Emerging Leaders Respond: Public Speaking
What makes a good speech? How can you be an effective and persuasive public speaker?
Filip Orth, College Senior
What makes a good speech is actually sharing the message across and delivering the idea that was intended to be shared prior to the delivered speech. To keep the vision and mission of what is to be delivered throughout the given speech is crucial and makes a speech good. Often the issue may be that the intended message is well prepared but is not delivered well and the audience does not retain the message. This is when the speech may rather be poor, because it is the responsibility of the speaker to engage with the audience and be able to share the message across with real understanding from the audience.
To be an effective and persuasive public speaker you have to get the message to the entire audience. There will be people who do not follow or might not necessarily be sharing the same perspective as you do. You might not be able to persuade them or win them to your side, however to try and get as much response from the audience is certainly making a speech a good speech. If you are able to get the uninterested or unfollowing audience to listen and follow, it is certainly a positive to the speech including catching interest even from those that do not necessarily agree or do not follow your perspective.
In addition to this, to be an effective and persuasive speaker you also have to be able to show both sides of cards on the given topic and be willing to respect other opinions.
Getting facts and sources right makes the speech credible and hence effective and most importantly persuasive.
Eye contact, pauses, focusing on a few points and referring back to them so that the audience, which might have heard it for the first time, can still process the information and have the opportunity to digest the ideas mentioned are some of the key points to focus on.
While it is important to be clear on what is your stance in the given speech, your given opinion, it is still important to be unbiased and unemotional in this regard as listeners will not accept the delivered message well when they feel a push from the speaker as well as it could result in a loss of focus on the speaker´s side and pull away the attention of the audience from the main idea.
Minako Furukawa, College Graduate
Making a speech in public would be necessary in many situations while it is not always easy to do so for some people like me. It is important to train a public speaking skill since it allows one to tell innovative ideas broadly. Good speech is often delivered with a clear tone and the right volume of the voice. Using body/nonverbal language effectively and making eye contact with the audience during the speech would be another key points to be an effective public speaker in my understanding. Nonetheless, choosing the interested topic to the targeted audience and practicing the presentation over time would be must-do preparation before doing a speech in front of the audience.
Sinclaire Ogof, College Sophomore
Alexios Eleftheriou, 9th Grade
A good speech is one that simply achieves the effect desired by the speaker. For example, a speech where the speaker is attempting to educate on a subject is successful if the audience becomes educated on that subject; a speech attempting to persuade others of a certain viewpoint is successful when the audience becomes persuaded of the speaker’s viewpoint.
To be an effective speaker, one must, firstly and most importantly, be confident in the with the topic and purpose of their speech. Without confidence, the audience will never become persuaded or educated by the speaker, for the speaker will not appear educated on and persuaded by the topic they are opining.
Nirvaan De Silva, 6th Grade
Speeches are ways through which you can express your ideas. That makes it really important for you to captivate your audience to really want to listen to your speech.
You must show how much you care about your topic. Normally your audience takes motivation to get really into your speech. Some ways you can do that is to make big statements that really wake up your audience and get them excited. If you are going to talk about how much change is needed and how we aren’t meeting the standards, make sure to talk later about new things we can work towards. Emotion is good but no one wants to listen to someone listing everything that is wrong with our society. You need to get them excited to make the change you are speaking about. Because once you are able to captivate audiences with your speeches you will be able to convince them to really think about your speech and be ready to make the change you are speaking about.
Maryam Abdul Sattar, College Senior
Public speaking is an art that can be learned with practice. despite it often causes anxiety for many people, it is an important skill to have. The speaker’s passion for the topic, and how much importance they give to the message to be conveyed, greatly impacts the quality of their speech. Also, preparing the content of a speech considering the time, occasion, and the audience to whom will be presented to can make a speech an effective one.
In order for a speaker to be able to influence and persuade the audience, it is vital for them to be familiarized with the content of the speech and have enough knowledge of what they are going to talk about. Having a good command on the content and preparing talking points for the speech helps avoid going off topic. The accurate use of rhetorical strategies such as Ethos, Pathos, and Logos can be very influential in triggering emotions and curiosity in the audience. It is equally important to create a balance when using rhetorical strategies. For instance, listing too many statistics can make a speech tedious and dry. Likewise, a very emotional speech may impair judgement.
To summarize, the content of a speech and the speaker’s familiarity with the topic is crucial when engaging in public speaking. Also, the presenter’s style, approach, passion, compassion, body gestures, and their tone of voice can affect the results intended to gain from a speech.
Elisa Contreras, 8th Grade
Anjali Patel, College Graduate
While there are many elements that make a good speech, I really want to focus on two: preparedness and focus. When delivering a speech, setting aside adequate time to prepare is so important so that one is confident when speaking and able to answer most questions that may arise. Focus is also another aspect critical to giving an effective speech. When one is focused on just the main points, they can better communicate their message, ensuring more people are able to understand and really resonate with their words. Maintaining focus also assists with being able to effectively slow or speed up the pace of one’s speech, include metaphors as appropriate, and adjust the tone. Giving speeches on topics one may not think much about can be a good way to develop and refine these skills.
Brayden Mahoney, College Senior
Delivering a good speech as a good speaker is a very useful skill in many settings from professional to academic. To be a good speaker means that you are able to present yourself with confidence, supported by body language that complements your speech. In a public speaking class, I learned strategies to enhance your speaking. For example, an effective public speaker needs to be heard, therefore projecting your voice in key. To be a persuasive speaker requires further control and manipulation of your voice, specifically in varying your tone and intonation. To be received as an effective and persuasive speaker, the quality and content of the speech is critical. Your speech must be well written with not only proper grammar, but it must also contain essential elements of a speech like the hook, body paragraphs, and a summarizing closing statement.
Jasmine Kabira, College Graduate
Until my senior year of high school, I was terrified of public speaking. However, I gained two formative experiences that have shaped me into a much more confident and engaging speech giver. I enrolled in a senior Capstone course, which taught me how to deliver effective and persuasive content. I learned to get rid of every “um” and run-on sentence; good speeches demonstrate the speaker’s certainty in their own message. Every word needed to have purpose in my presentations. I realized that every anecdote, piece of research, and supplemental argument needed to fit into an organized flow to keep the audience captivated as I guided them to my main points. Speakers accomplish persuasive public speaking when they help their audiences understand that there is a point to everything they say, that every sentence holds some value to be digested and interpreted meaningfully.
That same year, I competed in a national poetry recitation competition. This experience taught me that public speaking is a performance, regardless of the context. Rather than simply focusing on conveying the meaning of each poem, I had to think about elements such as my physical presence and volume. Body language is an incredibly important part of projecting confidence in public speaking, and using it to not only emphasize but complement the content makes a good speech great. When we think of great speeches, given by great historical figures, charisma is often a word that comes to mind. Strong public speakers can project their personalities through their body language and command attention from their audiences. Speech giving has been a vital tool for changemakers throughout time, and these speech givers use these types of tools to effectively change the hearts and minds of those who listen; it is necessary to employ them when challenging the status quo and trying to engage the world to accomplish such feats.
Pavani Durbhakula, 10th Grade
Anneliese Raynolds, College Junior
A good speech captures the audience. It should begin with a hook to engage the audience and keep them interested. The speaker should embody the emotions they want to project. If they want to excite the room they should be excited. If the subject matter is grave, they should be grave without being monotone. If the subject is sad, or is okay for the speaker to be sad. There should be a mix of emotions still. Highs and lows to keep the story moving. Finally, the speech should not drone on and on. Everything said should have purpose. It is surprising easier to fill time with useless words than it is to be quick and to the point.
