PDF Summary:Public Speaking for Success, by Dale Carnegie

According to author and lecturer Dale Carnegie, public speaking is the one skill that can bring you more success, opportunity, and fulfillment than any other. In Public Speaking for Success, Carnegie argues that as a skilled speaker, you'll be able to change people's hearts and minds, inspire action, improve your relationships, and advance your career. Most people fear speaking in public, but that’s only natural—and with Carnegie’s time-tested lessons, you can learn to overcome that fear, take the stage, and speak with confidence and poise.

Our guide is based on the updated 2006 edition of Public Speaking for Success (originally published in 1926). We share Carnegie’s essential teachings about why public speaking matters, how to overcome the fear of getting on stage, and how to craft and deliver a memorable speech. In commentary, we’ll explore how speech-giving has changed since Carnegie’s time and compare his ideas to those in two popular books on TED talks.

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Contrary to Carnegie’s suggestion that you can use technical language with a specialized audience, Shapiro suggests always crafting your language to be understood by young, unspecialized listeners. However, that doesn’t mean the ideas need to be simple—just the way you phrase them. Using simple, easy-to-understand phrasing actually allows you to play with more complex ideas. So long as they’re explained in plain language, your audience will be able to follow your logic.

Objective #2: Persuade

When you want to persuade an audience of some position, Carnegie recommends that you use enthusiasm, force, and repetition (in addition to a well-formed argument) to fix your idea in their minds. This works because, according to Carnegie, people have a harder time finding smart objections to an idea than simply accepting it.

(Shortform note: Repetition is a common rhetorical strategy with great power, but it can fail if you repeat your points unskillfully. To avoid this, be sure to vary your phrasing and look for ways to stylize your ideas—such as by using poetic phrasing, alliteration, imagery, or other techniques. This will keep the idea interesting and help it stick in people’s minds without them noticing the repetition as easily.)

Carnegie says that unless your ideas have obvious flaws, people will generally take you at your word. Given this, you can craft a persuasive speech by 1) repeatedly impressing your ideas upon the audience, and 2) actively addressing any doubts or objections. To these ends, Carnegie recommends these tactics:

• Speak with great enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is infectious and will spread from passionate speakers to their audiences.
• Find the flaws in your ideas. Think of any likely objections ahead of time, then address them in your speech to allay doubt.
• Quote authorities. Find quotes from well-known people that support your points—people will more quickly believe known experts.

Above, Carnegie suggests singular ways to use pathos, logos, and ethos—or, respectively, appeals to emotion, reason, and authority. These aren’t the only ways you can put these appeals to good use. For example, in Thank You for Arguing, Jay Heinrichs offers the following suggestions:

Pathos: You could also appeal to shared values; religious or moral sentiments; or common fears, hopes, and dreams. Enthusiasm might not be appropriate for all of these cases.

Logos: To further strengthen the logic of your speech, you could analyze it for bias and logical fallacies. We all have cognitive biases—gaps or flaws in our brains’ ways of processing the world—that we often overlook. Acknowledging your own can help you determine whether they’ve warped the logic of your speech.

Ethos: You could also slip in a reference to your own relevant qualifications and education. If you don’t have any, you could also make reference to any connections you have to respected people—maybe someone from your family works in the field you’re speaking about or maybe a friend holds a high position related to your topic.

Objective #3: Inspire Action

One of the most powerful things a speech can do is move people to action. Carnegie recommends a four-step process for achieving this objective:

• Use a strong opening to get the audience’s attention (we’ll explain how below).
• Earn the audience’s trust. Introduce yourself with key points about your background, experience, and qualifications. Then, speak sincerely and from your own experience, rather than using abstractions.
• Make your argument. Introduce one idea at a time, and logically build each subsequent idea toward your conclusion. Then answer objections—as many as you can—to demonstrate that you aren't afraid of scrutiny.
• Appeal to people's emotions, which drive us more than reason does. You can appeal to desires such as personal gain, safety, happiness, and self-esteem, or to moral or patriotic ideals, such as fairness, equality, liberty, and faith.

Make a Clear Call to Action

When making a speech that inspires action—commonly called a persuasive speech—your main goal is to build toward a powerful call to action just before the end of your speech. Carnegie’s points above will help you to get through the speech but don’t quite touch on the specifics of making the call to action itself. To do so, you’ll want to:

• Think about the types of people in your audience—thinkers, doers, highly connected people, and so on.

• Appeal to the motivations of those kinds of people—like getting things done, innovating new ideas, or spreading a new way of thinking.

• Communicate a clear vision of what taking action will accomplish and why it’s worth doing.

