Karl Waters
When delivering a speech or presentation, knowing what your speech is trying to achieve is incredibly useful as knowing this sets the foundations on which the speech is crafted. The basic frameworks for a speech are six in number;
- A speech to Inform
- Persuade
- Entertain
- Inspire
- Motivate
- Advocate
When delivering a speech, one of the initial starting points is to determine what it is that you want to achieve by framing your talk with respect to the above categories. For example, if you are giving a presentation for your final year university project – you may be setting out to inform your audience of the work you have undertaken, or if you are giving a Toastmasters tabletopic on “whether you’d fight twelve duck sized horses, or one horse sized duck”….speaking to entertain the audience will be the goal.
Sure, the above two examples read trivial – however in most real world cases your speech/presentation will involve some mix of the above categories. Returning to the first example above, your final year university project presentation may be more holistically aiming to inform the audience of your work while also persuading them that you’ve done a good job of it. Another example may be that as a best man at a wedding, your talk would be to advocate the lucky couple’s suitability through entertaining the audience with some stories.
Before you decide what content you wish to include, before you decide how to arrange that content, and before you decide how to say it – know what your end goal is, know the consequence on your audience that you want your talk to have. A well planned speech is a well prepared for venture – like a wing-suit flight over a colossal canyon under a sight of northern lights – however, without knowledge of the end-point you can find yourself crash landing into a chaotic meadow of gauze bush… leading the audience there with you to end up all caught up in confusion and tangled in torturous awkwardness. That’s not the feeling you want your audience to walk away with after your talk…
Try this for an engaging exercise: the next time you watch someone’s presentation – try to work out what they’re trying to achieve. Furthermore, and more importantly, are they succeeding at it? The confident answering of the latter question should compellingly propel the answering of the former. Have you learned something new? Do you feel motivated? Are you leaving the room refreshed? Or was all just another forgettable blur of boredom?
If you’re going to deliver a speech that seeks to purely inform people, your speech will be of a formal tone, and may be concerned with the challenge of conveying information while retaining the interest of the audience. If you’re telling a speech to entertain, stories and anecdotes diced with humour may be your main ingredients – and eloquence in speaking rather than strict logic may be your dressing. When speaking to inspire – a strong emotional appeal to the audience, coupled with story and engaging body language may be how you craft your speech.
So….what’s the plan? An entrée of entertainment, dashed with a little advocating and a peppering of persuasion – served with an icing of inspiration? Sounds appetizing – certainly more appetizing than horse headed goat soup spiced with dodecahedral cod cuts. You pull a long face at that – but it happens. Know your goal.
Varsity Toastmasters 