None of us is born knowing how to speak in public. As with anything else, public speaking is an acquired skill that improves with practice. It is also a skill that shares much in common with other familiar activities, such as conversing and writing, and it can be much less daunting when you realize that you can draw on expertise you already have.
Draw on Conversational Skills
In several respects, planning and delivering a speech resemble engaging in a particularly important conversation. When speaking to a friend, you automatically check to make certain you are understood and adjust your meaning accordingly. You also tend to discuss issues that are appropriate to the circumstances. When a relative stranger is involved, however, you try to get to know his or her interests and attitudes before revealing any strong opinions. These instinctive adjustments to your audience, topic, and occasion represent critical steps in creating a speech. Although public speaking requires more planning, both the conversationalist and the public speaker try to uncover the audience’s interests and needs before speaking.
Draw on Skills in Composition
Preparing a speech also has much in common with writing. Both depend on having a focused sense of whom the audience is.10 Both speaking and writing often require that you research a topic, offer credible evidence, employ effective transitions to signal the logical flow of ideas, and devise persuasive appeals. The principles of organizing a speech parallel those of organizing an essay, including offering a compelling introduction, a clear thesis statement, supporting ideas, and a thoughtful conclusion.
Develop an Effective Oral Style
Although public speaking has much in common with everyday conversation and with writing, it is, obviously, “its own thing.” More so than writers, successful speakers generally use familiar words, easy-to-follow sentences, and transitional words and phrases. Speakers also routinely repeat key words and phrases to emphasize ideas and help listeners follow along, and even the briefest speeches make frequent use of repetition.
Spoken language is often more interactive and inclusive of the audience than written language. Audience members want to know what the speaker thinks and feels and that he or she recognizes them and relates the message to them. Speakers accomplish this by making specific references to themselves and to the audience. Yet because public speaking usually occurs in more formal settings than does everyday conversation, listeners expect a somewhat more formal style of communication from the speaker. When you give a speech, listeners expect you to speak in a clear, recognizable, and organized fashion. Thus, in contrast to conversation, in order to develop an effective oral style you must practice the words you will say and the way you will say them.
Good conversationalists, captivating writers, and engaging public speakers share an important quality: They keep their focus on offering something of value for the audience.
Become an Inclusive Speaker
Every audience member wants to feel that the speaker has his or her particular needs and interests at heart, and to feel recognized and included in the speaker’s message. To create this sense of inclusion, a public speaker must be able to address diverse audiences with sensitivity, demonstrating respect for differences in culture—the language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and even material objects that are passed from one generation to the next. As David C. Thomas and Kerr Inkson explain, more than ever, public speakers must cultivate their cultural intelligence, which they define as:
being skilled and flexible about understanding a culture, learning more about it from your ongoing interactions with it, and gradually reshaping your thinking to be more sympathetic to the culture and to be more skilled and appropriate when interacting with others from the culture.11
Striving for inclusion and being audience centered throughout the speechmaking process will bring you closer to the goal of every public speaker—establishing a genuine connection with the audience.