If you can also sum up that vision of inspired action with a poetic flourish or memorable turn of phrase, it’ll stick even better—something like Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Objective #4: Entertain and Inform

You don’t always have to educate, persuade, or inspire action—instead, Carnegie says you can speak just to entertain or inform an audience on an interesting topic. To that end, you can employ any technique we've discussed so far, as well as the following tactics:

• Provide novelty. We all love to be amazed by new, unexpected information. For instance, you could present about the mushrooms that scientists found can digest plastic—relatable, yet novel.
• Appeal to people’s self-interest. How do your ideas matter to your audience? How do they affect their lives, ambitions, or fortunes?
• Use human interest stories. People also love stories about other people—their triumphs, failures, struggles, and successes. Make just a few points and then spend most of your time illustrating them with stories and examples.

(Shortform note: Entertaining speeches are often given at special occasions, such as weddings or awards ceremonies. While they’re meant mainly to amuse, they still require preparation—don’t make the mistake of thinking such a speech is easy and you can wing it. To use Carnegie’s above strategies, think of the type of occasion you’ll speak at and the sort of audience you’ll have. Then, you can think of novel, interesting stories and ideas that provoke the right sort of emotion for the occasion—whether that’s laughter and good humor, drama and serious engagement, or celebratory sincerity.)

Structure and Arrange Your Ideas

Now that you've begun to develop your ideas and aim them toward a main objective, start setting out the structure of your speech. According to Carnegie, your speech needs a clear opening, a focused trajectory or throughline, and a stirring conclusion. While there are no hard-and-fast rules for nailing down the nitty-gritty specifics within this framework, Carnegie offers the following templates to adapt to your needs:

• Template #1: Start with your premises; present your argument; call for action.
• Template #2: Draw attention to a problem; present your solution to it; call for action.
• Template #3: Captivate the audience; establish your credibility; give your argument; call for action.

(Shortform note: Expanding on Carnegie’s structural points above, Chris Anderson offers a variety of specific techniques in TED Talks. These include presenting your premises dramatically, using fascinating imagery right off the bat to captivate attention, discrediting alternative perspectives to make your solutions look better, and making your call to action specific and easy to perform.)

Whichever template you start from, Carnegie also advises that you favor keeping your speech succinct and focused. Pick two or three key points to make about your topic, then refine them until they vividly and persuasively communicate your argument. (Shortform note: Another way to keep your speech focused is to develop a clear throughline—a central point or takeaway about your topic. In TED Talks, Anderson argues that you should be able to express your throughline in a single sentence and that a good throughline carries an element of surprise.)

Last, Carnegie suggests dictating your speech to explore different ways of arranging the ideas. Speak aloud into a voice recorder as if you're giving the speech, and you'll begin to notice better ways of fitting the ideas together. Transcribe your dictations for editing in a word processor, and repeat this process until you're sure of your structure.

(Shortform note: For centuries, writers and speakers have spoken their ideas aloud, to themselves and others, to better explore and organize the connections between what they want to say. Doing so helps you see your ideas more objectively, and it forces you to make explicit the connections between them—whereas keeping them in your head can obscure a lack of clarity or connectedness. Speaking aloud can also help you overcome (speech)writer’s block, as it’s often easier to explain your ideas out loud than to put words to the blank page.)

Memorizing Your Speech

Once you finalize the structure of your speech, from macro to micro, you can start memorizing it. Carnegie says that this doesn’t necessarily mean learning each exact word and phrase by heart—rather, you can save time and enhance your delivery by thoroughly learning your argument, and then speaking extemporaneously. When you know your speech well enough, this will help you deliver it with conviction, feeling, and authenticity.

(Shortform note: Carmine Gallo explains in Talk Like TED that thoroughly rehearsing your speech will free up mental space so that when you’re on stage, you can focus on things such as your stage presence and adapting to the audience rather than struggling to remember your speech. He suggests that in addition to learning your ideas, you should also rehearse your body language, hand gestures, and even the speed at which you talk—190 words per minute is an ideal, conversational pace.)

Speaking extemporaneously is possible because, Carnegie says, our memories are quite strong when we use the right techniques. He recommends three rules for using your memory effectively.

Rule #1: Create Lasting Impressions

As a general rule, memories stick best when you get a thorough and vivid impression of what you want to remember. Carnegie advises that you simply focus hard on a mental image, like a blooming flower, until it unfolds in vivid detail. Use all your senses to concentrate and feel, taste, hear, smell, and see the image.

