Speeches sometimes have glaring needs seen on a recording. Being versatile and visual are always a need
Needs in a speech may become apparent in a recording. Versatility and visualization are key.
Lifelong Learner in Speaking: There are just two types of recorded speeches on this site and in general- the type that really could use some noticeable improvement in revision and the type that has been accepted "as is." These below are three recent speeches that definitely need revising.
A Zoom Speech is commemorating "Meals on Wheels" in November 2021. My first contact with MOW was through a speech given by one of my Youth Toastmaster students. I became a volunteer driver two years later and still drive in the present day, but I did not "wreck" until a speech run-through at a Toastmaster club. When I tried to give some role plays, there was some pushback, even in an advanced club. The phonetics person refused her role and the prayer person was in a panic. I may try to revise the speech for recruitment, not for Toastmasters but for Meals on Wheels drivers.
The commemoration of Father's Day speech with me in a white t-shirt is also a work in progress. The speech has some glaring areas in need of "removal or repair." For instance, the closing of eyes opening needs replacing. My comment below on an Advanced Toastmaster club blog told what basic lessons I learned:
After the evaluation of my speech and conferring after the meeting with the evaluator, I felt a great burden lifted. I have been carrying an albatross around my neck since early on in my Toastmaster speaking experience. Over the past five years on several occasions I've heard or seen written in comments about my being "sing-song" or not being conversational enough. I pursued this thinking with a gifted evaluator who clarified that mixing up the pace and giving extended eye contact can do wonders for these issues. It's a relief to get that sort of feedback in an advanced club. It gives me a sense of increased control in polishing my craft. Do hold me accountable for making progress. Thanks!!
"The Wright Stuff" was given in the spring area speech contest in 2021 on Zoom and was disqualified at 8:00 minutes with 30 seconds overtime. This was redone as "The Wright Stuff 2" in October 2021 as a model of an informative speech for BRCC. It was not memorized or polished but met the criteria for elements, include citing of sources, but it ran 7:15, one minute over the alloted time and was not in business casual. What will students think? Point deductions are in store. It may be redone yet again to meet the power point elements. These visuals below were from the area contest:
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Speeches Need to Be Visual & Versatile
There are fully scripted speeches, and there are fully improvised speeches, and then there's everything in between.
A good Toastmaster aims to develop each type of speech. The contest speech may continually be refined with audience feedback. The table topic speech is what is given impromptu to a prompt; often it may occur just what to say 30 minutes after that shorter speech is made.
There were 10 basic speeches that composed the basic, printed Toastmaster manual:
Ice-Breaker Introduction
Organize Your Speech
Get to the Point
How to Say It
Your Body Speaks
Vocal Variety
Research Your Topic
Get Comfortable with Visuals
Persuade with Power
Inspire Your Audience
Visual aids should not be a crutch. Everyone has seen some Power Points that were used heavily as reader slides throughout a presentation. That's a surefire way of cutting down on speaker and listener imagination and interaction.
Three visual aids from the speech are given below. But the speech should be able to thrive on its own.
Visualizing is a skill to develop in order to share the full depth of a story or example. Then a point can be "seen" and really appreciated.
Below is the script for a "contest" speech that used visual aids.
Visualization is critical in any speech to make a subject come alive.
"Maximizing Pethood"
It’s halftime of the big game and you’re in the locker room when the coach speaks to INSPIRE! Now Team USA can get a miracle win against the Russian Hockey machine. Now the Fighting Irish can “win just one for the Gipper.”
But what about Flipper, the dolphin, the king of the sea? It’s not flippant to say pets can INSPIRE. It’s not just the bomb-sniffing dog that saves lives. Not just Tara the cat on Youtube that scares off a vicious dog predator. It’s the pet next door or maybe in your household.
Pets give us a primer to learn lessons as children and adults, too. The major lessons are being a caretaker, and working through life's transitions, and discovering real desires from the heart.
Chances are you first focused on responsibility while caring for pets. My parents volunteered me when a neighbor left on a trip. Each morning and evening before my mealtime, I’d walk four houses over to this woman’s back stoop with half a can of catfood. Then Snowball followed me home and decided to stick around, even after the woman returned. With her blessing, I became fully responsible for her cat.
