I’ve spent about a decade teaching college speech. I’ve dealt with numerous college textbooks. In general a textbook will recommend an approach to speech development that revolves around choosing a topic, developing a thesis and organizing support for that thesis. A student following such a textbook may progress along the following points: 1) choose a topic, 2) do some research, 3) develop a thesis, 4) do some more research, and 5) organize the research to support their thesis, which general involves following some sample outline or pattern given in a book. What they often produce is devoid of passion and mechanical.
Why would such a process produce a lifeless presentation? For the most part they don’t own the ideas. They have collected and organized the ideas of others. I have never seen a great speaker who doesn’t have their own unique ideas and perspectives on things. In order to teach people how to become great speakers, we must find a process that begins with their own ideas. We must teach a person how to develop ideas.
A second problem with the academic approach is one is relying primarily on book knowledge as opposed to experiential knowledge. Book knowledge lacks understanding. How can one develop unique ideas without understanding? There is a useful test for the ideas you want to communicate. If you can’t support your ideas with specific examples from your own life, you don’t know those ideas well enough to talk about them.
A third problem is book knowledge is devoid of passion. If you’ve experienced something, it’s made you angry, sad, happy or frustrated. Experiential knowledge is connected to passion and every audience member deserves a heart-to-heart connection with the speaker.
I have seen great speakers use statistics, quotes, newspaper stories and other forms of research in their speech. So, incorporating book knowledge is not bad. What is bad is when the main ideas come from others as opposed to coming from your own experiences. The main ideas must come from the thought processes and experiences of the speaker. The use of research is to complement and reinforce those ideas. Research and book knowledge is a servant; your own thinking ability is the master. College often turns secondary concerns into the master and destroys the learning process.
With that background, I’m going to share a method of speech development that begins with experiential knowledge. Although I will communicate this in a step-by-step fashion (which is often helpful to the rookie) realize that public speaking is an art form. Speech development is not linear. You may find you work better following a different order. And, you may find certain parts of the process are circular, where you end up back tracking to an earlier step. So, the step-by-step approach is merely a starting point. To become a great speaker you will need to find your own process.
The first step is to find a story. Just think through the stories of your life. The ones most vivid in your mind represent your strongest experiential knowledge. Which stories do you end up telling people over-and-over? Which stories represent life lessons that you keep revisiting? Which stories make you laugh, cry or feel the deepest emotions? The collection of these stories is the heart of your experiential knowledge. Take some time to explore them.
Of course, what happens when you are not free to pick the topic? Maybe you’ve been given an assignment at work or school. In most cases if you take some time to think, you’ll have some stories that relate to the topic at hand. If you spend a great deal of thought and you don’t have such experiences, then what I am suggesting may not work for you. In such cases, you’ll likely have to follow the more academic approach. It’s not the best way, but at times may be necessary.
Second, pick a story. I know what you’re thinking. How do I know which story to pick? Simply ask yourself which story you most want to talk about. Often your gut will know which one if you don’t think about it too much. You need to trust your gut. Your gut knowledge is based on experiential knowledge. Often gut feelings are your brain tying things together behind the scenes. It often means there is a deep lesson just below the surface and if you learn to follow your gut you’ll find ideas flow much easier. The commitment to follow your gut will help bring that about-to-surface wisdom into focus.
Third, find the life lesson in the story. There might be many lessons. Find the one your gut tells you is most important. This life lesson is the theme you will develop for your speech.
Fourth, you need to translate that life lesson into the big idea you’re going to communicate. In the world of academia this would be called developing your thesis. I recently had a student of mine whose thesis was sixty-three words long. It was a single sentence and was grammatically accurate, but imagine if you’re sitting in the audience and your brain is trying to absorb such a long, complex sentence. By about word twenty your eyes begin to cross. I suggested an eleven-word thesis that communicated the same idea. It’s much easier for the mind to grasp a shorter, simpler sentence.
So, don’t allow your mind to slip into academic-writing mode when you figure out your main idea. Instead, think of finding a marketing slogan for your life lesson. Consider what commercials do. They communicate ideas in short, vivid and memorable ways. Even a week or month later the jingle is stuck in your head. I will give you some general rules for your marketing slogan: 1) Keep it to fifteen words or less. 2) It must be memorable. 3) It should have a natural beat to it. By that I mean it has a rhythm to it that is musical in nature. Of course, remember that all these rules are merely guidelines. At times the greatest artistic expressions break the rules. So, what I am giving you is a starting point. The rules and step-by-step process are merely training tools. The tools are a means to helping you achieve the ends of understanding how to communicate. Once you gain that understanding, you should move beyond the rules and begin to develop your own tools.
