7 Tips on Public Speech for Teachers and Students

on 02/02/2018

“Imagine the audience naked” is a stupid tip. It is simple, but it works rarely. Here are eight best tips from one of the writers of our service, who works as a teacher at university and is ready to share his public speech experience.

His tips will deeply examine the topic of speaking: how to communicate correctly, how to speak your mind and prepare yourself for the speech.

Speech Preparation

People who know how to tell stories gain this skill with the help of repeating the same phrases. Do you remember your favorite stand-up comic? Mostly, they mention their especially good jokes later. This is how they get stronger connection with the audience.

It is important to summarize every part of your speech, too. Steve Jobs used this method on all the “Apple” conferences. He stated main thoughts, then explained them widely, and made a short resume on the topic of his speech in the end.

Speech Plan

Having the idea for presentation is only the beginning. It is not so easy to turn the idea into the entire speech. The best thing to begin with is a plan. For instance, you are going to make a presentation about rock music of the 70’s.

First, you need to make up the general plan:

1. Introduction;
2. First Part: Culture of the 70’s;
3. Second Part: Reasons Why Society Chose Exactly Those Music Styles;
4. Third Part: Best Representatives of  Rock Music of the 70’s;
5. Conclusion.

After you created the general plan, move on to subpoints explaining each point in more detail:

1. Introduction;
2. First Chapter: Culture of the 70’s;
   • a) Hippie Society and its Principles;
   • b) Psychedelic Rock Development Because of Hippie Popularization.

And so on. When moving from bigger to smaller things, you’ll be able to explain gradually each point without forgetting about important details as well. Do not make points too lengthy: they need to start the next topic, not to explain it.

It is possible that you won’t be able to delve into each point of your plan in your speech, but after creating the plan you’ll see your own thoughts clearly and understand how to turn an idea into a presentation.

Slides

There were speakers who placed several hundreds of slides into a 30-minute presentation. There were those who hadn’t used a single one, too. Both examples show you bad presentations.

In the first case, listeners won’t remember even a small part of the info. In the second one, they won’t be able to support words they heard with the visual information.

The ideal quantity of slides for presentations does not exist. Their number depends on how you present the info to the audience.

Delivering a speech several times is the best way to find out your optimal slide quantity. Some speakers feel that it’s enough to see only a few words on a slide to go on speaking, others might need more info.

Slides’ quantity depends on the topic of your presentation, too. If it is related to IT, for instance, there have to be to be more slides; if it looks more like a story, then some pictures may be enough.

Speech Pauses

This is another trick Jobs loved using. When asking a question, he made a short pause before answering it. That is quite confusing for the speaker, as there is silence in the audience, but it is very effective. You make your listeners believe that you think over the answer in real time, and haven’t prepared it in advance.

Pauses are good before moving to the next point of the speech. Pause length is about 3-5 seconds. If it is too confusing for you to keep silent, deceive yourself and drink some water.

Animation Between Slides

Don’t even think about that.

Best Presentation Software

Don’t be too serious about searching the program. If you use Windows, go for PowerPoint; if OS X, then Keynote is for you. Alternatives exist, but they are for those planning a complicated presentation. For instance, Showoff allows creating slides with Markdown, JavaScript and CSS.

How to Deal with Stress

You are going to feel nervous even when holding a speech in your 10th or 20th time, but the duration of this effect will decrease.

There is a way to deal with nerves: make a test speech for your friends or family members. But make the environment maximally close to “battle conditions”.

If you keep up to this guide, you’ll be able to deliver your speech perfectly.