The Art of Speeches and Presentations

The Secrets of Making People Remember What You Say

Philip Collins

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780470711958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Pequeñas empresas

Be memorable.

Whether you like it or loathe it, public speaking is something many of us have to do. Be it presentations to colleagues or speeches to a room full of near strangers, we all want to shine…or at least get through it with our dignity intact. Luckily Philip Collins, former Chief Speech Writer to Tony Blair, knows exactly what's needed to give a storming speech.

The secret, according to Philip, is content. Too many of us focus on how we're presenting, and don't spend enough time thinking about what we're presenting. The secret to memorable, polished speeches is to think more about the material you're sharing – to pay attention to detail and choose your works carefully. Speech writing is and art – and art we can all learn.

When the content's right, the confidence will follow.

In The Art of Speeches and Presentations Philip Collins provides you with a concise set of tools, preparing you for any speaking occasion. Ranging from the ancient history of rhetoric to what makes Barack Obama such a good speaker, it's packed with practical examples and tips to teach you the craft of speaking well and making people remember what to say.

"Does Phil Collins know what he is talking about? Here's the answer – he isn't just good, he is the best. It's as simple as that. I spent years writing speeches for major politicians and I now speak publicly myself all the time, and yet there is so much that I can pick up from him and anyone who re4ads this book will too."— Daniel Finkelstein, Executive Editor, The Times and former speech writer to William Hague

CHAPTER ONE

AUDIENCE

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In this chapter we will locate the start of the writing process long before composition. Everything is leading up to the central argument and there is much work that needs to be done before we get to that point. Before you are ready to begin you need to be sure that you really do want to make a speech, rather than take part in a panel session. You need to commit the time but, crucially, do not be tempted to start too soon. Once you have determined to proceed, you need to begin to get to know your audience. There are three ways of doing this – thinking, researching and asking. The best tactic, if you can, is to speak to people who are planning to attend. Then there are five questions you should ask yourself, as a further guide to what will be required of you.

1. What title have you been given?

2. How large an audience can you expect?

3. On what occasion will the speech take place?

4. How much does your audience already know about the topic of the day and do they have a prior prejudice?

5. Are you speaking to a larger audience than those who are gathered in the hall?

You will by now know enough about your audience that you are ready to think about what you expect from this speech.

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Before You Begin

As the task of writing a good speech unfolds in this book, you will see that the pivotal moment, the fulcrum of the whole process, is the clarification of a resilient central argument. Everything prior to that point leads up to it and everything subsequent to that point follows from it.

In other words, there is a good deal of work to do before you start to write. Before you begin, you should stop and ask yourself the following question: how far away is the speech? Most people start their preparation far too early. The natural response to trepidation is to start working. Lots of people use activity to displace nervous tension. They think it will help to start writing two months before the event and have it completed and ready to be delivered with a week still to go.

This is a mistake and you will just need to be braver about it. There is no speech that has ever been delivered that could not have been done in a month, from start to finish. Starting too soon leaves too much time for your material to go stale and for you to lose confidence in what you have done. People start to make poor editorial decisions the more time that passes. You also run the risk that too many people get involved in the process and the speech loses its central thrust.

If that schedule sounds tight and you want to protest immediately that you are too busy for that kind of regime, then you need to ask yourself a more fundamental question: do I really have the time for this speech?

If you thought the speech was worth doing in the first place, then you will need to put aside the requisite time. Turning up poorly prepared is a discourtesy to your audience, as well as a foolish missing of an opportunity on your part. But perhaps your reluctance is pointing to a more basic concern. The sense of unease lurking underneath your bravado may be pointing to the fact that you have nothing to say.

That isn’t quite the knock-down insult that it sounds. It doesn’t mean that, if engaged on a topic of conversation, you would sit there in embarrassed silence. It means that you do not, just at the moment, have something sufficiently new and important to impart that it warrants organizing a whole event around it, to which people will be asked to interrupt their day to attend.

