Speaking Well – Part 2

Okay, so we spent last time laying the groundwork for how to approach getting better at public speaking by identifying the main hurdle to speaking well as fear, and the main antidote for fear as practice, both in the short term (practice this speech so you’re not as nervous delivering it), and in the long term (give lots of speeches, so that your baseline level of nerves is lower). Now let’s actually dig into what to practice: what to say, how to say it, and how to hold yourself as you say it.

Crafting a Speech – Clearly Structure Compelling Points

The first, and most important, step in giving a great, compelling speech is to have something interesting and worthwhile to say. As we talked about back in the post on persuasion, the way that we figure out what to say is to consider our audience: who are they? what do they want? what do they find interesting and credible? Knowing our audience, we compare that with our goal, shaped by our values and part of our wider strategy, and we look for the overlap. If you try to push your interests on an audience who doesn’t care about them, or just as bad, try to address topics which don’t align with your own values and goals, you’re going to have, at best, a shallow and boring speech, and at worst, something actively counter-productive. Contrawise, if you are speaking on a topic of genuine interest to both you and your audience, that can help both you and them reach your goals, you don’t have to rely on fancy rhetorical devices, clever word choice, or flawless delivery nearly as much. So, as we jump into looking at some of the nuts and bolts of putting a speech together, remember that all of this should be building on a solid foundation of relevant material pitched toward your audience’s wants and needs.

A Quick Word on Structure – It’s Easier to Follow a Well-Organized Speech

In looking back over the past posts, I was somewhat surprised to realize I hadn’t discussed structure in speaking and writing yet. We’ll dive into a specific technique for structuring our thinking, and thus our communication, when we get to writing well, but a quick primer will be helpful before we discuss the different parts of your speech.

Most of us learned sometime around 7th grade the venerable “Five Paragraph Essay.” In case that’s a bit hazy, the basic format is “Introduction, Body Paragraph, Body Paragraph, Body Paragraph, Conclusion.” Despite the name we’re most familiar with, this approach actually originated in public speaking, and was worked out by ancient Greek rhetoricians as a good, solid default for giving a speech that your audience can follow along with, understand, and remember, even without the aid of written or visual aids.

The introduction tells the audience the main idea (or “thesis”) and provides some context. A good introduction should clearly get across what your main point is, but perhaps without enough evidence to convince a neutral audience. In other words, if an audience only heard your introduction, they should know what your claim is, whether they buy it or not.

Get Them Hooked – Grab Their Attention Straightaway

The first and last 30 seconds are the most worthwhile “real estate” in a speech. All but the most hostile or disengaged of audiences will be paying attention when you first start, and most will perk up again when they sense you winding down. The opening and closing of your speech also take advantage of the primacy and recency effects. Basically, we tend to remember and engage with the first and last things we hear more than everything else in the middle. As such, we want to take advantage of this natural tendency and give our audience something worth paying attention to right away, so that they’re more likely to keep paying attention as we elaborate on those worthwhile points.

The Hook – Get Their Attention Quickly

As I mentioned, most audiences will start out willing to pay attention to you, but unfortunately, especially in this world of readily-available distraction, that attention may start to wander fairly quickly. One way to mitigate this is to make the first words you speak something that grabs attention, a “hook.” This might be a shocking statistic, a bold, counter-intuitive claim, or a vivid, emotionally-arresting scene. The goal here is to say something that gets your audience to sit up and take notice. You want to create a sense of “wait, where is he going with this?” so that they want to follow along and stay engaged. Such a hook is especially effective if it is technically accurate, but by the end of the speech, can be seen in a totally different light than is implied by the bald statement (more on this when we talk about closings). There’s one caveat to this “making your claim clear” that we’ll talk about more below.

Your three (by default) body paragraphs are where you make your main points and provide the evidence for them. This is the “meat” of your speech, and should make up roughly 60-80% of what you have to say. Each of these should be like a mini-speech of its own, with a topic sentence taking the place of an introduction, the evidence taking the place of body paragraphs, and the conclusion/transition sentence wrapping up that point. You might think of it as “fractal structure.” Your evidence should be chosen to be credible and compelling to your audience – a room full of engineers will pay attention to and care about very different evidence than a room full of artists.

Lastly, your conclusion recapitulates your points and reminds the audience of why they support your main point/thesis. This is a place both to remind your audience of what they have heard and make crystal clear why it was significant. If making a persuasive speech, it’s helpful to close with a “call to action,” where you ask your audienc explicitly to take whatever action it is that you want them to do, having been convinced by your points.

Make (Some of) Your Ethos Clear Up Front

If you remember Aristotle’s three pillars of rhetoric, you’ll recall that ethos is the speaker’s credibility – why should I listen to you. It’s helpful to bring this to mind early in the speech, as it will make everything else you say easier to believe. Of course, the gold standard here is that your audience actually knows and trusts you, as a real, individual person, but sometimes we don’t have this luxury – we’re speaking to a large group of strangers, say. Next best is to briefly provide some evidence that you know what you’re talking about and can be trusted – mentioning prior relevant experience, credentials, or achievements as a way of introducing yourself can go a long way in getting your audience’s “buy in” right in your introduction.

Pathos – Establish the Emotional Stakes Early

Another of Aristotle’s pillars that it is helpful to bring in early is pathos, the emotional content of your speech. Your hook is a great way to introduce this aspect of your speech right from the beginning, but you can also highlight the emotional side of things as you clarify why you’re speaking about whatever your topic is. If your audience gets the impression they’re in for a dry rehearsal of facts, they’re going to tune out pretty quickly. Instead, as you paint the big picture of what you’ll be diving into, try to bring in some of the feeling of why this topic does or should matter to them.

