How To Prepare My Speech?

There are three steps to preparation, which we will go through:

• Research
• Outline
• Practice

Before focusing on any of these components, let’s take a quick look at the reasons why you are giving a speech. In general, there are four key reasons for speaking:

1. To entertain
2. To inform
3. To persuade
4. To inspire

When researching your speech, decide what your purpose is (it could be more than one), and keep that in mind throughout your preparation. For example if you are presenting an entertaining speech, you will be looking for entertaining stories that you can use. If you are looking to inspire, you will need inspiring stories etc.

Research

Nowadays most research is done on the Internet. This is fine, but be careful what websites you use to source your information. There are plenty of other places to do research as well, such as newspapers, magazines, libraries, and interviewing experts in the topic.

When I research a topic, I put all of my ideas into a mindmap, with no structure at all, or just enough structure to focus on the main aspects that I would like to put across. When I feel that I have enough ideas to bring my purpose across, I move onto the next phase, and that is structuring the research into a logical outline.

Outline

Now that we have decided what we are speaking on, let’s put the ideas into a logical structure.

Which aspects of your topic you are going to speak about, and more importantly which you are going to leave out? Most topics contain enough information for a whole series of presentations, so unless you are speaking about a very specific topic, you are going to need to do some pruning.

I use mind-mapping to research and create my presentations. I usually start by writing down all of the aspects of a topic, and then slowly structuring them into the key points that I would like to bring across, and deciding which points I will discard.

I use a fairly simply outline as follows:

Introduction

• Introduction
• Body
  • Point 1
  • Point 2
  • Point 3
• Conclusion

The introduction introduces your topic, the three points address the three main points of the topic, and the conclusion wraps up the speech. This can be used for a five minute speech, or for a thirty minute speech. In a longer speech, simply split each main point into sub points.

• Introduction
• Body
  • Point 1
    • Point 1a
    • Point 1b
    • Point 1c …..
  • Point 2
  • Point 3
• Conclusion

Some people like to take their outline and then write the entire speech out word for word based on the outline, but personally I use index cards with my speech keywords and practice my speech based on the outline. Experiment and see what works for you.

Practice

This is the point where too many speakers fall over. They spend hours researching and structuring the presentation, and never get around to standing up and practicing the presentation! This is a vital step - it helps you to get comfortable with the presentation, and helps to iron out any problems and fine tune the content and structure.

It also helps you to REALLY feel how the structure of you speech works, and to do some fine-tuning. If possible, record your speech on audio or video and listen to it afterwards. Don’t be over-critical - it can be quite scary watching your own speech, but see how effective your speech really is.

I have often given speeches where I have felt that I could have make a good presentation a great presentation with more practice, but I have never felt that I have over-practiced a presentation.