Be careful that your diary is not exercising a kind of tyranny over your time. Most speeches are just dates in the diary that you feel you cannot avoid. Many of these events will have been put into your diary by someone else, with only the merest indication to you. They probably thought it was corporate necessity that you attend and they may well be right. In other words, this is an event at which nobody involved actually wants to make a speech and this is a really inauspicious beginning. The annual industry conference is on the horizon and, as a big cheese in the trade, you can hardly not show up. But the obligation to attend is not the same as the need to make the keynote speech.

There are other ways to appear that release you from the obligation to be the main event. You could suggest a panel event in which leading figures answer questions from the audience. If those questions are submitted by agreement in advance of the event, you will not be ambushed by any nasty surprises. The presence of others on a panel always provides cover, in any case. You could arrange to have a structured conversation on stage, led by an interviewer, with whom you have discussed the course of the discussion in advance.

There are many occasions on which your task is simply to make the corporate case that you have made before. There is nothing wrong with that. The world does not change fundamentally for most of us in a matter of months. So, if that is the task you have, think hard before you accept the invitation to do a set-piece speech. You may be asking for a lot of hard work you will wish you had avoided. Not that you should automatically suppose that submitting to a structured interview, a panel or a question and answer session will release you from the requirement to prepare. Even if you are familiar with the standard material you have to impart, each of these occasions contains pitfalls that preparation can help you to avoid. It is also worth adding, too, that after you have done a few of these events you will have honed your answers and you probably have a set response to certain questions. That is fine as long as you are sure to interrogate your own patter every few months. Lines can date quickly and your delivery can betray the fact that you have become bored with saying it. You can be sure the audience will be if you are.

How Do I Get to Know My Audience?

A speech is sometimes known as an address and an address has to be addressed to someone. An argument has to be given to someone in particular. It is impossible to work out your speech in the abstract. So, the place to start is with an assessment of the occasion for your speech or presentation and the audience who will be there to hear you.

Before looking at what you need to ask of your audience, you need to think carefully about how you intend to go about unearthing the information. There are three ways you can get to learn more about your audience.

1. You can sit there and think

2. You can do some research from your desk

3. You can ask people

If you sit and think for a while you will usually find that you already know quite a lot about the speech you have been invited to give. It is likely that you know the occasion and the organization that has asked you to speak. If the presentation is internal you will probably know some, if not all, of the audience members. You will probably have a good sense of the educational level of your audience, its basic income and also know the context of the conference or occasion. Incidentally, there are some books and websites on speech writing which implore you to make a great deal of this kind of psychological musing. There are others too that ask you to do a certain amount of what they call “demographic” analysis of the audience. You should be careful with this. There is a limit to the psychological attitudes that can easily be read off from somebody’s biography or the place you impute to them in the social structure. It’s unlikely that extended study of this kind will repay the investment of time. There are events which demand a certain tone (such as a conference exclusively for women) but that will be clear in the title of the event and requires no great insight into demography. You almost certainly understand the purpose of the meeting you will address. It goes without saying that, if you don’t know the answers to any of these questions, you certainly need to. But you will find that a clear picture of the event is already available in your mind if you just spend half an hour sketching it.

Now, the sketch you have ready-made in your mind is highly impressionistic. So let’s paint in some of the details. If you know nothing else at all about the forthcoming event, you will presumably know who you have been invited by. Start by investigating who they are, if you do not already know.

The best way to begin this investigation is to ask what this organization stands for. As a guide, you can use the following questions:

• What question does this organization exist to answer?
• How would you characterize this organization, from what you can see on its website and the literature that you will find there?
• What problems do you imagine they encounter?
• Why do you think they are interested in the topic that you have been given?
• Imagine the meeting they had, at their headquarters, when your name came up. They had other options, yet they chose you. Why did they do that, do you think?
• Why did they imagine that you had any of the answers to what they need to know?

There is another way of ascertaining the answer. You could just ask them. You must have at least one contact at the organization that has issued the invitation, namely the person who contacted you. If they are at all efficient, they will already have attached some information about the event. In fact, it is more likely that they will have sent you too much rather than too little. Make sure that the accompanying material you have contains something about the prospective audience, a projected line-up of speakers for the day and something akin to the statement that sets out the purpose of the day.

