the audience and the student giving the speech or presentation was visibly frightened. Did you have a negative impression of that student? More than likely, you were moved by sympathy and wanted to help that individual feel better by smiling or nodding.
Remember that your peers mostly want you to succeed and feel at ease. If the audience is not on your side, or you are subjected to bullying or social exclusion, talk to a parent, teacher, or guidance counsellor about it.
Advice on Public Speaking
Knowing what makes a good speech can sometimes boost your confidence. Before you have to speak in front of an audience, concentrate on some of the following elements and rehearse them.
• Develop your own style: Work on developing your own particular style as a public speaker in addition to mimicking good speakers. You will feel more at ease in front of the class if you incorporate your own personality into your speaking style. Telling personal anecdotes that relate to your theme is a terrific method for other students to learn more about you.
• Avoid filler words: “essentially,” “well,” and “uh” are all filler words that offer nothing to your speech. When you feel compelled to use one of these words, practise remaining silent.
• Change the Pitch (high vs. low), volume (loud vs. soft), and speed (fast vs. slow) of your words: Interesting speakers change the pitch (high vs. low), volume (loud vs. soft), and speed (fast vs. slow) of their phrases. As a result, your students will be more interested in what you have to offer.
• Make the audience laugh: Laughter is a terrific way to relax yourself and your classmates, and cracking jokes may be a great icebreaker at the start of a speech. Before you tell your jokes, practise timing and delivery and get feedback from a friend. Before you begin, double-check that they are appropriate for your students.
• Smiling: If everything else fails, you can always smile. Your peers will see you as a friendly speaker and will be more interested in what you have to say.
Please don’t Apologise.
Make no apologies if you make a mistake. In any case, your classmates are unlikely to have noticed. It’s pointless to linger on faults that you probably only detected unless you need to fix a fact or figure.
If you make a mistake because your hands are trembling or something similar, try to laugh it off by saying things like, “I wasn’t this nervous when I woke up this morning!” This can assist to relieve some of the tension in the situation.
11 Important Tips for Giving a Good Speech
1. Get some practice with your microphone technique.
Bad microphone technique undermines a speech more than anything else. You can be Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, and Barack Obama all rolled into one improbable but brilliant speech-giver, but it won’t matter if all the audience can hear are the snuffly sounds of your breathing, which are painfully amplified by the fact that you’re standing too close to the microphone. Similarly, if you’re positioned too far away from the microphone and your audience can’t hear you, they’ll probably be generous and strain their ears for approximately thirty seconds before giving up.
To acquire a microphone and a critical friend (preferably in the setting where you’ll be giving the speech) and have the buddy tell you whether you’re standing too near or too far away, as well as pointing out anything else that comes off as odd. For example, if you pull the microphone off its stand and walk around the stage with it, you’ll come across like a stand-up comic – so only do this if you want to convey that impression.
2. Keep it brief.
No one will mind if your speech is a little short, especially at a party or a wedding; it will just give them more time to inspect the canapés. If you’re giving a speech for a class that will be graded, you should make it a priority to stay inside the time limits. Even in these situations, if you’ve been given a 10-15 minute speech to give, it’s usually best to stick closer to the 10 minute mark than the 15 minute mark. Simply put, even if your speech is bad, your audience will most likely put up with it for ten minutes. They’ll be battling for a long time.
This should not limit what you can cover; in the film Up, the entire devastating love storey of Carl and Ellie is told in less than 12 minutes. Do you really need that much more time to make your points? To achieve brevity, write out the speech you’d deliver if you had unlimited time, then remove anything that appears unnecessary or dull.
3. Think about what your target audience wants to hear.
If you’re giving a speech in class for an assignment, your audience will most certainly want to hear “the bell ringing for lunch,” which you can’t help them with. In other situations, though, think about what your audience wants to hear and what you want to convey, and try to have as much overlap as possible.
What you want to say in a political speech, for example, is why your party deserves votes; what your audience wants to hear is what your party would do for them if they achieved power. Hopefully, rather than focusing exclusively on what you want to say and disappointing your audience, it should be able to compose a speech that fits both sets of demands.
4. Decide on a theme and stay with it.
Here’s a goal for giving a speech: someone sitting towards the back, who spends at least two-thirds of it fiddling with their phone and mainly thinking about how long it will be before lunch, should still be able to give a relatively correct answer to the question, “what was it about?” If you’re expected to give a speech in support of nuclear deterrence, for example, both the topic and your viewpoint on it should be obvious.
To use the nuclear deterrent as an example, this means not talking about jobs for a while, then the wider economy, then the North-South divide, then Scottish independence, then Ukraine with a brief digression into South Ossetia, before squeaking out “and that’s why we should renew Trident!” seconds before you run out of time – no matter how timely that cornucopia of topics may feel (and they are all relevant, albeit tenuously). It means that, even if you have to spend some time explaining a more complicated concept, you must be succinct and return to your main point as fast as possible.
5. Slow down your speech.
When they’re on stage, most people speak faster than they realise, especially if they’re scared. However, if you’re babbling, no one will be able to understand what you’re saying. Thankfully, with a little work and practise, this one is simple to repair. To begin, determine how quickly you’re speaking: make a word count for your speech and then time yourself delivering it. A fast speaker may speak at 160 words per minute, a slow speaker at 100 words per minute, and an average speaker at 130 words per minute.