Fifth, develop support for that main idea. You already have one story. So, you’ve already started that process. If you’re only giving a short speech, this may be enough. If it’s not, then how do you support ideas? If you read a speech or English composition textbook you might be thoroughly confused. Textbooks often try to be comprehensive in their coverage of a topic, so a textbook will likely give you innumerable ways to support ideas. However, there are only a few go-to ways great speakers use over-and-over. Three are primary: stories, analogies and demonstrations. Since you’ve already thought through your life stories, you might find there are more stories that strongly support your marketing slogan. You might have two, three or fifteen stories. You may likely have more stories than time will allow you to communicate. So, you might need to ask your gut which are most important. Generally you want to start and end strong. So, as you’re organizing your speech think about what will have the greatest impact and put those things on the two ends.
You might be wondering, “Does this mean I can give a speech that is merely a collection of stories that support a marketing slogan?” Yes. I have seen great speakers do that. Having a simple, vivid idea and telling stories are so powerful that in many cases this is not only sufficient, but the best way to communicate. If you’re a rookie speaker, I would recommend learning how to develop your big idea and telling stories as the starting point. These two skills are so fundamental and so powerful that until you master them, you don’t need to worry about anything else.
Another strong way to support ideas is through the use of analogies. Basically an analogy is using one thing to explain something else. Consider how I used the idea of marketing to explain developing a thesis. I’m using one thing to explain something else. Or, to put it another way, I’m using life experiences to explain a concept. With an analogy there are two things in play. First is the thing you’re trying to explain. In general this is something the audience doesn’t know or understand. The second is the thing you’re using to explain the unknown. So, basically an analogy is using something the audience knows at an experiential level to explain an unknown concept. Analogies are extremely powerful, but it will take a while before you master their use.
Another way to support ideas is through demonstration. If you want to teach someone how to cook a steak, sometimes the easiest way to do that is to bring in a Porterhouse and a grill. If you want to teach someone how to block a punch, you can’t do it through lecture. They have to see and experience blocking a punch. Demonstrations don’t work for every topic and I think if you use common sense you can figure out when they apply.
There is one big problem with demonstrations. They take time. You can’t rush them for them to be effective. You need to take your audience through the process at the pace they can absorb it. Often their ability to absorb is far slower than your ability to demonstrate. For example, say a professional baseball player was to teach a group of Tee Ball players how to hit a baseball. They could demonstrate a bat swing in a matter of second. To fully explain it, might take days as they break the swing down into it’s various components, explain each in detail, give kids time to practice each step and give feedback along the way.
At this point you have a marketing slogan and have developed stories, analogies and/or demonstrations to support that slogan. If you develop things following this method, you will likely have more material than you can cover in the time you have to speak. So, again you may need to listen to your gut as to what is most important. If you don’t have enough material, you now know the primary ways to support ideas. So, at least you know what to look for. You can also do some research to help fill out your speech.
Sixth, you need to figure how to organize the material—what order to put it in. It is possible to overcomplicate things. So, consider what you have. Give it some thought and see if you can find a way that just makes sense. How can you present ideas in a way that your audience will remember your marketing slogan? Is there certain material that won’t make sense unless you cover some other material first? Is there a certain way to organize material that will give it the strongest emotional impact? Is there something that just naturally grabs people’s attention? If so, you may want to start with that. Is there something that will really leave the audience with something deep to ponder or show them how to apply what you’ve talked about? You might want to close on that. If there is something you have that is really strong, you might want to open with it and also refer back to it at end.
This process I’m taking you through is the exact opposite way of how most students operate. Most students pick a pattern of organization from a textbook and then fill in the boxes. But, the patterns are merely a tool. Developing and supporting ideas is the prime goal. You want to begin by thinking through the how’s and why’s of organizing. Develop ideas first. Organize them second.
Now, I realize you might think and think until your brain bursts open and a pattern doesn’t rise to the surface. At this point you might need to look outside your thought process to find something that works. I would suggest patterns that fit how the mind naturally thinks and processes information.
