What is the goal of a speech which is often performed by students? There are several of them: to entertain, to inform, to inspire, to teach, to motivate for actions. If you want your speech to cause the required effect, you need to learn how to impress the audience first. Your humble homework doers have selected top seven tested ways often used by students to reach this goal.
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1. Make Your Speech Emotional
Why are emotions so important during public speeches? The reason is that they come on top a thousand times faster than logical conclusions. Emotions appear instantly.
You can see a person for the first time and fall in love with him or her at once. And then you can go on loving even despite his or her behavior is far from honorable. So, it does not matter what your speech is about: you should add emotions to it.
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2. Say Something to Get the Audience Involved at Once
For instance, Brian Tracey usually starts his speeches with expressing gratitude to everyone who comes to listen to him.
Think about it: everyone is busy, but people in the audience found some time and money, put aside their excuses and laziness in order to come and listen to you. This means they are “among 5% of people who really want to learn something and reach serious success”.
Tracey mentions it even before starting his speech. This causes sympathy at once.
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3. Start with a Strong Phrase
The phrase shouldn’t be “cheap” and sensational. You don’t have to say anything provocative too: these are the methods of average manipulators. A strong phrase can “tune up” the whole story or performance, hence it makes the audience pay attention to you and get involved in the listening process.
Let’s take a look at the available arsenal:
- A Powerful Quote. There are tens of thousands of quotes on the Internet which you can find. Many of them will perfectly fit your speech.
- A “What If” Scenery: if used right, this trick works like a miracle, as it can touch emotions and minds at a time. Ask something like: “What if you were a plant?”
- An Imagined Possibility: here you ask your listeners to imagine something. For instance: “Imagine that you jump with a parachute and you understand that it is not going to open”.
- A Question: a rhetorical or a literal one. Something like: “Who wants to live on an inhabited island?”.
- A Silence: a 5-10-second pause might become the most powerful phrase of the whole performance.
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4. Tell Listeners How Good They Are
It shouldn’t seem to them that you would like to hold a speech for a faceless crowd and to start preparing for another speech in front of other people right after that.
To avoid this, you need to pay attention to the audience from time to time and to say compliments to them, specific ones if possible. All in all, everyone wants to feel special. And the person who feels that would listen to you till the very end.
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5. Entertain Listeners with Stories
Stories are keys for entertainments. They are the most important parts of good speeches.
Stories could be short or long, they may tell about you or someone else, they can be real or fictional, etc. Stick to this simple structure: a strong beginning, three key moments, and a conclusion.
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6. Connect Your Speech to Audience’s Interests
You should ask yourself the same question every time you start preparing for a speech: “What do listeners want?”
You can ask additional questions to make your speech clearer:
- What are the motives of people coming to listen to the speech?
- What can wonder and interest them?
- What do they need most of all?
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7. Tell the Audience What Exactly They Are Going to Get
Motivation appears when a person clearly understands he or she is going to win something. If you can make every listener understand what exactly they are going to get from your speech (like to save time, money, to reach success or prestige in a certain field), then they are going to catch every word you say.
A perfect way to start is to say something like: “There are three things you need to know in order to pass your exams perfectly with no efforts.” And then make a short pause.
Listeners are going to listen to you with doubled curiosity after that. But you actually need to prepare the speech and to give them very useful information. No speeches can be successful without that.
“I really like the tips, but can I pay someone here to write this essay for me?” We are happy to provide you with a marvelous sample that will impress your audience so much that they won’t want to leave the hall.