The 5 Speech Writing Tips You Need to Know

When you are looking for speech writing tips everybody has an opinion. If you were to write them all down and read them out you would have a pretty long speech. Experts know that there are in fact only five speech writing tips that you need to know. The rest may help but these tips are the big ones.

Top 5 Speech Writing Tips

1. Prepare your speech well in advance. Not only will you end up writing a better speech but the better prepared you are the less nervous you will be.

2. Understand who your audience are. A crucial aspect of tips for easy speech writing is to understand why the people in your audience have come to listen to you. There is a big difference between an audience that have chosen to come to see you and one that has been told they must listen to you. Compare delivering a speech about how to become a real estate millionaire and a speech announcing compulsory redundancies.

3. The essence of this public speaking tip is to appreciate what it is like to be in your audience. It has been scientifically proven that concentration in humans dramatically drops after twenty minutes when listening to a speech. People probably won’t get up and walk out if your speech goes on for too long but their minds may wander off.

4. Think from the perspective of your audience. You are an expert in whatever the speech is about and familiar with the subject matter but some of the people may be hearing the information for the first time. Always give examples that are easily pictured in the mind. For example, you may find it easy to visualize a distance of 2835 million miles but most people in your audience probably won’t. A better way of putting that number, the distance between the Earth and Neptune, is: If you were to drive your car at 70mph across space, it would take you 5 months to reach the Moon and 4500 years to reach Neptune.

5. This is the most important of the speech writing tips given here. If you don’t grab the attention of your audience from the outset you may never get it. The worst mistake you can make, and this cringe-worthy mistake is made again and again, is to begin your speech with "hello, I’m here today to talk to you about…" Your audience knows that you’re there to make a speech and what that speech is going to be about. This introduction is their cue to switch off and think about something else. Start your speech with a joke or an intriguing question.

These then are the five most important speech writing tips you need to know. There are many other tips that will help you but are not essential for effective public speaking. Put these tips into action and you’ll soon be writing great speeches.

 

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