How to Write a Speech

Part 1 of 4: The Very Basics

 

1

Choose your topic. A good speech is usually about one thing. There needs to be one message that matches the occasion for the speech. It should reflect the interests of your audience, the feel of the occasion, and, better yet, have something to say that is relevant.

• If the speech is for school and is completely open-ended, choose a topic that you'll find easy to be passionate about. The best speeches have very little to do with argument and more to do with delivery and the heart put into it by the speaker. If you can get into it, odds are your audience can too.

2

Find your purpose or thesis. Why are you giving a speech on this topic anyway? ("My teacher told me to!"or I have to" is not a reason.)

• "Thesis" is paper talk, yes, but a good speech is like an informal paper - you still need a point to drill home. If you are writing a speech on an event in your life, it still needs a message. Your topic may be the near fatal death experience you had last year, but your thesis or purpose would be advocating the use of seat belts. When you need reasoning to back it up, "it saved my life" is pretty hard to argue with!
  • A speech should be made for a good reason: To inspire, to instruct, to rally support, or to lead to action are noble purposes -- but not to merely sound off, to feed a speaker's ego, to flatter, to intimidate, or to shame. For the record.
  
  
  
  
  
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  Get organized. Remember that all great speeches (and even those not so great) require "shape": the introduction, the stuffings (the body), and the "outro" or conclusion. A speech is not an amorphous blob or strings of tangled spaghetti; it is not bits and pieces shoved together.
• The old saying is hard to beat for shaping your speech: "Intro -- Tell them what you will tell them. Body -- Tell them. Conclusion -- Tell them what you told them." That's exactly how you should think of the structure of your speech.
• For your body, come up with at least three points to support your argument. If they build on each other, all the better. At the beginning, draft a list. You can pick out the strongest ones later.

4

Be prepared to get persuasive. You'll need to do this in any way that you can. If your points aren't strong logically, you'll need to pad them with other reasons. If you're not persuading them to agree with you on a topic, you need to at least get them hanging on your every word.

• Plato's appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos will come in handy here. Move your audience to agreement by means of your credibility (ethos) or by using others' (when you think of Hanes, do you think of quality underwear or do you think of Michael Jordan? That's right.), by manipulating their emotions (pathos), or by simple use of logic (logos). Neither is necessarily stronger or more effective than the others; it all depends on the point you're trying to make.

Part 2 of 4: Making It Effective

 

1

Choose your words wisely. If you're giving a speech to a group of 8th graders, it's important not to get too esoteric -- in other words, use words they'll understand and appreciate. Cater your speech to your audience -- what do they want to hear?

• That being said, what do they already know? You don't want to waste time explaining concepts to them that they're already familiar with; or worse, assuming they know the basics and confusing them horribly. Put yourself in their shoes as you write -- what background knowledge do they need before you jump in to the meat of your argument?

2

Grab their attention. "Shake hands" with them -- figuratively of course. Make your writing humanizing and personalizing, hooking the members of your audience. Build agreement with your topic and a sense of rapport with you.

• Former Ambassador Robert Strauss used to begin his addresses like this: "Before I begin this speech, I have something to say." What's your hook?
• Wear your sincere smile, even in your writing. Audiences will be able to tell. You may want to begin with an amusing one-liner or thought-provoking anecdote that can be connected to the situation.
• As you're writing, think about what you would say to a friend. The more comfortable and open you are, the more your audience will feel drawn to you. Choose how you express yourself as if you were having a discussion with someone you feel at ease with, someone you're comfortable showing emotion to. A speech with "heart" is the most moving kind.

3

Focus on your message. For some, it's easy to get side-tracked or to try to attack too many things at once. Your speech has one message and it is the only thing that needs to be addressed thoroughly. Don't focus on the details or, what's worse, something completely unrelated. Your audience will be left wondering what the heck is going on.

• Rambling will lose their attention. When you have a point addressed and taken care of, do not be afraid to move on. You have more points that deserve the spotlight -- give each its evenly-spread due.

4

Illustrate. Make your writing graphic. Your goal is to make the main points of your writing in the speech stick in the minds of your audience. If someone asks or compliments your speech afterwards, it'll probably sound something like, "I enjoyed the story Tom told about his sister," or "The pie chart of this year's earnings was helpful." They probably won't say, "Your second point in the body of your speech was well thought-out and logical." So think visually.

• This can be taken a number of ways. If you are talking to your business team about the year's poor numbers, painting an image of their starving families to drive them to work harder isn't a good idea. Images should be used appropriately. If you're talking numbers, use graphs. If you're talking emotions, paint a picture. Know your context.

