Why are people afraid of addressing an audience? The most common answer to that is that they lack confidence. In teaching courses in public speaking, we have seen the most timid person become a tiger on the platform. All it requires is the time to show the individual what they can accomplish.
Mind you, the basics can be learned but it is application and practice that creates the really great speakers. We learned how far practice can take a person from our late friend Charles Templeton. Chuck got his early start from listening to the evangelists who came to Toronto when he was young. He used to practice their styles in front of a mirror. He had learned how they used words and how they used their bodies for emphasis He would admit with a laugh that he really started out to be a cartoonist but found that it was much easier just to talk. That confidence in speaking never left him, even after he quit the church, tried politics and found his niche in the media.
But confidence can be deceiving. In making a brief presentation to city council a couple weeks ago, we were overconfident and did not do well. People who watched on television said that it was fine but we knew we lost our place in our notes a couple times and we could have done better if we had practiced it a few times.
But we really prefer to write speeches than deliver them. We learned very early in our career that we had a knack for being able to hear the person say the words in our mind as we wrote them. It is also the way good dialogue is created when writing for radio and television or producing fiction.
The key to speech writing is to build on audience agreement. You layer agreements through the speech, building acceptance of what the person is telling the audience. You structure the sentences to allow the audience to react to the speech at planned intervals. You create applause points for example to enable the audience to react.
A person for whom we wrote a speech recently tried to change some of the sentence structure. He was correct in his grammar but it was wrong for the speech. We convinced him to use our wording. He was impressed when the audience proved the point by feeling free to applaud at what he thought was the wrong way to end some sentences.
Good writing is not always a good speech. Speech writers research the audience and then research the topic. They know how the words are understood. There are many examples of that.
Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream and he used heavy repetition to drive home his point in a brilliant speech that was heard around the world. Abraham Lincoln told the audience at Gettysburg that few would remember his words that day. Millions of American school children know he was wrong. Marc Anthony told the Roman mob that he came to bury Caesar, not to praise him. He lied. He turned the mob.
A good speech is communication at its most basic. It identifies with the audience. It uses words that are easy for the audience to understand. It employs emotion. It challenges. It motivates. It informs. It paints pictures. It asks for commitment. It is memorable. It is visceral. It shows leadership. And you thought it was just another speech.
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