There’s new media, old media — and then there’s that most ancient of all media, the big speech.
The stagecraft behind pep talking an audience may seem archaic alongside Twitter feeds and RSS scrolls, but career counselors say you’re still more likely to wow industry insiders and forge your rep in the spotlight than you are behind the sickly glow of a laptop screen.
“It never ceases to amaze me that intelligent, well-educated and ambitious individuals overlook the number-one skill that will put them ahead of the competition — and that is the ability to stand up and speak eloquently with confidence,” public speaking expert Patricia Fripp says.
The key to a keynote, she says, is to start with a plan. Compose what speech coach Elayne Snyder calls your “speech statement of purpose.”
“Decide: Are you going to motivate, inform or convince them?” she elaborates.
That means starting with a sense of what your audience already apprehends. “Never tell them anything they know or assume,” Fripp cautions.
Starting and stopping
But what if you want to completely wing your speech??No way, says Fripp: “You must script the opening and the close,” she emphasizes. “Very few people know how to start and stop.”
The other 80 percent of the speech can come from the hip — but it has to be concise, Snyder says: “Never tell people more than three points because they’ll never remember it. Introduce your main point, use an anecdote to explain it, then repeat your point the same way you introduced it.”