So, how does the mind think and process information? Our mind is connected to our body and designed to process information from the body and output commands to the body. So, our thinking has a strong physical component to it. We exist in time and space. We are also emotional beings. This immediately suggests some patterns of arrangement.
Stories contain time, space and emotional elements. So, it’s possible to arrange a speech around a story. If there is one story that vividly illustrates your marketing slogan, just organize your main points around the story. Now, you may wonder what happens if that single story is not enough material for the time you need to speak. You can use the structure of the story to organize the speech and then for the high points in the story, where the story really illustrates important life lessons, bring in shorter stories, analogies, demonstrations and/or outside research to help heighten those high peaks.
Another way to organize things is to follow some sort of time arrangement: step-by-step or following the chronology of events. This is particularly true for speeches that are demonstration oriented, teach a specific skill or are historical in nature.
Our brain also thinks spatially, so can you find a way to organize things spatially? If you’re teaching about the parts of an engine you might progress from front to back. If you’re talking about a castle, you might organize the speech around giving the audience a mental tour. If you’re explaining different weight lifting exercises, you might work from top-to-bottom: leg exercises, core exercises, upper torso exercises and arm exercises.
Our emotions are closely linked to our thinking. So, you might want to think in terms of how to move an audience emotionally. Persuasive speeches often build the emotions of the audience to a high point. It’s like climbing an emotional mountain and leaving them at the peak.
People absorb information better after you’ve connected to them emotionally. So, you might think of a speech as a series of grabbing their heart and giving the mind something to ponder, grabbing their heart and giving the mind something to ponder and so on.
Sometimes your audience will have a series of emotional hurdles they need to overcome in order to absorb the message. For example, when I teach speech I know the first thing on everyone’s mind is the fear of getting in front of an audience. So, the first emotional hurdle is to deal with stage fright. After stage fright, their next biggest fear is, “What am I going to talk about”? So, the next topic I cover in class is choosing a topic. The next thing they are thinking is, “How am I going to put together a speech?” So, I talk about how to organize a speech. I organize my content based on their psychology—the set of emotional hurdles I need to overcome.
If you’re an experienced speaker you will likely know what I mean by organizing a speech emotionally. If you’re not an experienced speaker, you may need to get some more experience before you thoroughly grasp these concepts.
Sometimes what you are trying to communicate doesn’t fit one of these patterns. So, let me give you a few other patterns that make sense. One pattern is: 1) Grab their attention. 2) State your marketing slogan. 3) Support your marketing slogan. 4) Summarize and reinforce. This is a simplified version of what a textbook would call a deductive arrangement. One of the advantages of this is it’s easy to follow.
You can also organize a speech like a murder mystery. Think about a murder mystery movie for a moment. It generally has the following points: 1) Grab the audience’s attention. 2) Introduce a question. For a murder mystery this is generally a who-done-it question or how-did-they-do-it question. A murder mystery revolves around having a compelling unknown. If you organize a speech in this fashion, you must have some interesting question that drives the curiosity of the audience. 3) Present information that helps to answer the question. In a murder mystery, this information is carefully doled out piece-by-piece. The movie producer must balance two conflicting challenges: giving the audience enough information to give a sense of direction, but withholding enough information to keep things suspenseful. This arrangement is compelling, but it can be difficult to pull off. 4) Answer the question. In the movie, this is where the killer is revealed. Sometimes the movie will end at this point. Sometimes there might be a few loose ends that need tied up, but once the question has been answered things must conclude rather quickly. In a textbook this pattern would be called an inductive arrangement.
There are far more ways to organize a speech. These patterns will work in most cases. If you’re a novice speaker studying speech, it would be helpful to have a decent speech textbook in your library. In many cases textbooks are not a good tool for learning, but are a good reference source. You wouldn’t read a dictionary and thesaurus to learn how to write, but when you become stuck finding the right word the book may be extremely helpful. A speech textbook will catalog lists of ways to organize and support ideas. Nothing wrong with using a textbook when you’re stuck, but don’t blindly follow a pattern. There should be purpose and thought behind everything you do.
If you follow my suggestions you have a starting point to developing a speech. The ideas I’m giving you are different than what I’ve seen (and often hate) in academia. Whereas a textbook or college class will likely begin with book knowledge, I’m suggesting it is far more powerful to begin the process of speech development with experiential knowledge.
