Best Practical Tips To Improve Your Speech

The best way to learn skills of public speaking is to practice before an audience, no matter how small or big it can be. Before you stand to speak, you must take time to write your speech and practice in your private room as though you were standing before a real crowd. 

Like an essay, your speech has an introduction, the body, conclusion, and citations. Your speech citations will not come at the end, but you must strategically place them within your speech. Follow these tips to help your speech improvement.  

1. Take note of the key points

When delivering your speech, you cannot read word to word from your copy. You must prove to your audience that you took time to prepare and you have the best for them. Also, you cannot memorize word for word because you can easily mess up the entire speech if you miss a sentence or a paragraph.

To help you create a balance between your written and memorized speech, you must learn citations for language enrichment techniques to ensure that you will not miss any key points. The key point in your speech will be the introductory point that lays down the foundation of your entire speech. 

The body of your speech will have several key points that may range anything between one to five points or even more. Your concluding point should be as strong as your introduction point because it crowns the entire speech you presented. 

2. Use your citations strategically

Citations add humor to your speech, it keeps your audience attentive and is a proof that you researched and thoroughly prepared for the day. However, citations can mess your speech if you use irrelevant citations and cite at the wrong time. 

To help you stay relevant, write your citations down and mark each section where you will use the citation. If you want to quote a famous personality, mention their name, followed by the quote. For each citation, have a formula that is easy to remember and be ready to answer any question that might arise in connection to your citation. In your written speech, follow the correct writing and citation structure. 

Speech can be defined as what you speak before an audience or what you write to an audience. You must work hard to find sources for your speech regardless of whether you want to write a paper, a proposal, or a statement. 

Citing your speech is another essential point and the EduBirdie MLA citation generator will help you cite in the right format. To help you write the best speech, make a habit of referring to the online guide for students that are written by credible authors. 

3. Prepare and practice

Preparation for the speech day has several phases that you must give special attention to. Your first phase will be to write your speech. Give your speech structure and divide it into main points and subpoints. For each point, write exhaustively, while paying attention to what will give your speech more weight. 

The second phase will be the editing phase, where you read your speech and eliminate the weak points. The best way to decide if your point is weak or strong is to look at the value it will give your audience and the level of relevance. 

Your final phase will be to practice giving your speech before an imagined audience. You may also call a few friends and present the speech before them and keep improving on your speech until D-day. 

4. Watch your body language and tone

The unspoken word carries a greater weight compared to what you speak. Non-verbal language is displayed by how you use gestures, your look on the face, your posture, dressing, and son. Every bit of your non-verbal communication should display confidence at its best. 

Your tone is another important factor in public speaking. You must learn to balance your tone and avoid too low a tone that makes your audience struggle to hear what you are saying. To help you drive your points home better, use varying tones to create humor and attention. 

5. Make your speech two-way

You might not become perfect in public peaking if you concentrate on giving a speech and deny your audience a chance to participate. Let your audience respond to humor, questions, jokes, and so on. Your first level of engaging your audience is to acknowledge them immediately you stand to speak. 

To help you grab your audience’s attention, you may start with a rhetorical question to help provoke their mind. Give some intriguing statistics, tell a humorous story or anything that will help to grab their attention. 

Your eyes will tell if you are friendly or hostile to your audience and you should try and keep your eyes fixed to them and have a friendly face. 

6. Use visual aid

Visuals will help add greater weight to your speech and they will help you remember your key points easily. There are several types of visuals you can use in your speech but the primary ones are slides, photos, and videos.

Powerpoint slides will help your audience grab the points easily and remember them many days later. Photos help when you want to give more emphasis on a point to create positive emotions within your audience. Videos are useful when you want to give a real example of a situation or something.

Conclusion 

No one has ever given a perfect speech but you keep improving each time you write or give a speech. What’s more important is the time you take to prepare your speech and the level of understanding you have concerning your audience. It is important to remember to use your body language well during public speaking and to weigh your tone in proportion to the point you want to elaborate. After your speech, take time to measure your areas of success and failure for the sake of your future speech.  

Author Bio: Judy Nelson works for a print media company as a senior writer, editor and proofreader and has been the key person in the company’s success so far. She’s brilliant in writing academic essays, news articles and technical documents. In her free time, she loves doing portrait painting, watching drama movies and swimming.