Say you’re arguing for universal basic income—you might concentrate deeply on an image of the plight of low-wage workers: The pervasive stress, the smells and sounds and sights of low-income housing. Feeling this idea deeply will help you remember it and communicate it clearly to your audience.

(Shortform note: In Learning How to Learn, Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski explain that multisensory learning works so well because it creates more pathways for your brain to recall a piece of information. For instance, if you practice seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling an idea—such as how waves crash on the shore—you’ll connect that memory to inputs from each sense, thereby creating more synaptic connections and neural pathways in your brain. Then when you want to recall the idea, you’ll have multiple ways to do so.)

Rule #2: Liberally Associate Your Memories

Once you have a strong image for each of your ideas, begin to weave them together. According to Carnegie, the brain is an associative machine: We create and access memories by linking them together with other memories. So to further memorize your speech, take those images you created and link them together as a sort of “road trip” through your ideas. Shape the images into a narrative sequence, associating each point with a stop along the way.

(Shortform note: To help with this associative process, consider developing a memory palace. This practice involves creating a mental image of a place you’re very familiar with and filling it with the details of what you want to remember. To sequence your ideas, you could plot a path between, say, the rooms of a mental image of your childhood house. You’d then fill each room with sights, sounds, and smells that help you to recall the idea, practice recalling each room, and then practice moving through that sequence of memories.)

Rule #3: Practice by Repetition

Once you’ve created strong impressions and linked them together, practice recalling those memories. Practice by repetition is like walking the same path until it becomes well-worn and clear of obstructions. However, don’t practice every day—instead, practice in intervals of a few days, and increase the gaps as time goes on. Studies have found that this strengthens memories to the same degree as daily practice in around half the time.

(Shortform note: This method of recalling things at increasing intervals, known today as spaced repetition, has its roots in the research of 19th-century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Specifically, Ebbinghaus discovered the “forgetting curve,” or the fact that new memories decay along an exponential curve—we tend to forget new details all at once, then more slowly as time goes on. However, we better remember things that we practice recalling. The point of spaced repetition, then, is to practice recalling new pieces of information at key points along the forgetting curve. This gradually produces strong memories that decay more slowly and with less need for continuous recall practice.)

Lastly, Carnegie recommends combining the above techniques to create a mental narrative that traces the path of your speech. To do this, number each point in your speech (for instance, one to seven). Then, create a strong mental image for each number. Link those images to each corresponding point, then string them together in a mental story based on your images. Rehearse that story, and you'll recall your points easily and in order.

(Shortform note: To aid in this process, you could use spaced repetition software (SRS). One of the most popular is Anki, a free and open-source flashcard program. Try creating flashcards to associate each point in your speech with the corresponding mental image, with the point on one side and the image to recall on the other. Then, recall and strengthen those images at each review opportunity. Start at least a week prior to your speech, and you’ll have a much easier time recalling the structure of your speech, as Carnegie suggests doing.)

Giving Your Speech

Once you’ve prepared, polished, and memorized your speech, it’s time to get ready and give it. In this section, we'll discuss Carnegie’s recommendations for making last-minute preparations, giving a strong opening, holding the audience's attention, and closing memorably.

Preparing for the Day of Your Speech

Having put in the work to prepare for your speech, you’ll want to be ready for the day of. Carnegie recommends that you rest up before your speech: Get a good night's sleep to rejuvenate mentally, physically, and emotionally. Also, to prevent brain fog, don't eat before speaking.

(Shortform note: In contrast to Carnegie’s suggestion, it may be that you should avoid certain foods rather than food in general. Some foods, largely those that cause a spike in blood sugar, cause more brain fog than others—sugary foods, breads, heavy meats, and dairy are the common culprits. Instead, start the day with healthy fats from avocados, nut butters, or whole nuts, as well as unrefined sugars from whole fruits and berries. Eat lightly of these options, and you’ll avoid the spiked blood sugar that causes mental fatigue while also getting enough slow-burning energy to deliver an excellent speech.)

Just prior to the day of, you'll want to make sure the stage is properly prepared. Carnegie advises removing all clutter and furniture, apart from an unobtrusive podium, to minimize distractions. If you don't have a stage, simply clear the area you'll be occupying of clutter—and know that speaking from the same level as your audience makes the event more personal and comfortable.

As to the room itself, try to match its size to your audience. For a small audience, book a small room; book a large room for a larger audience. If audience members are sparse and scattered, Carnegie says you can ask them to gather in the center. This helps facilitate a crowd mentality, which makes people easier to engage with and persuade.

