Speaking skills

Powerful tips for improving public speaking skills

Techniques of oratory, which from the usual speech make great

Pause

What should start any successful performance? The answer is simple: with a pause. It doesn't matter what your speech is: a detailed presentation for a few minutes or a short presentation of the next speaker - you should achieve silence in the hall. Going to the podium, inspect the audience and fix your eyes on one of the listeners. Then mentally say the first sentence to yourself, and after an expressive pause, begin to speak.

The first phrase

All successful speakers attach great importance to the first phrase of the speech. It must be powerful and must generate a positive response from the audience.
The first phrase is, to put it in the terminology of television people, the “prime time” of your performance. At this moment the audience is maximal in number: each person in the hall wants to look at you and find out what kind of bird you are. Already in a few seconds, the students can be screened out: someone will continue the conversation with a neighbor, someone will stop their phone, and someone will fall asleep at all. However, the first phrase will be listened to by all.

Bright start

If you do not have a bright suitable aphorism in stock that can attract everyone’s attention, start with a story from your life. If you have an important fact or news unknown to the audience, start right away with it ("Yesterday at 10 am ..."). In order for the audience to perceive you as a leader, you need to immediately take the bull by the horns: choose a strong start.

The main thought

Even before you sit down to write your speech, you must determine its main idea. This key point that you want to convey to the audience, should be compressed, capacious, "fit in a matchbox."
Stop, look and make a plan: first select key ideas, and then you can add and explain them with examples from life or quotes

Quotes

There are a few rules, the observance of which will give the power of quoting. First, the quote should be close to you. Never quote the author, who is unfamiliar to you, uninteresting, which is unpleasant for you to quote. Secondly, the name of the author should be known to the audience, and the quotation itself should be short.
You also need to learn how to create an environment for quoting. Many successful speakers use similar techniques: before quoting, they pause and put on glasses or seriously read a quote from a card or, for example, a newspaper sheet.
If you want to make a special impression with a quote, write it out on a small card, get it out of the wallet during the speech and read the statement.

Wit

Surely you have many times advised to dilute the performance with a joke or anecdote. There is some truth in this advice, but do not forget that just joking for a joke only offends the listener.
You do not need to begin your speech with an anecdote that is irrelevant to the situation ("It seems that it is customary to begin speech with an anecdote, and so. Somehow a peasant comes to a psychiatrist ..."). It is better to go unnoticed to your funny story in the middle of a speech to defuse the situation.

Reading

Reading speech from a sheet with eyes down, to put it mildly, does not cause delight among the audience. How, then, do? Is it really necessary to memorize a half hour long performance? Not at all. Need to learn how to read.
The first rule of reading speech: never say the words, if your eyes are looking at the paper.
Use the SOS technique: watch - stop - say.
For training, take any text. Drop your eyes and mentally take a few words. Then raise your head and stop. Then, looking at any object at the other end of the room, tell us what you remember. And so on: look at the text, stop, speak.

Receptions of the speaker

Use rhymes and inner consonances in the phrase to give the sound of your speech a poetic force of influence.
It is very simple to come up with rhymes, it’s enough to remember the most common ones: -on (war, silence, necessary), -that (darkness, emptiness, dream), -h (sword, speech, flow, meetings), -oses / wasps (roses , threats, tears, questions), -down,-yes, -he, -tion, -ism and so on. Practice these simple rhymes by making up loud phrases.
But remember: the rhymed phrase should be one for the whole speech, no need to turn your speech into a poem.