Lay Out Where You’re Going with a “Road Map”

Toward the end of your introduction, you’ll want to clearly spell out what you’re going to talk about, in order. The best way to do this is with the humble “road map sentence.” This can and should be fairly simple and straightforward, something like “as we talk about how to deliver a speech, we’ll cover content, voice, and body language.” Such a sentence helps your audience orient toward the structure that you’ve prepared, and to keep track of where in that structure you are as the speech goes on.

Your Main Points – Present Credible, Compelling Evidence to Convince Your Audience

The bulk of your speech will be you making your arguments in support of your main point. As mentioned above, what you say will depend heavily on who your audience is and what your goal in addressing them is. Generally speaking, your arguments should answer a why or how question about your main point/thesis, and your evidence should answer why or how questions about those arguments.

Direct against Indirect – Make Your Claim or Set Up What Is to Be Determined

Above, I stated that usually, an audience ought to know what your main claim or point is just from hearing the introduction – it should function like the one-minute version of your speech in a nutshell. Doing it this way is known as the “direct approach.” You make your claim, back it up with evidence, and close with re-stating why that evidence is convincing. In most situations, especially in the business world, this direct approach is helpful: it gets to the point, it makes the “so what” of everything you’re presenting clear, and if your audience’s attention wanders, they’ll still have gotten the gist of it.

On the other hand, some situations call for the “indirect approach.” Here, you make clear what question is to be answered by your speech in the introduction, but you wait until you’ve presented the evidence to give your answer to that question. For example, imagine you’re making a pitch within a company to determine whether to launch Product A or Product B. In the direct approach, you might say “I believe we should launch Product B due to it’s strong tests in the youth market, high performance in Europe, and its excellent spin-off opportunities.” For the indirect approach, on the other hand, you might instead say “We are going to take a look at the case to be made for Products A and B. In looking at testing in the youth market, Product B does better. Likewise, so far, Product B has done better in Europe. Finally, Product B seems to have more spin-off opportunities than Product A. Therefore, I propose that we move forward with Product B instead of Product A.”

Do you see the difference here? In both cases, I made clear that the speech is about a decision between Product A and B, but in the direct approach, I revealed my conclusion right up front, whereas in the indirect approach, I held off on stating my conclusion until after sharing the evidence. The indirect approach can be more useful with audiences made up of experts or technically-trained people, who want to see “how you got there” and are interested and able to follow along in the getting there. Another case where we might prefer the indirect approach is with potentially hostile audiences. If you walk into the room and everyone is wearing Product A t-shirts, coming right out and saying “I’m team Product B!” might alienate them to the point that they won’t even listen to your evidence, however reasonable and well-supported it might be.

The Power of Three – A Rhetorically “Complete” Number

So far, in talking about the structure of your speech, I’ve assumed three body paragraphs. Strictly speaking, you’re not limited to three body paragraphs. You might have compelling reasons to use two, or four, or even five. That said, there’s a reason I’ve been assuming three. In most cultures, and very much so in the West, three is seen as a number of wholeness or completeness. If I make two points, that implies a dichotomy – pros and cons, right and wrong, helpful and unhelpful. If I make four (or more) points, that implies I’ve selected a handful out of infinite possibilities. When I make three, points, on the other hand, that subconsciously implies that I’ve selected and presented everything that matters in a holistic way. Three also provides a natural rhythm folks are used to hearing: think of the three little pigs, the “boy who cried wolf,” or almost any joke to get a feel for how a tripartite structure just “feels” right. As such, I recommend making three arguments to support your main point unless you have compelling reasons to do otherwise.

Logos: Give Evidence that Your Audience Finds Credible and Compelling

The body of your speech is where you most lean into the logos, or logic, pillar of rhetoric. Before discussing that, though, I want to point out that the structured approach we’ve been taking (the five-paragraph “essay”) is another way of bringing logos into your speech: having a clear structure where each part supports the others is a way of speaking to the rational side of your audience. Within the body, however, is also where you will present your evidence. Evidence is anything you share with your audience to convince them that the arguments you’re making are right. If you were pitching your start up to investors, you might show them growth in users, or projected revenue, or how you’ve managed expenses. On the other hand, if you’re trying to get a talented graphic designer to come work for you, you might share very different things about your company: the culture, the autonomy given to employees, the opportunities to earn equity, or what have you. Good evidence should be both credible and compelling. Evidence is credible when the audience believes that what you’re telling them is accurate. Compelling evidence is evidence that your audience cares about. You want to make sure your evidence is both of these things, as credible evidence that isn’t compelling comes across as “so what?” fact-sharing, whereas compelling evidence that isn’t credible is clickbait and fake news – empty manipulations. To determine if your audience will find evidence credible, you need to think about what/who they trust, what kinds of evidence are meaningful (a group of sociologists might find a carefully controlled, peer-reviewed study very credible, whereas if you cite it to your girlfriend to justify your behavior in your relationship, she might not). To work out what your audience will find compelling, you need to think about what they care about, and what bearing this evidence has on that. Evidence that clearly points to an ability to get more of what they want, or that shows an obstacle to getting what they want, will be far more compelling than evidence that doesn’t obviously have anything to do with them.

Ethos: Remind Your Audience Why You Are Worth Listening To

We mentioned establishing a baseline of ethos in your introduction, but as with the other two pillars, it remains relevant throughout the whole speech. As you search for evidence that your audience will find credible, you also have to reflect on how the fact that you are the one sharing it might affect that. If you present evidence that purports to be perfectly objective and neutral, but just so happens to be obviously in your interest, your audience might question whether you’ve been cherry-picking. As we said above, the gold-standard for credibility is that your audience knows you and has a good reason to know what your biases, blind-spots, and interests are, and so can judge where to trust you and where to take you with a grain of salt. Where this is not possible, you might want to pepper into your speech some accounts of how you came across your evidence, how you evaluated it, and what makes you confident that evaluation was accurate. In the past, credentials were a reasonably effective way to signal competence and trustworthiness, but with the explosion of credentials granted and the growing distrust in the institutions that grant them, such shortcuts are less effective than they used to be. Perhaps the strongest signal of credibility in today’s day and age is to be able to demonstrate positive results that came from following your assumptions/arguments.