(Shortform note: Carnegie’s tips to match your room to your audience may serve to effect deindividuation, a phenomenon identified by researchers of crowd psychology wherein members of large crowds have a lessened sense of self and individual identity. This can have a variety of effects, such as causing people to be more likely to go along with crowd norms. So if your enthusiasm successfully reaches a few audience members, others will more easily join in the general excitement and agreement that they feel.)

Carnegie advises that right before the speech, you should dress and groom yourself well. Looking the part will help you deliver as well as impress your audience. Right before you take the stage, read your speech over once more, and rehearse what you've memorized.

(Shortform note: Research confirms that how you dress affects both how you feel and how others perceive you. Specifically, people were found to make snap judgments in three seconds or less based on the clothing worn by the study’s models, even with faces blurred. Based on whether their suits were fitted and tailored or off-the-rack, participants rated the former as more confident, high-earning, flexible, and successful. Given this, be sure to consider all the little details of your outfit—even a small bit of frumpiness could negatively affect people’s perception of you.)

Opening Your Speech

It's now time to give your speech—so how do you engage and captivate your audience right from the start? According to Carnegie, the secret is simple: Deeply feel what you have to say, then speak from your heart rather than your head.

Having prepared ahead of time, you've learned your topic thoroughly and gotten all the facts straight. However, facts don't convince—emotion does. So when it's time to deliver, do so with passion, emotion, and great enthusiasm. If you haven't built a strong emotional investment in your speech, your audience will notice and quickly lose interest—people can tell when you don't really care about what you're saying.

(Shortform note: Since Carnegie’s time, science has added weight to his claim that emotion is crucial to persuasion. Numerous studies confirm the reality of emotional contagion or the fact that we often instinctually mirror the emotions of those we interact with. This can involve aligning ourselves with the body language, facial expressions, posture, and even neurophysiological qualities of a speaker. While it’s not clear exactly how this phenomenon applies between a speaker and a large audience, the underpinnings of Carnegie’s point are founded in scientific reality.)

In more practical terms, Carnegie recommends the following tactics for successfully opening your speech:

• Pump yourself up. Right before your speech, get energized. Jump around, shake your fists in the air—feel your convictions and allow them to animate you and fire you up.
• Stand tall and act confident. Take the stage with poise and presence, and remind yourself that you are well-prepared, invested in your ideas, and here to educate an audience that came to listen to you.
• Cater to the audience. If they're technical, you can open with familiar in-group words and ideas, like a Richard Feynman joke for a group of physicists.

(Shortform note: Having built this energy from pumping yourself up, note then that according to Chris Anderson in TED Talks, you have only 60 seconds to earn and hold your audience’s interest. He suggests a different approach from Carnegie: Open with dramatic or fascinating imagery, a curiosity-arousing question, or a counterintuitive statement (“Believe it or not, farmed fish is hardly more sustainable than wild-caught”). Mix and match these with Carnegie’s techniques, and you’ll have a foolproof way to open your speech.)

Hook the Audience's Attention

Beyond the above general advice, Carnegie explains that you must hook an audience's attention. People are generally impatient, so you have to grab their attention very quickly—and this is best achieved with an opening that you design in advance to maximize your chance of success. Carnegie gives the following techniques:

• Keep it succinct. Refine your opening to a sharp, powerful sentence or two at max. Then charge ahead into your speech.
• Arouse curiosity. People are naturally curious—take advantage of their desire to know more with a shocking statement, novel information, or a captivating question.
• Appeal to self-interest. If your audience is practical or business-oriented, tell them how what you have to say will improve their lives or bottom lines.
• Find common ground. When your topic is contentious, open by tactfully speaking to shared experiences, values, or points of reference between you and the audience. This gives them a positive first impression and ensures they'll listen to what you have to say.

Appeal to Core Human Needs to Hook Your Audience

For a complementary perspective on how to hook and hold an audience’s attention, we can look to the field of marketing and advertising. For example, in Ca$hvertising, Drew Whitman contends that hooks grab and hold attention by addressing one of eight core human needs:

• To live a long and happy life

• To eat and drink well

• To avoid fear, threats, and danger to your life

• To find a sexual partner

• To be safe and comfortable

• To have status and recognition

• To take care of your loved ones

• To be accepted by society

Since these needs are biologically embedded in all of us, any appeal that addresses one or more of them will make sense and feel important to the audience. This also reduces the amount of extra convincing you’ll need to do if your point is abstract since you’ve linked it to something tangible and meaningful to everyone.

