PDF Summary:The Master Guides: Public Speaking, by Shortform

Does the thought of speaking in front of an audience make you anxious? You’re not alone: Many people say they fear public speaking even more than death. But public speaking is also one of the most important and widely applicable skills in life, and the good news is, anyone can master it. By learning proven skills and techniques, you can become an effective communicator and confidently deliver your message to an audience.

In Shortform’s Master Guide to public speaking, we’ve compiled leading experts’ insights on how to prepare and deliver your speech. Whether you want to persuade, inform, entertain, or motivate your audience, this guide will walk you through the process of crafting and delivering a powerful speech that captures your audience’s interest.

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Tip 3: Use active language. Begin sentences with clear subjects and vivid verbs. This keeps the “action” moving and keeps your audience engaged.

Tip 4: Trim unnecessary words and ideas. Keep sentences short and direct by avoiding qualifiers and hedge words—they add fluff and feel indecisive. Likewise, Maxwell says you should trim excess information that might distract from your main points.

Incorporate Engaging Content

To make your ideas more understandable and to captivate your audience, experts recommend that you incorporate a variety of engaging content into your speech. Let’s look at several ways you can do this:

Strategy 1: Tell stories. In How Highly Effective People Speak, competitive public speaker Peter D. Andrei explains that people understand the world through stories—it’s how we learn and how our ancestors passed down information over thousands of years. When an argument is presented as a story, we relate to the people in the story and imagine what it would be like if the same things happened to us. Andrei specifically recommends telling a story about a single person because this makes it easier for the listener to imagine themselves in the story.

Heinrichs adds that you should describe sensations in detail. For example, describe the scent of your childhood home or the feeling of your stomach dropping. This helps your audience “experience” the event alongside you, and they’ll react to it the same way you did.

Gallo offers additional recommendations for making your story more memorable. He suggests incorporating the following elements into your story:

• Unexpectedness: Make the story take a turn that the audience didn’t anticipate. You’ll shock people into paying attention to what you’re saying.
• Mystery: Keep your story’s outcome unknown for as long as possible. People crave the closure of knowing how a story will end and will keep listening until they get it.
• Heroes and villains: Give your audience some characters to root for and others to dislike. They’ll become engrossed in your story as they wait for the satisfaction of the hero triumphing and the villain getting their comeuppance.
• Adversity: Make sure that the main character of your story overcomes adversity at some point in the narrative. Your audience will be inspired by this battle against misfortune, and they’ll keep listening to find out whether the main character prevails.

Strategy 2: Use visuals. Maxwell suggests you use body language, visual metaphors, or actual visual aids like physical props and images to help illustrate your ideas. Andrei explains that memories based on visual perception stick out more clearly in our minds, so they’ll provoke a stronger emotional reaction and be easier to recall later.

Gallo provides an example of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos using a vivid metaphor to condense a complex idea: To illustrate his philosophy on team size, Bezos explained, “We try to create teams that are no larger than can be fed by two pizzas.”

Strategy 3: Engage multiple senses. Gallo recommends presenting content that triggers a combination of the senses of hearing, sight, and touch. It’ll help your audience to remember what you’ve said: Research has shown that multisensory experiences are much more memorable than single-sense experiences. For example, if you’re pitching a product, you could pass a prototype around your audience.

Strategy 4: Incorporate humor: Maxwell writes that getting your audience to laugh increases feelings of intimacy and makes them more receptive to your words. However, he suggests you only use humor if it comes naturally to you. Gallo adds that humor increases your likeability and suggests four ways to incorporate humor into your speeches and presentations:

• Share an anecdote: Relate a short, amusing story about an experience you—or possibly someone else—had.
• Make an analogy: Humorously draw attention to the ways in which two different things are similar (for example, “Attempting to run Congress without encouraging social relationships between its members is like trying to drive a car that doesn’t have any motor oil!”).
• Quote someone else’s funny comment: This might be anyone from a friend to a famous person.
• Show the audience a funny video or picture: Use one you’ve produced yourself or one produced by someone else.

Create a Powerful Closing

Anderson writes that an audience will remember a talk based on how it ends. He provides several options for powerful closings:

Closing 1: Apply what you’ve discussed to a broader situation. For example, “If this management style can transform Fortune 500 companies, imagine what it could do in the White House.”

Closing 2: Declare a personal mission. End your speech by making a proclamation about how you are going to use this knowledge to improve the world.

Closing 3: Leave your audience with a dream. Paint a picture of a better world. Inspire your audience with your dream for the future—but be sure to avoid clichés.

Closing 4: Call them to action. Ask your audience to take the information you just gave them and do something with it. For example, “If we all contact our congressmen, they’ll have to listen.” Maxwell offers another tip for encouraging action: Help your audience imagine what the positive change looks like and show them how to take the first step.

Closing 5: End with beautiful language. A poetic statement, song lyric, or eloquent phrase can add a somber and memorable touch. Carnegie recommends using a famous quote if it more powerfully sums up your argument than you could.

Practice Your Speech

Once you’ve written your speech, rehearse it so you can deliver your ideas clearly and confidently. Carnegie recommends you memorize your speech. This doesn’t necessarily mean learning each exact word and phrase by heart, but instead thoroughly learning your argument so you can speak extemporaneously. This will not only save you time but will also enhance your delivery—when you know your speech well enough, you can deliver it with conviction, feeling, and authenticity.

Gallo suggests you focus on three things when practicing your speech:

• The speed at which you talk. Keep rehearsing until you’ve perfected talking at a speed of 190 words per minute. This is a conversational rate of speech that seems natural.
• Confident body language. Examples of confident body language include standing up straight, holding your head high, and making frequent eye contact with your audience. If you fail to appear confident in what you’re saying, your audience will trust you and your opinions less.
• Hand gestures. Use gestures to add emphasis to what you’re saying. For example, if you’re talking about how much a problem has grown in size, create a small circle with your hands and expand it. Studies have shown that making hand gestures will increase the audience’s confidence in you and what you’re saying.