Pathos: Make the Emotional Connection Clear

Again, we already mentioned pathos when discussing introductions above, but it remains an important factor throughout your speech. If ethos is connected to how credible your audience finds your evidence (however logical), pathos is linked with how compelling they find it. Perfectly logically coherent evidence from an impeccably trustworthy source that has no bearing on anything you care about isn’t likely to move you to action. As we discussed back in the post on persuasion, emotions tend to be the strongest drivers of action – logos and ethos are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for actually doing something. For that, you need your audience to care, which they will only do if you find a way to speak to the relevant emotions. Often, it’s helpful to explicitly spell out the implications of a piece of evidence. Don’t just say “housing prices are high and look to stay that way,” say “housing prices are high and look to stay that way, which makes it harder for you to find a place to live.” Of course, how effective such direct connections will be will depend on how well you’ve understood your audience, so once again, learning everything you can about your audience is of the upmost importance.

Transition Sentences Help Your Audience Follow Along As You Go

Even though each body paragraph can be treated as a miniature speech unto itself in some respects, you are still trying to make them parts of an organic whole that is the full speech. To do this, you’ll want to work transition words into your closing and opening sentences for each paragraph/section. Simple, straightforward placemarkers like “first, second, third” are often over-looked, but are actually quite helpful. Stating what you just talked about and/or are about to talk about briefly can also be helpful: “Now that we’ve covered youth market testing, I’d like to discuss performance in the European market.” These milestones and transitions help the audience remember the roadmap you laid out at the beginning, and thus to relate each of your arguments back to the overall main point. If there is a logical flow, such as one argument following from the previous argument, you can use words like “thus, therefore, and it follows” to provide. The goal is for each body paragraph to feel like a distinct part, but a part of a whole, like a puzzle piece cleanly fitted into its neighbors. Transition words are the glue that hold them together.

Close the Loop – End in a Way that Brings the Speech Together as a Coherent Whole

After you’ve made your arguments supporting your main point, you’ll want to bring your speech to a definite close. All too many people just kind of peter out when they realize they’ve said everything they wanted to say. As we said at the beginning, though, this is a missed opportunity, because even if your audience’s attention has drifter during the speech, they’ll likely come back to you as they realize you’re wrapping up, and whatever you say will stick in their minds as the freshest thing they heard, so it pays to put some effort into a solid conclusion.

Recapitulate What You’ve Covered and Why It Matters

While you don’t want to introduce any new evidence or arguments into your speech during the conclusion, it is helpful to re-state what you’ve said, and even more importantly, why you were saying it. If you’ve followed a direct approach, this “so what” will be another restatement from your introduction, but if you’ve followed the indirect approach, it’s even more critical to clearly state the “so what,” since you haven’t yet done it anywhere else. As for your body paragraphs, you’ll just want to briefly and simply remind your audience what you’ve covered, and then connect it to that “so what.” Simply reminding them of the arguments you’ve laid out will call to mind the evidence you gave in support of them, without having to restate all of the evidence. Doing this kind of summary can, at times, feel redundant or unnecessary to us as the speechcrafters, but you have to remember that you’ve been thinking hard about this, working out how to structure it, how to say it, what the logic is behind the evidence and arguments, and so forth, whereas for your audience, this very well might be the first time they’re hearing anything about it, at least in the way that you’re framing it. So, a summary may feel extraneous to you, but to your audience, it will be very helpful.

Come Back to Where You Started, but from a Fresh Perspective

When we talked about opening with an attention-getting “hook,” I mentioned the value in being able to somehow come back to the hook at the end, but in a slightly different light. This technique is called “closing the loop” and is a great way to give your speech a feeling of being a unified whole. Imagine opening your speech with some shocking statistic about how bad some aspect of the world might be. Then, you go through the speech giving arguments for what can be done about aspects of the problem. In your close, you return to the statistic and talk about what it might be if your recommendations are followed. That’s closing the loop.

Close with a Clear Call to Action

If your speech is at all persuasive (you want something about your audience to change thanks to what you said – what they think, how they feel, what they do), you will likely want to end with an explicit “call to action.” A call to action is just what it says on the tin: an explicit ask of your audience to do something. If you were giving a campaign speech, you might close by asking for their votes. If you were pitching investors, you’d close by asking for their investment. If making a sales pitch, by asking them to buy. You get the idea. This is another case where it helps to be more explicit than we might assume. To us, immersed in the topic, it seems clear what someone should do once he knows all the facts, but to him, hearing it for the first time, that might not be clear. In order to make a good call to action, as straightforward as it may be, you need to be clear on what you truly want your audience to do, and how much you think you can ask for given the situation. If you’ve just met an executive from your dream company at a conference and given a 30 second elevator pitch about yourself, it’s probably a bit much to ask for a job offer on the spot. But asking for an interview, or at least a follow-up call? Thats far more do-able.

Giving a Speech – Get Content, Voice, and Body to Work Together

Now that we’ve talked through some considerations for what goes into your speech in its different parts, let’s talk about how to give your speech. I like to split this topic in to content delivery, voice, and body language. That first bit, “content delivery” is a bit of a bridge between the what and the how, which I’ll explain below, but this section focuses on “okay, you know what you want to say, what can you practice and do to get that across as effectively as possible?”

Choose Words that Clearly Get Your Thoughts Across

As I mentioned above, “content delivery” overlaps a bit with what we’ve been talking about above in terms of what goes into your speech. The idea here is to focus less on the evidence, arguments, points, or structure, and more about things you can do in conveying those things to make them clearer and more interesting.