Beyond what to do, Carnegie says, you can also improve your opening by avoiding the following common (and often ruinous) errors:

• Opening with an apology. Often used to seem humble, this technique makes speakers look incompetent or unprepared and can annoy audiences. (Shortform note: Research confirms that apologizing excessively lowers self-esteem and others’ respect for you.)
• Opening with humor. Most speakers can't pull off jokes, so you'll most likely make the audience cringe and pull away emotionally. (Shortform note: If you do use humor, use a self-deprecating joke to humanize yourself—and never say anything offensive or rude.)
• Opening too formally. Scripted, overly rehearsed, and/or dry openings easily lose the audience's attention. (Shortform note: In contrast, Chris Anderson suggests in TED Talks that a scripted opening works in some situations, like funerals, where formality matters.)

Holding the Audience's Attention

Once you've hooked the audience's attention, you need to continue to earn it. According to Carnegie, you can do this by paying attention to how you speak and not just what you say. While he states that there are no hard-and-fast rules, Carnegie does recommend these techniques:

• Speak conversationally, as if you're chatting with a close friend. This will bring out a natural, sincere quality in your voice and help the audience feel connected to you.
• Speak to individuals, not the crowd. After all, the audience is composed of individuals, and people generally appreciate being recognized and spoken to. Make eye contact; create connections.
• Let loose your individuality. Real stage presence comes from an authentic individual owning their personality. To truly own the stage, speak, move, and express yourself however feels most natural.

Remember also that your attitude influences your audience's attitude—that is, they respond to the emotion you give off. To avoid appearing uncomfortable or awkward, stand tall and keep your hands relaxed at your sides. Let yourself gesture naturally, but avoid sharp or jerky movements. All in all, practice speaking spontaneously, authentically, and as only you can.

(Shortform note: While Carnegie recommends being natural, authentic, and spontaneous to connect with your audience, in Talk Like TED, Gallo suggests that you should thoroughly rehearse how you’ll stand, move, and act on stage. He suggests that you exude confidence by standing up straight, making frequent eye contact with crowd members, keeping your head high, and staying relaxed rather than fidgeting. To rehearse this all, find a family member or friend and practice “faking it ’til you make it”—even if you don’t feel confident at first, acting confident will gradually improve your body language and delivery.)

Closing Your Speech

To close a speech in a memorable way, leave the audience with a final, powerful, and clear restatement of your argument's main thrust. According to Carnegie, there's no perfect prescription for achieving this. You won't do it that well in your first few speeches, but over time, you’ll develop a sense of when your point is clear and when the timing is right to end.

Generally, that point comes not long after the peak, or climax, of your speech. That is, once you've landed on the main, cumulative thrust of your argument, start looking to wrap the speech up. This works because you'll stop while your audience is still enjoying your speech and leave them wanting more. If, in contrast, you drag things out, you'll lose their interest.

(Shortform note: Another way to look at your peak or climax is as your main point, which Joel Schwartzberg defines in Get to the Point! as a clear assertion that you can explain and support. Many people, he argues, fail to get to the point—often because they don’t really know what it is—and thereby lose their listeners. If you’re still feeling fuzzy on your point, use Schwartzberg’s strategy to identify a proper point: State your point as an “I believe that (your point)” sentence. If it doesn’t make sense (“I believe that bad construction and zoning laws”), it’s not a point. Then, rewrite it to fit this formula—“I believe that bad construction and zoning laws lead to runaway development, inefficient use of resources, and ecological damage.”)

Carnegie asserts that since endings are so important, you should plan yours out word for word. Write it out ahead of time, revise it, and try it out on friends and family to get feedback. Keep revising it and getting feedback until your helpers clearly feel roused by the ending. As you're crafting your ending, consider Carnegie's techniques:

• Recap your argument. This refreshes your logic in the audience's minds and helps them put the whole thing together.
• Call for action. Having made your argument, make a passionate statement as to what needs to be done about your topic.
• Thank your audience. If you sincerely feel it, express your pleasure, gratitude, or enjoyment at speaking for them.
• Use a famous quote. If a famous quote more powerfully sums up your argument than you could, take advantage of that fact.

More Ways to End Your Speech

In TED Talks, Chris Anderson corroborates Carnegie’s emphasis on the importance of a strong ending. He adds that the ending is how your audience will remember your entire speech and that even the best speeches can fail due to poorly planned endings. He offers a few different options from Carnegie, including:

• Apply your main point to a broader situation: “If this change in pedagogy worked in one school district, imagine how it could transform education nationwide!”

• Declare your mission: “...That’s why I’m starting a consulting firm to teach this new methodology everywhere I can.”

• Paint a picture of your dream: “...Just think—thousands of teachers and students with happier, more effective classrooms, better relationships, and fewer kids left to slip through the cracks.”