Remember Your Speaking Outline

The words in your speaking outline must prompt you to remember your ideas. During your rehearsal, you’ll discover whether you’ve chosen key words that are at an appropriate level of abstraction, or vagueness versus concreteness (Chapter 3). If the word is too vague, it may not jog your memory under pressure. But if it’s too concrete, you may be tempted to read directly from your notes. You will need to practice under realistic conditions to discover the right level of abstraction.

By now you know the benefits of creating a speaking outline consisting of key words and phrases. Now it’s time to practice from it. Review your speaking outline to make sure that all of your key words and phrases work as prompts—if you can’t remember that the letters “SD” stand for “sleep deprivation,” for example, you might need to write that term out.