Linking Words – Connect Thoughts that “Go Together”

We mentioned transition words above when discussion how to get your body paragraphs to hang together, but such linking words can also be helpful within a body paragraph. Words like “next,” “further,” “additionally,” and so forth can all help you to make clear that multiple, distinct thoughts are also linked together. When making an extended argument, logic words like “thus,” “therefore,” and “however,” can help make the shape of that argument clearer.

Counting Words – Make Sequences and Separations Clear

If you have any sequences, series, or subdivisions you want to make clear, you can literally just say things like “first, second, third” and as simple as it sounds, it’s actually extremely helpful for your audience. You can also pair this with “mini-roadmap sentences,” such as “there are three pieces of evidence that Product B is doing well in Europe. First, sales have shown steady growth since introduction. Secondly, our competitors have lost market share in that time period. Third, customer satisfaction surveys consistently mention Product B.” This is really just a “zoomed in” version of the value of structure we talked about with the speech as a whole – a way for the audience to meaningfully related the parts to the whole, and thus grasp (and hopefully agree with) the argument you’re making.

Straightforward Words – Don’t Overcomplicate Things with Fancy Words

Now, as a student of Latin and Greek and an avid reader, and thus rather overly fond of my vocabulary, this one piece of advice is a bit hard for me to give. Most of the time, you want to stay away from “fancy” words and instead seek to say things in as simple and straightforward a way as you can. First off, the simpler you say something, the more likely that your audience will understand and follow along – after all, they may not have the rich and voluminous vocabulary that you enjoy. Another aspect, though, has more to do with you than your audience. Most of the time, though not always, simpler words tend to be more concrete and rarer/fancier words tend to be more abstract. Forcing yourself to express yourself in simpler words is a way of making yourself get more concrete and specific in your thinking, which will almost always make it clearer. The last warning I’d give here is to beware of seeking out unfamiliar synonyms to “spice up” a speech. We’ve all been there: we find that we’ve used the same word over and over, so we look it up with the thesaurus function of our word processor and pick an alternative that sounds nice and fancy. The trouble with this approach is that true synonyms that literally mean exactly the same thing and have all of the same connotations are actually fairly rare. What is far more common is for thesauruses to list words with similar denotations (literal dictionary definitions), but slightly different connotations, and that is a trap. If you use a vaguely familiar word that you think you understand because it sounds “smarter,” but your audience really knows the word, you might end up unintentionally sounding ignorant.

I’ll share a favorite example from my time in the army. I was walking into the chow hall to get some lunch, and I noticed a sign on the door. It said “ATTENTION: Only soldiers who dwell in the barracks are to subsist in this dining facility.” Clearly some food preparation specialist with delusions of linguistic grandeur thought the humble “eat” was unsuitable to the gravitas of this sign and decided that “subsist” would better carry the appropriate weight. Yes, subsist does literally mean “to eat what you need to survive,” which is what soldiers eating in the dining facility (“D-FAC,” but I still prefer “chow hall”) are doing. On the other hand, if you’re more familiar with the word “subsist,” you know that it’s almost exclusively used to describe, ongoing, habitual behavior: “Pandas subsist primarily on the shoots and leaves of bamboo.” As such, the sign unintentionally implied that it would be just fine for soldiers not living in the barracks to occasionally get a meal there, as long as that wasn’t their habitual way of eating, which almost certainly wasn’t what the sign creator actually meant. So, again, protect yourself by defaulting to simpler words, and only pull out the ten-dollar words when it naturally comes to mind as the right, comfortable word that you’re totally familiar with.

Concreteness – Use Vivid, Concrete Words, Analogies, and Examples

The last point I’d like to make on word choice is the value in conveying your points as concretely as possible. There’s a maxim among fiction writers that “the specific is the universal.” The idea is that a vivid example of the universal theme you’re trying to convey will land better than a generic statement of the theme. When discussing genuinely abstract concepts or principles, it can be helpful to make analogies, or to give one or more examples of the concept or principle instantiated in a specific circumstance. Saying “folks can rationalize their way into doing bad things, but not out of the guilt that comes from them” is fairly bland and likely to be ignored or forgotten. On the other hand, reading Crime and Punishment makes this point forcefully and vividly through depicting Raskolnikov’s mental gymnastics and subsequent suffering. Likewise “much of heroism consists in stoically enduring hardship,” is dry, but Sam and Frodo suffering across the blasted waste of Mordor and up Mount Doom is fresh and exciting. So, strive for the vivid and concrete in the evidence and examples you give.

Use Your Voice to Convey the Feeling and Significance of Your Points

When giving a speech, your main tool for conveying what you have to say is, of course, your voice. To get a sense of how much effect your voice has, consider the difference between reading the transcript of a speech, listening to an audio recording of it, and watching a video recording on mute. In the first instance, you might get much of what the speaker was trying to say, but miss out on much of the emotion and significance. In the second, you’ll get far more out of it, even if you’re missing out on some of the cues you’d have from both audio and visual. In the last, you’ll get very little out of the speech. As such, it pays to have some idea of what you might do with your voice to support what you’e saying.

Breath – the Groundwork for Everything Else You Do with Your Voice

In Part 1 of “Speaking Well,” we talke about the value of breath as a tool to deal with anxiety, going through the “Four Fold Breath” as an explicit tool to combat stress. Now I’d like to talk about the importance of breath during your speech. Everything else about your voice is built on top of breathing properly. Without enough air in your lungs, you can’t speak loudly. If you’re not breathing steadily, you’re more likely to talk too fast. Likewise, air is essential to varying your tone and emphasizing key points through vocal stress.