I’d dress up Snowball with a crown of multi-colored Easter eggs, his only trick. I fed, groomed, pet, and played with him. All was practice for raising my own kids, a practicum in parenthood made possible by pets.
But pethood doesn’t just teach responsibility. An even tougher lesson is optimizing on transition, the life changes we and our pets go through.
Companion choice is a biggie. We seek out companions, pet and otherwise, based on the cuteness factor, ignoring the transitional reality that what is cute may soon grow old or ornery. My sister Jackie sees this cute, little pink chick at the local Roses dimestore. She begs and the Easter bunny brings her one.
This chick grows to inhabit the wire cage vacated by three sets of hamsters. One day it darts outside to reside in our wood pile. Being responsible, we relocate this scraggly chicken to our grandparents’ farm. We hear it’s not content just to roost in the chicken coop, and when we visit HE comes out chasing, pecking, and crowing!
Thankfully, most chicks don’t become roosters and we learn to smooth over our transitions. While responsibility and life transitions are good lessons, pethood is only maximized with the fulfillment of a heart’s desire.
I had the career I desired at age 35, but still no wife. My cute girlfriend Carol wanted a puppy, so I, too, wanted a puppy. Because her apartment lease prohibited pets, Carol came to my house on lunch breaks to tend to OUR puppy.
His name was Slugger and he became our love child as well as a devoted watch dog. One day Carol was sleeping after working third shift, and she heard Slugger’s deep, persistent bark. She then found our deck nearly engulfed in flames, with surrounding leaves set fire by a neighbor’s grease pan.
Slugger became our hero, our precious heart’s desire. The morning he went missing, we searched the whole neighborhood. “Slugger.” No Slugger. The next morning I spotted Slugger on the way to work. He was laying on the shoulder of the highway, his coat pure white, his eyes at rest: a peaceful though painful transition. We did the only responsible thing and found another puppy to love.
His name was Oliver, a miniature Maltese sort-of cat dog. Each week, perched on Carol’s arm goes five-pounds of licensed therapy dog, his tail a-waggin.’ He opens doors of not strangers but neighbors in nearby rest homes.
None of us are licensed like Oliver, but we can maximize the best qualites of pethood: being responsible, as in the care of others, working positively through life’s transitions, and, especially, cherishing desires of the heart. You can start right now unleashing your pethood with attentive ears and eyes for your neighbors. But please, no tail wagging. Leave that to the professionals.
Opening and
Closing for impact
Attention!!! Audience members are usually brought to attention at the opening by a speaker’s planned attention-grabber. Often it may ask a question, have the audience imagine, or begin with a catchy statistic or joke. Without it, many members of the audience would be lost forever. But a more common lost opportunity is that of the close, or closer. Just as a relief pitcher is called in to protect a lead late in a game or a business associate comes in to close a trans-action, the speaker needs to have a clincher or closer.
Having no definite closing is like telling a joke without a punchline. Up to 10% of a speech, or at least 30 seconds, should be planned to wrap up and put a bow on the speech. This ending should have impact and be memorable.
Some closing techniques are like the opening:
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Use a quote
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Tell a story
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Call for action
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Ask a rhetorical question
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Refer to the beginning
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Repeat the main points
So, do not just let the timer signal you so that you simply conclude with “I have to stop as I’m out of time.” Do end on time, but plan and practice so that you end with at least as good an impression as you got with that first impression opening. You may simply say
Madame/Mr. Toastmaster/Mr. or Mrs. (teacher's name). The speaker just addresses the Toastmaster and does not say thank you at the end. It is the audience that should say thanks, as by applause.
https://www.ted.com/talks
This is the link to 2,400+ Ted Talks that have a short description and an image. It’s a great resource for inspiring thoughts. The following is one example.
This in summary is saying, “We mustn’t speak to strangers.” Malavika Varadan, challenges this societal norm, by presenting seven ways to make conversation with anyone with this Ted Talk.
Malavika Varadan has a four-hour radio morning show, Breakfast No.1 on City 101.6 with 1.6 million strangers/listeners each day. She has a very pleasant accent in this Ted Talk of 15 minutes.
