3 Tips to Help Your Speeches Stand Out
If you’ve been asked to speak at an event, congratulations. It’s an honor to be considered enough of an expert to be asked to share your knowledge. However, not all speeches will yield the same results. You’ve seen speakers who drone on and on, putting the audience to sleep. If you want to avoid this problem, follow these tips.
Involve People’s Senses
You’ve probably heard the saying that people remember part of what they hear, more of what they see and even more of what they see and hear. The more senses you can involve in your speech, the more memorable you will be. Include a power point presentation or charts for your most important points.
If you can find ways to incorporate smell, taste and touch, people won’t forget about your speech. In fact, they may even be talking about it for weeks. For instance, you can compare your topic to a food or texture, which will help people remember the details. Get creative to ensure people have something they easily recognize to associate with a new word or concept. This will help them understand what you’re saying, remember the topic and find it interesting.
Tell a Story
No matter what topic you’re discussing, it will be more memorable if you can make it personal. Tell a story that relates to the topic and brings home the overall point of your speech. You may think some topics have no possible story, but you can always find something to incorporate. Win bonus points if you make the story funny or poignant.
When you tell the story is also important. Open with one to capture your audience’s attention early. Close with a story to leave a lasting impression and as a way to wrap up the point to the entire speech. Another option is to break up a boring topic by telling a story somewhere in the middle at a particularly serious point.
Speak Clearly
No matter how interesting the subject you’re presenting, how fabulous the props or how funny the stories you tell, your speech won’t captivate anyone if they can’t understand you. People who get nervous when speaking have a tendency to speed up their speech, which makes it more difficult to be more understood.
Instead, slow down and form all of your words clearly. Avoid slang and even contractions to ensure every word is clearly spoken. If you have a strong accent or trouble using certain words, you can hire a speech coach to help you learn to enunciate better. A business speech coach trains you to speak your words correctly and to reduce your accent.
Being a public speaker doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but many people have to speak in front of an audience for work or other reasons. By following these tips and learning how to make a speech more interesting and memorable, even the most reticent person can learn to be a good speaker that others enjoy listening to.
Claudette Roche is a dialect coach who teaches accent reduction in the Los Angeles area. She teaches foreign and American accents to actors and business persons/executives. In 2010 she was named as one of The Top 5 Voice Coaches by Hollywood Weekly Magazine.