Making Speeches and Public Speaking
Have you ever heard the factoid that more people fear public speaking than death? Perhaps common sense would say that the latter should be feared more because death is more permanent, but the former is more prominent. In fact, people fear anything they are unfamiliar with. Even though speaking is a part of communication that people engage in every day, when it ceases to be private and becomes public, the art becomes a different beast. However, people still have the tools required to speak well.
If you are preparing for a speaking engagement and you can choose your topic, then breathe easy. Pick a topic that you appreciate and be thankful for the opportunity. Many people who are assigned topics feel that they've been given a "boring" or "dry" topic. If this happens to you, don't defeat yourself before you have even begun. Remember that topics are just ideas. Only you and your presentation can determine if a speech will be interesting or not.
To even begin to become a better presenter, you must adopt your topic and make it your own. Like any parent, you must be willing to do whatever you can to make your speech the best. Speeches in many ways are like spoken essays, so do some of the things that you would do if you were writing an essay. Outline your thoughts so that they have a form; research for inspiration or material, and then get to writing. Make sure you have time to put your drafts aside so that you can review and revise with an unbiased eye later.
After you have an essay, then what? Sadly, essays aren't speeches, and good essays don't necessarily make good speeches. To better your presentation, you have to practice that skill. Practice reading your speech with the gestures and inflections you hope to use in front of your audience (and if you don't have gestures or inflections, develop them now. Public speaking, just like any form of communication, has more than just a verbal component to it.) Anything that doesn't come out smoothly when you speak it needs to be improved or eliminated, quite simply. You don't want to purposefully give yourself rough spots in your presentation.
During the first practice stages, you want to be practicing for you. Use a mirror so you can see your movements and tweak them to pinpoint accuracy. Your movements actually help to anchor the words that you use - they are a sort of mnemonic device using muscle memory, so make sure that every time you perform your speech, you keep things similar.
The next practice stage should be with trusted friends (or even just people you associate with). Although you may feel your word flow, choice, movements, and pacing are all acceptable, what do others think? Take the advice of others to heart and make adjustments to your speech whenever you can. If possible, try to give your speech tens, if not hundreds of times, whether alone or with others.
All of this practice might seem tiring...however, remember that you've already adopted your speech. You can't just abandon it on a dirt road now! It needs to be nurtured constantly or else...perhaps the government won't come after you for child abuse, but certainly, you won't be as comfortable for your actual speech.