5

Think in pauses. The best actors are equally effective (if not more so) in between their lines. Write pauses, or beats, when you really want a point to sink in. People will automatically take notice -- looking, straightening up and cocking their head to the side and actually hearing the silence. Now that's commanding a room.

• Speeches need to be natural - not read off of a paper. And when you talk, you have pauses. This is not slowing you down or showing your weakness, it shows that you have this down so well, you're talking about it like an old pro.

Part 3 of 4: Forming Your Speech

 

1

Start off with a strong introduction. Open with a big statement that will grab the attention of the audience. Remember that engaging hook we talked about? That goes in now. Dive right in, getting personal and showing your human side.

• Opening with important remarks or quotes will immediately establish credibility. Just don't use Merriam Webster as your go-to expert; avoid cliches at all costs.

2

Use inclusive terms for individuals. Point to "our" things -- our team, our city/state/country, or our school, our class-year, our work, people, and product/candidate, etc. Your audience will feel more included and a sense of belonging. If "we" feel that way, they'll feel the pressure to feel that way, too.

• In a speech by Nelson Mandela, he started off with, "Today we celebrate not the victory of a party, but a victory for all the people of South Africa."^[1] Now that's a man whose oratorical prowess cannot be questioned.

3

Build the body of the speech. This part should contain the main points of the issue and support for each one. That list you made earlier? Narrow it down to about three. Which ones are the most convincing?

• Start off with your strongest point. You want the audience to start off seeing zero holes through your argument. Get them on your side before they get the chance to nitpick what you have to say.
• Put your weakest argument in the middle. You're sandwiching it here to make it the most forgettable. And, indeed, it will be.
• End with your second strongest argument. You want to vamp it up a notch towards the end. Reel them back in, rounding out your argument with your last piece of evidence.

4

Be aware of your transitions. Build clear and sensible transitions from one thought to the next. The biggest mistake speakers and writers make is to assume people will follow leaps of logic -- place, time or changes of ideas. Spell out to the audience when you are taking a turn in your thoughts with phrases like: "As an example of this, we can see..." or "This brings us back to the larger problem of...," and so forth.

• Transitions should not only go in between points in the body, but also after the introduction and into the conclusion. Again, your speech is one cohesive work, not a series of points that work independently. Show your audience that by transitioning clearly.

5

End with a firm conclusion. Conclude with a powerful nail-down, summarizing what you came here to say. Leave them with a question or thoughts of implications; leave them with something -- what do you want that something to be?

• Repeat key ideas. Make the audience recall and get on the mainline. Be sure they leave with the ideas you don't want them to forget.
• Give your audience a sense of completion in what you write. Bring them back to the beginning, but with a louder spirit -- after all, they have all the knowledge necessary to be passionate now, too. This can be done by starting the last paragraph with a strong, declarative sentence that re-makes your point.

Part 4 of 4: After Your First Draft

 

1

Deliver it to someone. This will be the most beneficial thing you can possibly do. Try to get someone that's as similar to your audience as possible. If they have a similar background, there's a better chance of them having the same impression.

• Ask them for feedback. Did they find anything confusing? Unnecessary? What questions were they left with? Did they follow your logic and end up agreeing with you? What impression were they left with?

2

Monitor for clarity. Often when we write things, there's a much easier way to say the exact same thing. Go over your work with an eye for this. Take each sentence as it stands -- could you make it more crystal?

• If you're not clear, you could have a good point that goes unappreciated or completely missed. Clarity is possibly the most important quality to look for in your work.

3

Ensure your tone is constant and appropriate. If it sounds like three different people wrote it, it'll be difficult to follow. What's more, if you slip into language that's condescending or simply over their heads, you're in an equally hard place. How will the audience find your speech?

• Don't be tempted to get crass or nasty to get their attention. It'll work, but after you stop the finger-pointing and yelling, they'll tune you out completely.

4

Write out your final draft. Once you have all the content ready, get it in its final form. This is where you may want to start employing tactics for delivery.

• Write in your pauses. Though the speech should not be directly read from, rehearsing from it with pauses written in will help you remember when you are actually delivering it.
• Write in body cues. Though these ultimately need to be natural and can't be scripted, making little notes where you might want to emphasize a point with your body (be it with your face, hand, etc.) can help jog your mind in the rehearsing process.
• Outline the speech on notecards. Since you won't be reading your speech, it's a good idea to have a written outline of the presentation as a reference so you don't leave something out .. like thanking the audience for their attention and the committee for asking you to speak.

source:wikihow.com