If you are missing any of these elements, just ask. Then, while you are asking, inquire whether there is an archive of previous events online. You can usually watch speeches from previous years which will give you a sense of the type of occasion you have in store and of the type of speech to which this audience will be accustomed. Finally, ask your contact if there is anyone you could talk to at a later date for a fuller briefing on the nature and mission of the event. If you frame this as wanting to be sure that the organizers get exactly what they want from the event, people are invariably delighted that you should be so interested.

So far, you will have gained some useful information about the event but not very much about the people who really matter – the audience. Your contact may have been helpful but there is still a lot more you can do. The best strategy of all is to talk to the audience before the event. Of course, unless it is a small-scale event, it won’t be possible to talk to everyone who will attend but that is not a counsel of despair. You can still unearth the information you need.

There are books on speech writing which suggest that you send a short questionnaire to the audience, assuming that you have been able to get hold of an invitation list from the organizer. The problem with this is that you are liable to annoy a large proportion of your audience, while gaining information of quite poor quality. Survey questions are usually too general and do not allow for the revealing follow-up question from which genuinely useful information often comes. There is something impersonal and perfunctory about a list of generic questions turning up in your inbox. As an audience member, I am apt to be more irritated than impressed.

There really is no substitute for actually talking to people directly. It will rarely be possible to talk to more than a small fraction of your audience. But assume that, on the day, you will be speaking to 100 people. If your research has yielded an account of the audience’s character, you should be able to construct a small representative sample. Good research should allow you to locate five people who will be reasonably representative of the whole. Don’t hesitate to contact them, if you can get their number or email address. Most people are flattered to hear from you, flattered that you should care at all and flattered in particular that you care what they think.

When you find these people ask them what single question they most urgently need you to supply the answer to. What single thing could they learn from your speech that they really need to know?

Though you are planning to talk to just five people, it is possible that each one of them will know others who are also planning to attend. You can be sure, too, that those five people will mention it to others, either before the event or on the day.

You will be appreciated for taking the pains to discover the needs of your audience, especially if someone recognizes a morsel of information which they think derives from the conversation that you had with them. Sometimes the people you speak to will not quite know what they are looking for from the day. They may be looking to you to answer that question. Sometimes the thing they are looking for is exactly what you know you cannot offer them, either because you don’t know the answer or because you disagree with them. But at least you will know the ground on which you stand and that will help a great deal in the preparation of your text.

What Do I Need to Know About My Audience?

Now that you have steeled yourself to make contact with your audience, you need to make sure that you do not waste their time. The following section sets out what, ideally, you need to know. For ease of reference, the information you need to contemplate before you are ready to start writing can be broken down into five questions.

1. What is the title that you have been asked to address?

2. What is the likely size of the audience you will have?

3. What is the occasion on which you will speak and where will the speech take place?

4. How much does your audience already know and what is their view on your topic?

5. Are you speaking to more audiences than you can see before you in the hall?

Question One: The Title of Your Speech

To start with the title of the speech is such an obvious first question that it is remarkable how frequently people forget to ask it. You can make some basic errors at this point, which will ramify all the way through the preparation process, so it is as well to get the title of the speech correct from the beginning.

Your title ought to be narrow, clear and precise. It should not be “Developments in the delivery of milk over the last few years” or “Trends in the production of cricket bats”. Those are broad subject matters, not topics for a speech. Your title needs to be one of two things:

(i) an assertive statement, which you will set out to substantiate or confound, or

(ii) a clear question, which you will set out to answer.

“Five years from now, the rise of the supermarkets will have finished off milk delivery for ever” is a statement of intent, around which a speech can be organized. Likewise, “is the cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• PROLOGUE
• Title page
• Copyright page
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: ATTENTION TO DETAIL
• CHAPTER ONE: AUDIENCE
• CHAPTER TWO: EXPECTATIONS
• CHAPTER THREE: TOPIC
• CHAPTER FOUR: LANGUAGE
• CHAPTER FIVE: INDIVIDUAL
• CHAPTER SIX: DELIVERY
• CONCLUSION
• FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
• GLOSSARY – THE MAIN RHETORICAL TERMS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Index