When giving a formal speech, you should talk slowly. While this will vary by culture and setting, 120 words per minute is a good target to shoot for; it’s slow enough that everyone should be able to understand you yet fast enough that you won’t put them to sleep.
6. Crack a joke or two
This is a difficult tip to follow because there are numerous traps in the realm of joke telling. For example, you could be tempted to include an inside joke that three of your pals will get and think amusing, but that the rest of the room will find very perplexing. Avoid this by making sure that any jokes, witty references, or anything else along those lines is accessible to everyone in the room.
Nonetheless, if you can crack a joke or two, it can be a good way to break up a speech and keep the audience’s attention. A little self-deprecation (but not too much!) or the usage of classic joke forms like “the scene was chaotic; it looked like a bomb had gone off and we didn’t know where to begin on repairs – but enough about the hen party…” Even if you’re not too confident, work well. If you’re not a comic, don’t convert it into a stand-up comedy sketch, don’t wait for laughter that doesn’t come, and don’t make jokes at the expense of anyone you don’t know can take it.
7. Don’t be scared to say something more than once if necessary.
You’ve undoubtedly heard some of these terms recently if you follow US or UK politics in any way: take back control, make America great again, long-term economic plan, son of a bus driver. Three of them have already led their parties or individuals to electoral triumph; the fourth remains to be seen. For example, the phrase “son of a bus driver” relates to Sadiq Khan, the current Mayor of London. Almost no one in London is unaware of what their Mayor’s father did for a job. In the meantime, many of them are unlikely to recall his opponent Zac Goldsmith’s name, much less anything he said during the campaign.
The point is that practise makes perfect. If you want folks to remember your main subject, you’ll have to express it more than once, according to point 4. Unless you’re in a school situation where they’ll be reprimanded if they don’t, don’t assume that everyone has paid attention to what you’ve said.
8. Use only the visual aids you require.
This tip can be used for both PowerPoints and notes. If you don’t need either (and your assignment allows it), go ahead and do so. You’re not interacting with your audience every time you’re looking over your notes or up at the screen, fidgeting with the laptop to get the slide to go on, fighting with a video that won’t work, or failing to read your own handwriting. Someone uncomfortably reading aloud the bullet points on their PowerPoint slides is always going to be better than someone giving a well-written, clear speech without notes.
If you absolutely must make a presentation – for example, because photos must be included – use as little text as possible, ideally none. That way, even if folks in the rear can’t see the screen due to the sea of heads in front of them, they’ll be able to understand what you’re saying.
9. Have a friend check for awkward etiquette.
When speaking in public, mannerisms that are perfectly acceptable in everyday life become awkward and weird. Perhaps you fidget with your hair or cuffs, rock back and forth on the balls of your feet, or reach your palm to your cheek while speaking. When you’re in regular conversation, no one will notice, but when you’re on stage, it will be all they see.
Some of these may be avoided easily; for example, if you have long hair that you like to twirl or mess with, tie it up. Get the critical buddy who helped you figure out your microphone method to tell you what other mannerisms you have, and try to repress the more irritating ones.
10. Take a look around the space.
Talking about eye contact, as well as giving a speech, frequently makes natural eye contact much more difficult. All of a sudden, you’re on stage, and you have no idea how to look at a gathering of people properly. Some presenters deal with this by addressing their entire speech to a point in the middle distance; others do it by addressing their entire speech to a specific person at the rear.
This is obviously not fun for that person, who will most likely spend the entire experience feeling quite uncomfortable, but it isn’t that strange for the rest of us.
If you can manage it, glance slowly and steadily across the room, aiming to create eye contact with a diverse variety of people, before returning to the middle distance and repeating the process. This must be done slowly and steadily, or you may appear to have just smelled smoke and are looking for a fire exit before the stampede begins.
11. Don’t be afraid of a positive response.
Your audience will react to your speech if it is actually entertaining, hilarious, motivating, or any of the other qualities you strive for. Depending on the situation, there may be laughing, applause, or even a little cheering. This can be intimidating because there’s no way to prepare for it while you’re practising your speech in front of your bedroom mirror. Even the finest speakers can make mistakes here, such as jumping right into what they were going to say next without waiting for the laughing or applause to stop, or by looking terribly awkward while it’s going on.
It’s a stumbling block that’s typically avoided by being aware that it could happen. It’s fine to smile, glance up, wait for people to finish clapping or otherwise reacting positively, and then continue with your speech — it’s as simple as that. You may even say “thank you” before continuing, safe in the assurance that everything is going smoothly.
Conclusion
It’s understandable to be nervous the first time you have to speak in front of a class. However, if your dread persists, disrupts your everyday life, or keeps you up at night, it may be beneficial to seek treatment for your anxiety.
Talking to a parent, teacher, or counsellor about how you’re feeling is a good idea. If that doesn’t work, ask your doctor to schedule an appointment for you. Severe public speaking anxiety is a real condition that can be treated.
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