How to Deliver Your Speech

Now that we’ve outlined how to prepare, write, and practice your speech, we’ll explore experts’ tips and tricks to help you deliver it with confidence and clarity on the day of your presentation. That way, you’ll leave a powerful impression on your audience. We’ll cover how to manage your stress and anxiety, engage your audience, and hold their attention.

Manage Stress and Anxiety

It’s normal to feel nervous and release adrenaline before your speech, even if you’re a seasoned speaker. Anderson explains that adrenaline can be good: It gives you energy and animates your voice. However, in large doses, it can also make you shaky, give you dry mouth, and cause anxiety. He gives some tips for managing your nerves before you step out on stage:

Tip 1: Get active. If your adrenaline is high enough to make you shaky, do something physical to get rid of the excess. Carnegie suggests you jump around and shake your fists in the air—feel your convictions and allow them to animate you and fire you up.

Tip 2: Drink five to six ounces of water five minutes before you speak. This is enough to keep dry mouth at bay but not enough to fill your bladder.

Tip 3: Focus on your breathing in the minutes before speaking. Make sure the oxygen is going all the way down into your stomach and hold it for a moment or two before exhaling. In Amplify Your Influence, keynote speaker René Rodriguez suggests another breathing variation for calming your nerves: box breathing. Breathe in for four counts and pause for four counts. Then, breathe out for four counts and pause again for four counts. Repeat this cycle of breath for as long as you need to feel more centered and calm.

If all else fails (if, for example, you begin stuttering or your mind goes blank), Anderson says to simply tell the audience you’re nervous. They want to root for you, and admitting that you’re experiencing nerves only makes you more relatable. However, Maxwell disagrees, arguing that if you show that you’re nervous in any way, your audience will be more concerned about you than your message. He recommends that you combat your nerves by adopting a mantra—a short affirming statement to remind yourself that you’re able to communicate well and make a difference with your words.

Engage Your Audience

To engage your audience during your presentation, Maxwell says you must focus on connecting with them. Connection breaks down barriers that prevent people from listening to you, which makes them more receptive to you and your ideas. Maxwell suggests a few ways to engage and connect with your audience:

• Put yourself in the audience’s shoes. Consider what they feel, think, and desire, and make them feel valued in ways that are important to them. You can do this by interacting with them, expressing your gratitude, or celebrating their accomplishments. Carnegie also suggests using familiar in-group words and ideas, like a Richard Feynman joke for a group of physicists.
• Remove mental and physical barriers. For instance, be friendly and create a comfortable atmosphere so that your audience feels at ease. Or, instead of standing behind a large podium, try sitting by the edge of the stage.

Carnegie provides some other ways to engage and connect with your audience when presenting:

• Speak from your heart: Facts don’t convince—emotion does. Deliver your speech with passion and enthusiasm. If you’re not emotional about your subject, your audience won’t be either.
• Act confident: Take the stage with poise and presence. Remind yourself that you’re well-prepared, invested in your ideas, and here to educate an audience that came to listen to you.
• 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.
• Show your individuality. Real stage presence comes from an authentic individual owning their personality. Speak, move, and express yourself naturally. Gallo explains that allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable is important because it shows your audience that you’re a human being who has feelings, just like them.

Keep Your Audience’s Attention

You may have successfully engaged your audience, but you must then prevent them from drifting off or losing focus as your speech progresses. Maxwell offers two techniques that can help you liven up a lukewarm audience:

• Interact with audience members. Ask questions that require them to shout out answers or raise their hands. You can also encourage them to say or share something with a neighbor.
• Use pauses strategically. When you stop talking, people naturally return their focus to you as they wonder what caused the sudden silence.

Another way to keep your audience captivated is to shock them. Gallo writes that shocking moments stick in people’s minds—according to neuroscientists, they heighten our emotions and cause our brains to perceive and remember information more vividly. The more your audience thinks about the shocking moment, the more they contemplate the idea you were trying to get across—and the more likely they are to act on that idea.

Gallo recommends several techniques to create a shocking moment:

Technique 1: Bring an unusual prop to your talk. For example, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor brought a real human brain to her TED talk about neuroscience. The brain disgusted her audience, but it also grabbed their attention.

Technique 2: Give a demonstration. This method is particularly useful if you’re presenting a product. Showcase the item’s unique selling points. Your audience will hopefully be shocked by how impressive it is.

Technique 3: Include startling statistics. For example, when giving a TED talk on psychopathy, author and journalist Jon Ronson revealed that one in every hundred people is a psychopath—a high statistic that grabbed his audience’s attention.

Technique 4:. Display a jarring photo or video. For instance, if you’re discussing the horrors of war, you could include images of war-torn communities to shock your audience into recognizing the pain that conflict causes.

Technique 5: Create a sound bite and use it in your presentation. A sound bite distills your main argument into a short, snappy, and memorable sentence. You can transform your sound bite into a shocking moment by making it particularly emotionally charged.

Shortform Resources

For more tips on public speaking and effective communication, see the following Shortform guides:

• TED Talks, Chris Anderson
• Talk Like TED, Carmine Gallo
• The Bezos Blueprint, Carmine Gallo
• The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication, John C. Maxwell
• Public Speaking for Success, Dale Carnegie
• Thank You for Arguing, Jay Heinrichs
• How Highly Effective People Speak, Peter D. Andrei
• Amplify Your Influence, René Rodriguez
• Simply Said, Jay Sullivan