The Elements of Good Delivery
There is no ‘correct’ way of presenting a speech. The manner of delivery will vary immensely depending upon the nature of the content and the personality of the speaker. Above all else, you need to find a way of speaking that is suitable for you, and plays to your strengths. This will take time, and will often vary from speech to speech.
However, there are certain elements of speaking that are often good to utilise in order to deliver a speech effectively. How you use them will vary, but normally they will all be present. These techniques are covered below. A good speaker will have mastered all of these things and use them to their advantage; a great speaker will not only have mastered them, but will know when these rules can be broken for a deliberate and specific effect.
Be warned: delivery is the final, and often most important, element of a speech. Unless you have good content, and unless you are extremely familiar with what you will be saying, your delivery will not be able to enhance your speech.
Delivery will be what turns a solid speech into an exceptional one. It takes practice and refinement, but it has some great payoffs.
Pacing
The speed at which you deliver a speech should be SLOWER than when you are speaking normally.
About 80 to 120 words per minute is ideal. Going slower becomes too boring for your audience, while if you go faster your audience’s brain will have increasingly difficulty following what is said, and will begin to skip over words.
Pacing should be varied throughout the speech: slower sections create emphasis or seriousness, while faster sections create excitement or passion.
Cards
Cards should be no larger than your palm. They should not have the speech written out in full. Rather, they should have dot points to prompt you through your speech.
Reliance upon cue cards prevents eye contact, hand gestures and the engagement of your audience.
Remember: there is nothing more boring than a read speech. As long as you are reliant upon your cards, expect to hear the same feedback (get rid of them!).
Pauses
You don’t always have to be speaking! Often, the mark of a confident speaking is being comfortable with silence, and well used pauses can add tremendous power to a speech.
Use pauses for emphasis – the whole point of a pause is that you are giving time for your words to sink in, and for the audience to think about them. They must therefore be used at very deliberate times.
Never underestimate the power of a good pause!
Eye Contact
Eye contact means that you are looking at your audience when you are speaking.
This doesn’t mean that you can never look at your notes. Rather, it means that you should avoid reading your speech when you are speaking. Look down at your notes between points in order to see what is coming up next, then look up to deliver the next point. Keeping your points short will help with this, and it will inadvertently also lead to some good pauses.
Eye contact is the foundation that the rest of your delivery will be built upon. Everything else is without meaning if you are not speaking to your audience, and you can’t do that if you aren’t looking up at them.
Gestures
Hand gestures are very useful as a means of punctuating your speech and emphasising points.
You don’t just want to have your hands grasping your cards or at your side for the entirety of a speech. However, nor do you want to have constant or over-the-top gesturing.
Gestures will need to be slightly exaggerated to have effect, and they should be tied to what you are saying: numbering with your fingers, open palms to signify a question or disbelief, pointing to make a point, and so on.
Word Pictures
When you say ‘baby’, no one sees the letters B-A-B-Y floating in front of their eyes. They see an infant child: perhaps gargling and cooing, perhaps sleeping in a cot, or maybe crying as loud as possible in the middle of the night. What is common is that they will visualise what is described.
You can use this to your advantage, as actually describing things, painting ‘word pictures’ for your audience, is an extremely effective means of engaging an audience.
For example you could say: “…they will reuse the same materials for each new group of volunteers, scamming them of the money they paid to ‘purchase’ them.” However, this is quite bland.
An alternative could be: “…the operators disassemble the house, restacking the wood and unscrewing the bolts, and wait for the next busload of unsuspecting voluntourists to arrive.” While it is a little more verbose, it paints a more vivid picture for the audience. They can see what you are talking about, and they are more likely to remember it because of this.
Sound effects, such as onomatopoeia, can be used for similar purposes.
Repetition
Repetition is a powerful technique to make an audience remember a point or piece of information. Repeating a fact, number or name will make it more likely that the audience will recall this information later.
Repetition can occur in quick succession (“More than forty million people have died from this disease. Forty million.”) in order to emphasise it, or over the course of a speech (e.g. returning to a point or example throughout your speech) in order to give structure.
However, repetition should be used sparingly and only for key points or information.
Light and Shade
No speech should ever be delivered entirely the same way. There may be a consistent tone or mood, but there also needs to be variation, particularly in a longer speech.
If some parts are louder and more forceful, such as when hammering in a point, then other parts should be quieter in order to draw your audience in and make them more reflective.
If some parts of your speech are fast and energetic, then other parts should be slower, calmer or more sombre.
Your voice is your most powerful tool, but the audience will get bored in everything is delivered much the same way. Tone, pace, volume and intensity should have their peaks and troughs in order to maintain the interest of your listeners.
Content
The content of your speech is also important for your delivery. Remember that a delivering a speech is very different from reading an essay aloud. Keep this in mind when you are crafting your speech and consider the different elements that are at your disposal: short sentences, short paragraphs/points, easy-to-follow and obvious structures, anecdotes and stories, and so on.
A good speech is like a conversation between you and your audience: the only difference is, you are the one doing all the talking. The challenge is to then make it feel natural.
8 Seconds
The human short-term memory lasts for about 8 seconds, This means that, if your sentence or point takes more than 8 seconds to say, then the audience needs to work very hard to remember it (and it is entirely possible that, but the time you get to the end of your sentence, they have actually forgotten when it began).
However, you can use this to your advantage. If you can complete a point, sentence or idea within an 8 second chunk, then the audience will be much more likely to remember it and will think that your speech has a clear and very easy-to-follow logic to it. Also, if you can repeat something within an 8 second window, then the audience is even more likely to remember it – a particularly useful thing to remember if you want them to take a key point away, or subliminally remember something crucial later in your speech.