How to Give a Speech So You Won’t be Asked to Speak Again
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Audiences place more value information that requires effort to absorb. Make them work to understand what you are talking about and why it’s important.
Don’t waste time planning and organizing your speech. Assume your speech will seem fresh and spontaneous, even if it wanders, includes irrelevant material and doesn’t have a conclusion.
If that approach makes you nervous, write out your speech and read it verbatim. This works particularly well if you have a PowerPoint presentation with the full text you are reading.
Speaking of presentations: the points of your slides shouldn’t be too obvious. Try and get as much text as possible on each slide. Include at least one ‘I know you can’t read this, but…’ slide.
Try to use a different color scheme on each slide. Look for combinations of text/background colors that are invisible to color-blind viewers, or lurid enough to cause physical pain.
Face the screen and read from your slides. Avoid looking at your audience.
Assume it’s the sheer volume of data that impresses your audience. Include tables with plenty of rows and columns to show how much work you did.
Flip through a series of information-dense slides faster than they can be read and comprehended.
Don’t make ideas more important that the data. You can’t argue with facts.
Try to avoid conclusions or speculating about why the facts are significant.
You are ’speaking’, so use language to your best advantage.
Speak just loudly enough to be heard under ideal conditions. You want the audience on the edge of their seats. Make them strain to hear.
Try and avoid eye contact. If you must make eye contact, stare at one person in the front row.
Demonstrate your vocal variety by starting each sentence loud, then getting softer to the end of the sentence.
The the most of verbal pauses such as, ‘um’ or ‘you know’, ’so’ or ‘and’.
Don’t leave time for questions. This just implies you did not do an adequate job of covering the material.
Never practice your speech ahead of time. You are confident in your ability to communicate, so practice would just waste your valuable time.
Stick to these guidelines and your audience -at least those who remain- will be quiet and non-disruptive. Also, your coffee break won’t be disrupted by people wanting to discuss your speech.
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Haha! This is a hilarious post, Ian.
I like the snarkiness you used in this post. It’s interesting that public speaking is the #1 fear among people, even topping death. I just gave a speech last week and I think the biggest thing that got it going was being personable – speaking to the audience like real people/friends.