Speeches and Speaking

Public speaking is one of those things that a person either loves or hates. There is no in-between. The secret is being prepared and confident in your presentation. Learn how to prepare, practice, present and be inspired.

The longer a speech is, the easier it is to get lost in the text. Even with a good outline, you will get lost. It might take a couple hours or half a day to write a short speech. A keynote speech can take a week, or two weeks, to draft and edit and finalize. Organization and outlining can save you endless hours of rewrites.

It's quicker and simpler to write a keynote speech -- or any speech -- that you're delivering. There's no client or boss who needs to give the ok; it's just you and the blank screen to fill. But it's also dangerous to write for yourself. Everybody needs an editor.

Every public figure needs to be comfortable speaking in different situations. There are three basic types of situations: impromptu, extemporaneous and full-text.

Short speeches are different animals. A keynote speech requires full text and maybe a teleprompter, because nobody should wing what might be the most important 30 minutes of their life. A short speech will come off as wooden if you try to read them word-for-word. So how can you write something that shouldn't be written word-for-word? Outline it. Practice it. Refine the outline and practice again.

A presentation is a speech with a prop. Or many props. Presentations are common in public relations. They can be be much more powerful than a normal speech, because humans are audio and visual creatures. Yet whatever the props may be -- charts, a PowerPoint slideshow, a video, photos, audio, evidence from a crime scene -- they changes the nature...

It can be quite hard to wean people from the idea that they need to read every speech word-for-word. This is a particular problem for short speeches of three-to-five minutes. If you're giving a short speech, or helping the speaker prepare, they've got to take off the training wheels and be able to do it without notes.

What's the difference between writing and speaking to inform versus to persuade? To inform, you're using journalism's inverted pyramid: most important to least important. It's useful for short pieces, but boring for anything of length, because the longer it goes, the less important and interesting it gets. Persuasive writing and speaking uses more of a roller-coaster structure.

How do you use talking points? A page of talking points isn't just a collection of bullets. It can be the framework for a variety of other products to inform or persuade -- a press conference or a guest column, a newsletter or a website.

It's common to see a page of bullets with no structure, no setups, no payoffs, no climax. Every bullet on a page of talking points is not equal. Therefore, they shouldn't be the same length and importance. I've changed my thinking a bit on talking points. All the talking points I've ever seen are all the same size. It's a page of 12-point Times...

Because talking points are a product meant to persuade, the blueprint that you use matters. If you're doing a page of talking points to inform an audience, that's really a fact sheet. So: what blueprint makes sense? It depends on the type of debate you're trying to win. And it is a debate. There's at one competing side, if not more.

There's an easy way to prevent the PR disease known as talking paragraphs. How do you know if your text suffers from this malady? It's simple: true talking points take up a single line. Maybe two. Talking paragraphs are a page of long paragraphs with bullets tacked on. The danger of talking paragraphs is that they defeat the entire purpose of...

Public Speaking can be one of the best methods of marketing your business, but how do create a lasting impression? How about adding a little humor to your next speech? Learn how to do just that in this guest article by Stephen D. Boyd.

Writing a keynote speech can seem overwhelming. Here's a quick checklist of what to do. 1) Get on the phone. 2) Talk to your client. 3) Get the OK early. 4) Make it readable. 5) Practice the speech yourself. 6) Listen to the speaker practice. 7) Put the speech to work.

The toughest part of writing a keynote speech for another person is getting their involvement and OK throughout the process, from the outline to the rough draft to the final draft and practice speeches.

Public figures are different than other speakers. In public relations, you can't rely on being good at one type of public speaking. One day might be packed with at press conference in the morning, a television interview at noon and a debate at 7 p.m. The next day might have a keynote speech, a panel and a radio appearance. Cross-training is crucial.

People listen to speeches with their eyes. In the first five seconds, with the sound off, you can predict how an audience will like a speaker. Five seconds. No sound. They've done this with professors, who get rated by students. They've done it with job interviews and political candidates.

Everything comes into play during the State of the Union speech. You have the undivided attention of the press, giving that speech the full spectrum of earned media: live TV coverage, pre-speech stories, live-blogging, post-speech reactions, polls, focus groups, editorials, opinion columns, radio talk shows -- everything. In a non-campaign year,...

The notes for a short speech -- three to five minutes -- should fit on an index card. A short speech typically starts and ends with thank-you's -- thank you for asking me here to speak, and thank you for listening -- so there' no need write that out. Focus on the meat of the speech. It's easy for audiences and speakers to remember things in threes, so divide the speech into three parts.

Public relations -- especially political PR -- is a confusing business. U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota) just came off a big win in the Iowa Straw Poll when the national press and punditocracy hammered her for a speech in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa for what was originally a low-key political event. What did she say to set off so many...

Lincoln proves that a big speech doesn't have to be big. Most people see a one-page speech and think its a trifle. A big speech has to be long, right? It's natural to think the more pages a speech or document has, the more important it is. In an age of shrinking attention spans and TV soundbites, the reverse is true. Nobody ever complained about a speech being too short.

How do you project passion? A common mistake of public figures is to increase the volume -- to shout their way through a speech or a press conference. Shouting to project emotion doesn't work. The press and public don't see passion. They see a well-known person losing their composure and getting angry.

Most speakers will focus on reciting facts and figures, and they'll sprinkle in the occasional metaphor. They'll talk about principles and values like equality and opportunity. Reagan proved the power of speaking more concretely. In perhaps his most famous speech, he didn't hint at the possibilities of freedom and democracy. He challenged the leader of the Soviet Union to do something specific. Something concrete.

You couldn't have staged this more dramatically: on a Sunday night, rumors swirl that Osama Bin Laden was dead. This was a masterful job of not only finding and killing Bin Laden, but announcing it to the world in a dramatic fashion without coming across as boastful or satisfied. The announcement was a crushing moral and public relations blow...

In public relations, you write a lot, and it's easy to fall into the habit of writing the same kinds of pieces with the same headlines and intros (first sentences - also called leads, ledes or hooks). Here are four more alternatives to the traditional hard-news approach.

In public relations, you're sunk if you don't hook the audience right away. So I don't advocate writing a lot of hard, straight-news headlines and intros (first sentences). "Soft" headlines and first sentences aren't sensitive and emotional. They're also called "grabber" headlines and leads, because they grab the attention of readers -- and that's what you want to do.

Speeches -- especially keynote speeches -- are the most difficult thing to write. It's worth looking at the greatest speeches, the ones that connected with the audience and are studied in the history books. Here's a series of posts about what we can learn from great speeches by Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.

If you've ever suffered through a long, boring speech that simply didn't work, you know how tough it can be on the audience. Torture is too gentle of a word. You're stuck in a chair for thirty minutes to an hour and can't leave. How can public figures avoid being that boring speaker?