As such, you want to make sure you are breathing deeply and steadily as you speak. First, you’ll want to have the best posture possible (more on that below), which opens up your torso for the proper use of your breathing muscles. Most crucially, you’ll want to build the habit of diaphramatic or “belly” breathing. A quick physiological note: we breathe in by expanding our lungs, which creates a pressure differential with the air outside and sucks it in through our nose or mouth. To expand our lungs, we have two main sets of muscles. What should be the primary is our diaphragm, a sheet of muscle stretching across our middle torso roughly at the level of the bottom of our rib cage. When it pulls down toward the belly, it expands the space inside our rib cage, expanding the lungs. I say “should,” because many of us spend far too much time sitting hunched over and so get out of the habit of using our diaphragms to breathe, and instead rely on what is meant to be a secondary, support system: the intercostal muscles connecting our ribs. “Proper” breathing starts with the diaphragm and only engages the intercostals to pull in a little more extra air, but many of us have gotten into the habit of breathing mainly with our chests (that is to say, our intercostals) from spending so much time with our diaphragms scrunched up as we hunch in front of computer monitors.

If you’ve never practiced the difference, or you find it hard to notice such bodily cues, here’s a simple way to learn the difference between what the two kinds of breathing feel like. Lay down on the floor on your back and pull your feet in toward your behind, so that your knees are up in the air. Place one hand on your sternum (center of your chest) and one on your belly. Breathe however feels normal to you and notice which one moves. If your chest rises, and not your belly, you are breathing mainly with your chest. If your belly rises, but not your chest, congratulations, you’re breathing with your diaphragm. Now, exhale as fully as you can, and try to pull your belly button only up (raising the hand resting on it). Hopefully, this engages your diaphragm, and you can feel what “belly breathing” feels like. Spend a few minutes trying to do one and then the other and pay attention to how it feels. Once you think you’ve got the hang of it, try standing up and repeating the exercise.

The goal is to get to where breathing with your belly feels easy and natural, so that eventually, it becomes your default. This will give you a good, solid basis for having enough breath to do the other things we’ll talk about below.

Pace – Talk a Little Slower than You Think You Should

The most important thing to learn about your voice for the purposes of public speaking is to control the pace of your speaking, and for most of us, that means learning to slow it down. As we’ve discussed at length, public speaking tends to make most of us a little nervous. When we get nervous, we tend to talk faster than we otherwise would. Compounding the problem, one of the side effects of the physiological stress response we discussed is a kind of “time dilation” – things go into slow motion (if you’ve ever been in a very stressful situation, like a car accident, you might have noticed this being made very clear). So, not only do we tend to talk faster, we also are less able to notice that we’re doing it. The good news is that the answer is fairly straightforward: talk at a pace that feels just a little too slow. If you think you’re talking just a bit too slow, chances are you’ll sound just right to your audience. If you don’t believe me, try recording yourself and listen to how it sounds (more on the use of recordings in a moment).

Volume – Talk a Little Louder than You Think You Should

As with pace, volume tends to be affected by being nervous, with the result that we end up talking a bit quieter than would be ideal. This is made worse by the fact that most of our day-to-day experience with speaking is at a conversational distance, and thus a conversational volume. The right volume for someone ~two feet away is not the same as the right volume for someone at the back of a lecture hall ~twenty feet away. As with speed, the answer to this is to recognize that our internal sense of what “right” is is actually off, and so to speak at a volume that feels just a little too loud. There’s one exception to this: if you have been told your entire life “use your inside voice,” you can just keep doing you, and you’ll be fine.

Tone & Pitch – Vary Your Tone to Convey Emotion

This part of the article is where I really wish I were speaking to you, rather than writing. If so, I could readily demonstrate what “higher pitch” and “lower pitch” sound like, which might be unfamiliar if you’ve never practiced singing. Instead, I’ll try to rely on a (hopefully) well-known cultural touchpoint. Think of Batman/Bruce Wayne (the animated series really nailed this, but just about any iteration will have tapped into this somewhat). When he’s Bruce Wayne, his voice is likely higher in pitch, and with more variation, even to the point of being slightly goofy. When he dons cape and cowl, however, the deep, rumbly voice comes out. Most speakers are somewhere along a spectrum between “higher base pitch with more tonal variation” and “deeper base pitch with less tonal variation.”

There are pros and cons to each. A deeper, less variable pitch will tend to convey seriousness, authority, and power. Your audience is more likely to take you seriously, treat you as important and competent, and less likely to question or contradict you. With a higher, more variable voice, your voice carries better over longer distances and background noise, you’ll be seen as friendlier and warmer, more approachable, and you’ll be more likely to get questions and debate.

As you might infer, the downsides are the mirror image of the upsides. With a deeper, less variable tone, your audience might get bored, not raise objections even though they think them, and will be less likely to connect with you on a personal level. With a higher, more variable tone, your audience will see you as less authoritative and powerful, might not take you seriously, and might feel like they can push back more than you’d prefer.

Most of us fall somewhere on this spectrum as our natural default, and I generally advise against trying to get to the opposite extreme. If you have a deeper, less variable voice by nature, you should lean into the strengths of that rather than trying to become Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky. On the other hand, knowing that such variation exists, we can extend the range that we’re comfortable with. Maybe you’ll never have a Mr. Rogers voice, but you might be able to bring in a bit more warmth and tonal variation.

As a quick note: making changes like this can be deeply uncomfortable, as we tend to hear our voice as a key part of our identity, and changing it on purpose feels weird and fake. Think about how much you hate hearing a recording of your voice, because it sounds different from what you hear when you talk. On the other hand, we make changes to the tone of our voice subconsciously all the time. When we meet a baby, we talk in a higher pitch. When we’re with the guys, we talk in a deeper voice. Knowing that can take some of the sting out of playing around with where you pitch your voice, and making conscious changes to it.

