As much as focusing on your words—the vocal channel—audience members will observe your body language to decode meaning visually.

Animate Your Facial Expressions

From our facial expressions, audiences can gauge whether we are excited about, disenchanted by, or indifferent to our speech—and the audience to whom we are presenting it.

Universally, few behaviors are more effective for building rapport with an audience than smiling.⁴ A smile is a sign of mutual welcome at the start of a speech, of mutual comfort and interest during the speech, and of mutual goodwill at the close of a speech. In addition, smiling when you feel nervous or otherwise uncomfortable can help you relax and gain heightened composure. Of course, facial expressions need to correspond to the tenor of the speech. Doing what is natural and normal for the occasion should be the rule.

Maintain Eye Contact

If smiling is an effective way to build rapport, maintaining eye contact is mandatory in establishing a positive relationship with your listeners. Having eye contact with the audience is one of the most, if not the most, important physical actions in public speaking. Eye contact does the following:

With an audience of a hundred to more than a thousand members, it’s impossible to look at every listener. But in most speaking situations you are likely to experience, you should be able to make the audience feel recognized by using a technique called scanning. When you scan an audience, you move your gaze from one listener to another and from one section to another, pausing to gaze at one person long enough to complete one thought before removing your gaze and shifting it to another listener. One speaking professional suggests following the “rule of three”: Pick three audience members to focus on—one in the middle, one on the right, and one on the left of the room; these audience members will be your anchors as you scan the room.⁵

Use Gestures That Feel Natural

Words alone seldom suffice to convey what we want to express. Physical gestures fill in the gaps, as in illustrating the size or shape of an object (e.g., by showing the size of it by extending two hands, palms facing each other) or expressing the depth of an emotion (e.g., by pounding a fist on a podium).⁶ Gestures should arise from genuine emotions and should conform to your personality (see the checklist below for tips on gesturing effectively).

Create a Feeling of Immediacy

In most Western cultures, listeners learn more from and respond most positively to speakers who create a perception of physical and psychological closeness, called nonverbal immediacy, between themselves and audience members.⁷

Audience members soon tire of listening to a talking head who remains steadily positioned in one place behind a microphone or podium. As space and time allow, use your physical position vis-à-vis audience members to adjust your relationship with them, establishing a level of familiarity and closeness that is appropriate to the topic, purpose, and occasion. Movement toward listeners stimulates a sense of informality and closeness; remaining behind the podium fosters a more formal relationship of speaker to audience.

Maintain Good Posture

A speaker’s posture sends a definite message to the audience. Listeners perceive speakers who slouch as being sloppy, unfocused, and even weak. Strive to stand erect, but not ramrod straight. The goal is to appear authoritative, not rigid.

Dress Appropriately

Superficial as it may sound, the first thing an audience is likely to notice about you as you approach the speaker’s position is your clothing. The critical criteria in determining appropriate dress for a speech are audience expectations and the nature of the speech occasion. If you are speaking as a representative of your business, for example, you will want to complement your company’s image.⁸ Consider the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who invariably wore jeans and a black shirt when he rolled out a new product line. Jobs’s attire conveyed a signature style that was casual and “cool,” personifying the Apple products he represented.⁹

Although some speaking occasions permit casual dress, take care not to confuse casual with sloppy or unkempt. Even casual attire should be professional in the sense that it conveys a responsible, credible, and confident image. Your attire reveals an attitude about what you are doing and the amount of effort you seem willing to put into it. The more professional you look, the more professional you will feel, and the more positive the attitude you will convey to audience members. This advice is no less important for your classroom speeches than it is for speeches given elsewhere. You should dress for your speeches in class just as you would if you were delivering them to a business or professional group that you wanted to impress. At the very least, it’s good practice, and it’s likely to benefit your speech by showing your respect for both the occasion and the audience.

An extension of dress is having various objects on or around your person while giving a speech—pencil and pen, a briefcase, a glass of water, or papers with notes on them. Always ask yourself if these objects are really necessary. A sure way to distract an audience from what you’re saying is to drag a briefcase or backpack to the speaker’s stand and open it while speaking, or to fumble with a pen or other object.