Speechmaking Essentials: Pace,Poise and Polish.
How’s your spelling? Pretty good? Then I reckon that you’d say that there was only one P in speechmaking. However, if you intend to make a speech, you had better remember that there are, in fact, three Ps in speechmaking – Pace, Poise and Polish.
And if you can remember to make use of all three in your speechmaking then you are guaranteed to impress each and every audience that you address.
Pace. This P can make or break your speech – it’s that important. Get this wrong and you will either bore your audience to tears OR they will be nudging their close neighbour to ask whether he could understand a garbled word you say.
If you have ever had the misfortune to be listening to a presentation being made by a slow speaker, you will already appreciate just how tedious too slow a pace can be. The audience will be itching to shout “speed it up, won’t you? I have to be in work tomorrow morning!”
Delivering your speech too slowly is guaranteed to make even the most polite audience lose their patience with you.
Too fast a delivery, on the other hand, will simply mean that a large portion of your audience will miss what you have to say and others will find making sense of your ideas extremely hard work. Your job, when speaking to an audience, is to take the hard work out of listening to you speak and allow the audience the luxury of simply relaxing and letting your words seep effortlessly into their consciousness.
Speak slowly enough for your audience to absorb what you are saying yet fast enough to prevent your delivery from becoming tedious. Learn to vary your pace throughout your presentation so that your delivery remains interesting to those listening to it.
Poise. Most speakers believe that the subject matter of their presentation is all that is important and spend most of their time worrying about the actual construction of their speech. They are happy to spend hours collecting snippets of information, organising it into an acceptible order, selecting an appropriate opening and closing style and making sure that the rhythm and flow of their words is just right.
And of course, all that effort is certainly required to produce an excellent speech. But that’s not the end of it. How you present yourself is just as important as how you present your words.
Run through this checklist just before you step out in front of your audience:
1. Is your clothing presentable, clean, appropriate and arranged correctly? 2. Is your hair neatly combed? 3. Does your body language convey the right impression?
Always remember that the audience will start forming their opinion of you from the second that they set eyes on you and long before you start to speak. Your poise – that is, the visual impression given to the audience – will be the first element that will influence their decision.
Make sure that your impression is a positive one.
Polish. This is what will make a good speech great! It is also the thing that will enable you to rid yourself of any pre-speech nerves. Thorough preparation is the key to most things in life and speaking in public is no exception.
Practice rehearsing your speech in front of a mirror, or if you can persuade them, in front of your friends and family. Familiarise yourself with the content of your speech and work out which is the most effective style of delivery. Decide on the incorporation of suitable hand gestures, in fact, anything that you feel needs to be practised until it becomes second nature.
Set aside time to scrutinise your stage clothes and pay close attention to how you stand and move. Don’t lean, don’t hunch, don’t slouch and don’t allow yourself to display any outward signs of tension. You must polish your performance until it sparkles! Whilst in front of your audience you must always appear relaxed, confident and in control at all times – even if you don’t feel it.
Pace, Poise and Polish – if you can remember these three Ps in ‘speechmaking’ you can guarantee that your speech will be delivered in such a manner that any audience will be entertained, enraptured and enthralled by your performance.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.