What is a “good speech”? You know, when you say after listening to a speaker; “Now THAT was a good speech!”
When I ask this question to the groups I’ve led in workshops on the subject, they give a lot of answers. Audible voice, eye contact, strong arguments, mimics, facts, engaging body language, vivid descriptions, “just the right length”, relevant topic, not too fast, not too slow. To mention a few.
I normally write all they say on the whiteboard. And after they have depleted their sources of ideas, I divide those answers into two main groups; WHAT and HOW.
That is a structure that helps break the art down into workable pieces for most people. The How-part consists of tempo, audibility, body language and mimics, etc. It is Body and Voice, the utilization of your tools. The What-part consists of the arguments and the facts, the wording and the length. It is the content, the message, the structure.
And when we have established this, it is pretty clear to everyone that we have to work with both parts in order to create a good speech. It is great that the realization that a “Good Speech” is not limited to the arguments, the facts and the structure, comes from the participants themselves. I never have to argue that we also need to work with ourselves, with our bodies and voices, in order to practice and develop as speakers. Something that I in the distant past sometimes found necessary, when addressing the matter of public speaking in more theoretical contexts.
The Recipient is king
In the initial parts of my workshops, we also always address the fact that all communication takes place on the recipient’s terms.
If the audience doesn’t want to listen, it doesn’t matter what you say. This has to have implications for you, both in preparing and in performing your speech. The more you know about the audience, the easier this gets. And even if it’s not more than which company they’re from, or what speaker has come before you, that is something. Use that. Try to find statements or arguments, stories or mental pictures that connect with something that will interest them.
So, in order to follow the very simple structure of “What and How”, we dive into the What-art first. In the next steps of my workshop, we cover some grounds of the theoretical framework for rhetoric. And so that is what I will do in this blog as well. I hope you’ll join me for coming posts on this subject.
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