Emphasis – Stress What’s Important

This is another place where it’s much harder to convey the idea via text than out loud, but again, I’ll do my best. Emphasis is which words you put the vocal stress on. Changing this can make even the same statement come across rather differently. Perhaps in high school drama or English class you went through an exercise of emphasizing Shakespearean lines differently (italics used to show stress): “To be or not to be, that is the question!” comes across rather differently from “To be or not to be, that is the question!” Typically, vocal stress is conveyed through a combination of change in tone, volume, and how much you draw out the word. If you’re still a bit fuzzy on what I mean, it can help to think of some extreme examples. Think of a pissed off drill sergeant: “What the hell do you think you’re doing, private?” (Though the drill sergeant would likely use a stronger word). Or a hysterical dame in a hardboiled detective story: “What on earth do you mean by that, detective?” Once again, this something that we do subconsciously and automatically all the time, but learning to notice it can allow you to better emphasize what you want to and play around with how different deliveries might have different effects on your audience.

Cadence – Speak in a Natural Rhythm

Of the characteristics of the voice, this one is perhaps the hardest for most of us to consciously notice and make use of. In fact, for most speakers, I recommend against trying to achieve an intentional cadence, unless you’re performing poetry or the like. Which brings up the best way to get a feel for what rhythm/cadence is: song, poetry, and rap. These days, we’re used to thinking of rhyme as the main component of these three related art forms, but at their core, they’re truly defined by rhythm, which is the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, in some sort of pattern, which may be regular or variable. Obviously, the skillful deployment of rhythm can be enjoyable and beautiful, so why do I usually recommend against consciously pursuing rhythm?

Well, for one, these days, what is generally seen as “good public speaking” is that which comes across as natural or spontaneous. Modern audiences see this as unaffected, trustworthy, and genuine. Modern audiences value less the performance and craft that ancient audiences expected as part of why it was worth listening to orators. Secondly, getting good at consciously making use of rhythm/cadence basically means becoming a poet, which is no bad thing, but which takes quite a lot of time and effort to get good at, and until you get good, you’ll be subjecting folks to bad poetry, which likely won’t go well for you. So, unless you want to pursue poetry as part of your wider Renaissance Man well-roundedness (and if you do, go forth and do that thing!), most of my advice here is on how to avoid unintentionally using rhythm/cadence awkwardly.

You see, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, we find it much easier to remember words that are set to a rhythm than those without – that’s why song lyrics and snatches of poetry stick in our heads. I read somewhere that some anthropologists hypothesize that our ancestors were vocalizing rhythmically (and dancing) before they even had words, which if true, would mean that rhythm/cadence is older than language. Wild. At any rate, this means that if you are trying to memorize what to say for a speech (more on this below), if you aren’t careful, you are very likely to impose a cadence on the words to make them more memorable. Not a bad thing in itself, but again, if you’re doing it subconsciously, you’ll tend to impose the same rhythm on chunks of words of roughly equal length. This ends up manifesting when you give your speech as a kind of sing-songy repetitiveness that is one of the key things people tend to pick up on when they say someone sounded “scripted” or “over-rehearsed.” The way around this, which I’ll explain in more detail in the section on preparation below, is to not memorize an exact script, but instead to memorize a rough outline, and then to ad lib the exact words you say, with a few exceptions.

Use Your Body to Demonstrate and Support Your Points

Though your voice is more important in giving a speech than your body, you don’t want to neglect your body language either. In today’s world, this aspect of public speaking is more likely to be constrained than the others (giving a presentation via video conference, being required to sit around a conference table as you speak, and so forth), but it still helps to have a solid baseline. After all, humans are very visual creatures, and so if you do have the luxury of presenting to a live audience in the same room, what they see will also influence how they take your message.

Posture – Stand Up Straight to Feel and Show Confidence

As mentioned above in the section on breathing, most of us spend far too much time hunched over computers and phones these days, and our postures suffer from it. Sure, working out can help with this, as stronger muscles make it easier to hold your body up the way it was built for, but learning to notice what it feels like to sit/stand up straight, and how to get back to it when you have let it slip is something that it pays to make habitual. Before I step through how to do that, though, let’s talk about why standing up straight is valuable for public speaking.

First off, as mentioned above, standing up straight opens up our torsos and makes it easier to properly breathe with the diaphragm first, followed by the ribs, rather than only through the ribs. This helps us do better on all of the points related to voice above, and breathing more deeply also helps to keep us calm, as discussed last time when talking about the physiological stress response. Secondly, standing up straight is yet another cue to our lizard brains that we are not in danger – if we were, we’d be cowering, right? So it also directly helps to tone down the stress response. Lastly, upright posture conveys confidence to our audience, as more confident folks tend to stand up straighter, and if our audience believes us to be confident, they’ll be more receptive to our message.

Okay, so how to do it? Let me walk you through a sequence I learned from Dr. Kelly Starrett, Ph.D. in his book Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World. This sequence is not something you’ll want to do right in the middle of a speech, but is instead a way to perform a physical “reset” any time you want to check in on your posture (right before a speech might be a good time, but I also recommend trying to make it a habit throughout your day until it starts coming naturally). Oh, by the way, if you can, I recommend you actually stand up and follow along as we go through this, it will make a lot more sense if you feel it and don’t just read about it:

1. We’ll work our way up from the ground up. First, position your feet hip-width apart and parallel, facing straight forward, like you’re on a pair of skis – you don’t want the skis to cross in the front or back. This positions your feet where they are evenly distributing your weight and aligning your legs and hips properly.
2. Next, we want to dynamically stabilize the knees, rather than relying on the bone-to-bone stabilization of locking them out (if you lock your knees out for too long, you’ll pass out, ask me how I know about that one). To do this, exert pressure as if you were trying to rotate your feet on your heels to move the toes to point outward at an angle, but don’t actually let your feet move out of parallel. You should feel some slight pressure in your knees, but not too much. If you feel a lot of pressure, you’re doing it harder than necessary. That slight pressure stabilizes your knees with the muscles and tendons, rather than the bones.
3. Keeping your feet where they are and the slight pressure in your knees, we now move up to the hips, which are one of the most important parts of our body for maintaining posture, but which get completely disengaged when we sit, which is why it’s so hard to maintain good posture while sitting. Think of your hips like a cup – you don’t want to pour any water out the front or back, instead, you want the cup level. Most of us default to letting our hips tip forward a bit, again, due to too much sitting. To correct this, clinch your butt cheeks – you should feel the front of your hips/pelvis rise and move forward slightly (this is movement is associated with a certain activity I’ll refrain from mentioning explicitly for the sake of delicacy). Once again, your goal is not to tighten your buttocks to the point of discomfort, just enough to shift your hips.
4. Maintaining everything you’ve done so far, now you want to stabilize your lower back. Paradoxically, though, we don’t want to focus on the muscles of the lower back, as that will tend to cause cramping and discomfort. Instead, gently tighten your abdominals across your entire belly – not hard enough to take a punch, just something like 1/3 effort. This will pull on the connected muscles in your back and stabilize your lower spine.
5. Once again maintaining everything done so far, move up to the upper back. Here, again, we don’t want to clinch the muscles of our shoulder blades or around our spine, instead we want to take advantage of the ball-and-socket joint of our shoulders to stabilize. To do this, let your hands hang at your sides, and then rotate them until your thumbs are pointing forward, palms toward your body. This has knock-on affects across your entire shoulder girdle and stabilizes your upper spine.
6. Finally, with most of your body now upright, slowly move your head backward and forward until you feel a spot where it feels like it is stably sitting on top of everything else – neither too far forward nor backward.

Congratulations, you are now standing up straight the way evolution intended your muscular-skeletal system to be configured! Most of us spend very little time in this position, and so it might feel a bit awkward or artificial at first. The goal is not to walk around and give speeches in this exaggeratedly upright posture, but rather as I said, to have a kind of “reset” of where to adjust from, rather than trying to adjust from our usual slouching postures brought about from too much sitting and typing/scrolling. If you can make a habit of resetting to this position a few times a day regularly, you’ll find that your everyday posture improves remarkably, and that you’ll be able to find a more upright posture when it comes time to give a speech.

Movement – Use Deliberate Movements to Convey Dynamism

This is an area where my advice may be less timeless than others. In the past, it was completely normal and expected to give talks from behind a lectern, but more recently, speakers who move around the space they have available in a calm, controlled way tend to be seen as more dynamic. I can console myself that this is likely a return to type – Greek and Roman orators would have practiced their craft in more open, stage-like spaces similar to what is the norm these days, and I like to think that they likely made use of dramatic, but controlled movements.

First off, let’s set down a baseline. No movement is better than awkward, distracting movement. So, if you’re not a walker when you speak, don’t worry too much about it. The trouble is, most of us find standing perfectly still difficult at the best of times, and downright challenging when we’re nervous. Even if we set out with the intention to stand still, then, we’ll often end up shifting our weight, shuffling, or taking small, awkward unintentional movements. One way around this is to practice standing still, but personally, I prefer to channel that nervous energy into intentional movements.

If you want to incorporate movement, as I’ve mentioned, the goal is to make it intentional. Generally speaking, the pattern is to walk across your space, pause, and then walk back, with a pause at the other end. It will be even more effective if you time your pauses to happen as you finish a point, and the walking to go with building up to that point. Without the pauses, you’ll look like you’re pacing, which might come across as nervousness. When in doubt, err on the side of pausing longer rather shorter – as we said, there’s nothing saying you can’t spend an entire speech standing in one spot, so any movement is a “bonus” – there’s no rule for how much you should be walking. One last thing: as you move, be sure not to keep your back to any part of the room for two long. Say you’ve just walked from stage right to stage left – you’ll want to then turn back to stage right during your pause.

Facial Expressions – Connect with Your Audience and Emphasize Your Points

Much of what we discussed above about tone of voice applies to facial expressions as well. In fact, it’s hard to change your tone of voice without also changing your expression, and vice versa. When you speak in a higher pitched, more variable voice, you’ll likely smile and move the other features on your face more. Likewise, if you speak in a lower, less-variable pitch, you’ll likely move your face less. As with voice, a more animated face tends to read as more interesting and relatable, but might be taken as less serious or authoritative. Similarly, a less-mobile face will tend to read as more serious and authoritative, but possibly as boring or uninteresting. As with voice, you’ll want to tailor this to your message and your audience, but recognize that you probably have a baseline expression – some folks are more expressive, others less so, and trying to go to the opposite extreme will likely come across as stilted and fake. Besides smiling more or less, the other facial features you can make use of consciously are mostly your eyes and eyebrows. Widened eyes and/or raised eyebrows can emphasize a point, or convey surprise or intensity. The best way to experiment with making use of your features is, again, to record yourself (though, obviously, video will be necessary here) and watch yourself.