Skip the small talk and ask a really personal question she says. How long have you lived here, where does your family live, etc. Find the “me, too’s.” Find what is in common rather than what to debate. Be on the same side. Give a full, unique compliment. Avoid the general compliment. Be genuine. Ask for an opinion. Don’t cross examine.
Be present. Make eye contact. Name, place, animal, thing. Say this name back to them. Ask about these things that are important to them.
A conversation is like reading a book. Every person is like a good book. Full of stories. Do we just read the titles or do we starting reading the story.
To Memorize or Improvise
Are confidence, enthusiasm, eye contact, and speaking from the heart not possible unless you abandon notes? What about memorization?
Stan Coss counts as his most successful and ambitious speeches not his memorized contest runs but his “three hour” speeches. That is three hours from start to finish to prepare. Three hours is not winging it, but it is far less prep than most speakers would use on a highly experienced audience.
The short notice to speak came from a last minute cancellation at his Toastmasters club, and he never wrote out more than the introduction and an outline. He had to improvise with how to say it. His title was "This is not politically correct." Stan did apply all the various skills he’d picked up in Toastmasters and had a small folded notecard at ready but didn’t have to use it. He did another a month later purposely confined this time to a three-hour prep based on his grandfather, and looks forward to more speeches he’ll craft an opening and close for. He’ll brainstorm and outline his three body points but leave the wording to what he practices aloud and what comes out live to his next audience.
Dale Carnegie said to never write out a speech and certainly never memorize. He wanted things conversational and fresh.
Ted Talks is a book by Chris Anderson, who's been in charge of Ted Talks since 2001. He says the majority of the 1,000 + Ted speakers script and memorize their whole talk and do their best to avoid letting it sound memorized. Find your best mode, he advises, and as you start to rehearse, the difference between the two modes starts to fade. The Ted program doesn’t have set rules. They give suggestions “for helping speakers find the mode of delivery that will be most powerful for them. One of the first key decisions you need to make— and ideally you’ll make it early on in your talk preparation— is whether you will:
“A. Write out the talk in full as a complete script (to be read, memorized, or a combination of the two), or
B. Have a clearly worked-out structure and speak in the moment to each of your points.”
Anderson says there are powerful arguments in favor of both strategies. The typical Ted Talk is 18 minutes. “For most of us, an 18-minute talk can easily take five or six hours to memorize.” (For some of us, the eight minute speech for Toastmasters, can take five or so hours to memorize!) The key is to make the speech NOT sound memorized but natural. It should use spoken language instead of written language. Many speakers believe “the best way to ’write’ a talk is “simply to try to speak it out loud multiple times.” In any case you need to five a sense of “feeling it in the moment. Mean every sentence.”
Ted speaker and author Elizabeth Gilbert always memorizes her talks. “Memorization makes me feel comfortable and safe; improvisation makes me feel chaotic and exposed. I would rather risk sounding like I am reciting something from memory than sounding like I lost my way, or like I never had a plan. . .” Pam Meyer agrees that the reason to script a talk is to make every sentence count. “You have to love every sentence.”
Ted speaker Salman Khan differs. “Believing what you are saying in real time has a much larger impact that saying the exact right words. I tend to list out bullet points. . . and then try communicating those ideas in my natural language as if I’m talking to friends at the dinner table.” Steven Johnson says he doesn’t memorize “because the audience can hear memorized text very clearly, and it takes away from the spontaneous, engaged nature of speaking to a live audience.”
“People should do whatever makes them comfortable on stage and helps them to relax, says Sir Ken Robinson, one of the worlds’ most talented speakers, according to Anderson. “Whether it’s ten people or ten thousand,” says Robinson, “I feel it’s essential to talk with people, not at them, and to be authentic in doing it.”
Dan Gilbert writes “a script for his talks (being careful to use spoken English) says Anderson, but then “he doesn’t stick to the script. Gilbert says, “A great talk is both scripted AND improvisational: First, the opening and closing are always completely scripted; second, the general structure is fully determined; third, what makes jazz interesting and captivating is that in the middle of the tune there is always some point or several in which the player can go off script and spontaneously create something that captures the mood of that particular audience in that particular room and time. A totally scripted talk is like a classical music concert: intricate, deep, and flawlessly executed, but often predictable enough to put the audience to sleep because they know from start to finish there will be no surprises.”
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