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Practice Your Delivery

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In any speech, your objective should be to communicate a message to an audience. If your message is clear, the audience will connect with it; if it’s buried in a sea of mumbling or if it’s forced to compete with distracting body language, the audience will miss your point. As you practice, you can improve the aspects of delivery you studied in this chapter and concentrate on your message.

Focus on your message. Concentrate on the way that you express an argument, paraphrase a quotation, or explain a statistic. If you focus on your message, the right delivery will usually follow naturally.
Use mirrors cautiously. Conventional wisdom has advocated rehearsing in front of a mirror in order to practice eye contact, maximize facial expressions, and assess gestures and movement. But you won’t have mirrors when you deliver the speech; they can also make you feel self-conscious about your appearance, distracting you from your message.
Record a practice session. Before you gasp in horror and skip to the next bullet point, please trust us: this really does help. Even many teachers and professors record themselves to get a sense of their presence in the classroom. Recording your performance will allow you to get a sense of how well you project your voice, articulate your points, and use nonverbal cues.
Ask for feedback. See if you can find a person or two to listen to your speech and give you an honest and constructive critique of your performance. Ask what they remember most about your presentation. Did they focus mostly on your content, or were they distracted by your postures, gestures, or stammering? Were your presentation aids helpful, or were they distracting or confusing?

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