Hands – Support and Emphasize Your Points

As with most other aspects of public speaking, what you do with your hands will likely take care of itself if you’re reasonably comfortable. We all “talk with our hands” to some degree when we’re not feeling self-conscious – some more, some less, due both to personal differences as well as cultural ones. First off, as with walking around, it’s helpful to know that no movement (of your hands) is better than awkward movement. It’s possible to give a complete speech with your hands resting on your thighs unmoving. It will feel enormously awkward, but it won’t actually look that way to your audience. That said, if you do want to work on using your hands, it can be helpful to have a few guidelines to do so consciously. First off, the “zone” that you mostly want to keep your hands in is between your chin and your belt and between your shoulders. Anything outside of your shoulders or above your chin will tend to read as “big,” which can be helpful, but should be used sparingly, as it might come across as too intense. Going below the belt, on the other hand, tends to draw the eyes of your audience too far away from your face, as well as leaving your arms somewhat awkwardly extended. Palm-down gestures tend to come across as more forceful, whereas palm-up is seen as more open, either to give or to receive, offering or welcoming. Palms turned inward (so that the surface of your palm is vertical) is a more neutral position. Pointing a finger can come across as forceful at least, if not downright aggressive, so you might consider gesturing with all fingers extended, together (think of a karate chop – in the Army, we called this the “NCO Knife Hand,” since the Army being what it is, something meant to be less aggressive got turned into something hyper-aggressive). One last thing to look out for: try not to pin your elbows into your sides, a phenomenon I like to call “T-Rex arms.“

Getting Ready for a Speech – Be Prepared, but Not Over-Prepared

We’ve talked about the difference between tactical and strategic practice, and the need for both, but let’s dig a little more into the tactical practice of getting ready for this specific speech, the one you’re about to give in the short run.

Crawl, Walk, Run

A useful concept when it comes to practice or training is “Crawl, Walk, Run.” The idea is to start out doing things the easy way and to gradually ramp up the difficulty. So, first off, practice giving your speech with your outline right in front of you as you talk. Then try reading over the outline, putting it down, and giving the speech while it’s fresh in your mind. Eventually, try to get to giving your speech without looking at your outline, and then check the outline after to see if you left anything out. Another axis on which you can practice this is with audience side. Start out giving your speech alone, maybe in the mirror, maybe recording yourself. Then give it to an easy “audience,” like your dog or an empty chair. Then practice it with one or two trusted friends. Then, if you can manage it, do a dry run before a larger audience. It can also be helpful to do a dry run in the space you’ll give the final speech without an audience, if you have the opportunity.

The Sweet Spot and the Valley of Despair: Practice Enough, But No More

You may have noticed in the section above that I said “your outline” and not “your script.” For most people, most of the time, I recommend against trying to memorize a word-for-word script. The reason why is that delivering a memorized script and making it sound natural is hard. It’s called “acting,” and most of us are not actors. There’s also a slightly paradoxical phenomenon when you try to prepare a script. When you start out, just reading from a script, if you’re a reasonably fluent reader, you’ll be able to emote and emphasize what you want to. But then, when you’ve just memorized the script and put it down, your ability to emote/emphasize actually gets worse. I call this “the valley of despair.” If you press on and practice even more, you’ll eventually get to where it sounds good and natural again. I witnessed this first hand when I was a sound tech for my high school drama club. The actors would start rehearsing scripts in hand, and they’d do alright. Then, at some point, they’d be required to memorize their lines. In the first rehearsal with memorized lines, their acting would get worse. But by opening night, they had practiced enough to get even better than their initial sight reading performances.

As a quick aside, the reason for this is something that cognitive scientists call “cognitive load,” but which is more colloquially described as “bandwidth.” The basic idea is that anything you do uses up cognitive resources, and the more things you try to do at once, the more they interfere with each other and use up scarce resources. When a script is barely memorized, it takes a lot of bandwidth just to call up the words, which leaves less available for things like managing your voice, face, hands, and movement. On the other hand, once you have something thoroughly memorized, it takes much less bandwidth to call it up, leaving plenty for delivery concerns. As an example, you could probably rattle off a nursery rhyme or three right now with zero effort, because they’re so deeply embedded in your memory, but if you spent an hour trying to memorize some other short poem, you’d likely struggle somewhat.

Which gets us to why I usually recommend against memorizing a script. It takes a lot of time and work to get an exact sequence of words into your memory that deeply, especially if it’s prose and not poetry or song. In most situations, the amount of effort isn’t worth the payoff. Instead, you can memorize your much more compact outline, so that you’re never at a loss for what to say, and then you can ad lib the exact words, giving them a more natural, extemporaneous feel.

There are a few exceptions to this: quotes, jokes, or particular phrases that are especially important to your speech might be worth memorizing and practicing until you can get them just right every time.

Get Your Reps In – Find Time to Practice

Usually, the difference between an okay speech and a great one is how much you’ve practiced, which means you have to find time to practice. Depending on how well you already know the subject matter, the amount of time you need to spend will vary, and some folks find it easier to memorize an outline than others. The goal is to practice to the point that you can step through your outline without any trouble, but without using the exact same words each run-through. For most folks, that will be somewhere between 5-10 run-throughs, with at least half of them from memory, without checking your notes.

The Immense Value in Knowing “I Got This”

The real value in practicing until you’re comfortable with your speech is less in having exactly the right words and more in being able to tell yourself “I know what I’m going to say, so I don’t need to be nervous.” A big source of nervousness in public speaking is worrying that you’ll forget what to say or freeze up in front of your audience. If you’ve just given the complete speech from memory in the mirror of the bathroom outside of where you’ll be speaking, you can truthfully tell yourself “I’ve already done this successfully, the only difference is this time I’ll have an audience.” Sure, some nervousness will remain thanks to the audience, but you’ve removed the other most common source of nervousness for speakers.

Wrapping Up: The Only Way to Get Better is to Do It

As you have seen, there are many aspects of public speaking you can focus on, and it may feel a little overwhelming. The good news is that you don’t have to master all of them all at once. As we saw with deliberate practice, instead, it is better to focus on one thing at a time, work on that until you feel better about it, then move on to the next thing. Fundamentally, though, the way to become a better public speaker is to speak in public more. Look for opportunities in your life to do so. Make pitches, ask your boss for the opportunity to speak at regular meetings, join a toastmasters club, or whatever else is consistent with your goals. It may be painful at first, but that’s where tactical practice comes in: get as good as you can right now, and even if it’s uncomfortable, you know that you’re taking a step to make it less uncomfortable in the future. You’re building the habit of courage, even when the current speech isn’t everything you might hope for.