By Justin Hsieh
From project presentations to graduation speeches, public speaking is an integral part of everyday life. However, most people do not devote much time or consideration to improving their public speaking, meaning that the world is full of unprepared and ineffective speakers. The good news is that anyone who wants to stand out as a stronger speaker can do so with a few simple tips.
- Know Your Goal
The fundamental purpose of any presentation is to give the audience something – an understanding of a new idea, an explanation of a complex issue, or an altered perspective on the world. Understanding and remembering this is the key to being an effective speaker. The point of a good presentation isn’t to say things for the sake of saying things or to make the speaker look good – the point of a presentation is to communicate and connect with an audience, and to leave people with something new and valuable to take away. Once communication is the focus of a presentation, the process of planning, building, and practicing it all ends up naturally incorporating the elements that are most important to a good presentation – clarity, direction, and connection. - Make Your Direction Clear
When communicating a message or idea to an audience, a key first step is to make sure that the presentation or speech has a clear goal and direction. When planning a talk, make sure to carefully plan the overall arc of the talk to make sure that not only do all the pieces fit together and connect to illustrate a single theme, but that these connections and relationships are made clear to the audience. Showing how concepts connect and explaining the hierarchy of an idea is critical to the audience understanding the idea. Make careful use of structure and transitions to ensure that the audience knows whether they’re listening to a main claim, evidence, an example or a digression, and make it easy for the audience to organize the things that you are saying in their brain. - Remember the Audience
To communicate a message, you need to know not only what you’re communicating, but to whom you’re communicating. Remember that the audience doesn’t have your level of knowledge on the topic. The whole premise is that they don’t yet know the thing that you’re about to explain to them. Thus, concepts that you take for granted may not feel so natural to them, and they might not know what any of the technical terms you’re using mean. You need to start from scratch and build up the idea for them piece by piece, without assuming any prior knowledge and being sure to introduce concepts in a deliberate and logical order. Use metaphors to explain unfamiliar concepts in terms of things that the audience is already familiar with. - Use Slides Carefully
Slides are a powerful tool, but they can easily become the downfall of the speaker who does not understand how to use them. Remember that slides are a tool to augment your speech, but they are not there to do it for you. Here are some tips to help you avoid common errors and use slides more powerfully:- First off, realize that your audience has a limited amount of attention. If you speak a lot and put a lot of content on your slides, you will force them to choose between understanding your words or understanding your slides. Don’t do that. Use slides in a targeted way to help the audience understand what you’re saying, not to distract them from it.
- Limit each slide to a single main idea. With digital slideshows, you have an unlimited number of slides that you can use for your presentation. Don’t try to cram a ton of different concepts and information onto a single slide. That makes it confusing and makes the audience have to decide what to focus on and in what order. It’s better to have three slides with one full-screen picture each, and go through them one by one, than to put three pictures on the same slide.
- When you’re done speaking about the content of a slide, don’t leave it up. Use blank slides for transitional moments, or when you’re saying something that doesn’t rely on any visuals, so that the audience can focus on what you’re saying.
- Eliminate or minimize the words on your slides. Single words or short phrases can help the audience remember and sum up a long point, but sentences and paragraphs are completely unwelcome on slides. Slides are not meant to communicate verbal information. Your mouth is for communicating words. The worst possible mistake is to put a paragraph on a slide that contains the exact same words you’re going to say, and then read it. In that case, there is no purpose to the speaker being there. The audience might as well just read the slides. Slides should only add value through things like diagrams, data, pictures, video, or other visual aids.
- Keep it simple when designing slides. They are vessels for communicating an idea, and are not supposed to be items of focus themselves. Use one simple, legible typeface and one to two font sizes per presentation. Avoid italics and underlining, which are difficult to read (bold is okay), and avoid unnecessary transition animations, especially long ones.
- Speak Naturally and Connect
The point of speaking to an audience is not to convey the maximum amount of information possible in the most efficient way possible. That’s what text is for. The point of speaking is to take advantage of the more visceral emotional and intellectual connection that comes from natural human communication through speech. That is the inherent value of a speech or presentation – to connect with the audience, and thereby strengthen the impact of your idea. That is also why you do not want to sound like you’re reading or reciting. No audience likes being read to. It makes a talk feel impersonal, and defeats the purpose of speaking in the first place. To address this, you must… - Practice, Practice, Practice
The value of practice is one of the single most overlooked elements of public speaking. People often choose not to practice, and try to just speak well on their first try. It doesn’t work. You need to rehearse the talk so that you can focus not on remembering or coming up with the right words, but on connecting with the audience.
When you rehearse your talk, you have two options. You should choose the one that feels more comfortable and natural to you. You can prewrite a script, which allows you to control your wording carefully to maximize the impact you have. Having a prewritten script comes with two important considerations. A script must be memorized so thoroughly that it can be spoken automatically and naturally, or else it runs the risk of coming off as recited or robotic. A script should also be made using spoken language, the more natural words and syntax of everyday speech, rather than written language, the more complex forms that writers use. Speak your script, then write it down (not the other way around).
The other option when rehearsing a talk is to practice speaking naturally without a script. This allows the audience to see you thinking out loud and communicating more naturally with them, but it has the obvious risks of fumbling with words or leaving out important parts. To address this, unscripted speakers should create a bullet point structure of their main points, and practice or memorize the transitions between ideas to make sure that their organization is clear and they don’t miss any major ideas. A major misconception is that unscripted speakers don’t need to practice. They do. However, rather than practicing delivering the exact wording of a script like scripted speakers would, unscripted speakers need to speak through several different versions of their talk and practice being able to communicate all of their ideas clearly. - Get Feedback
Feedback is one of the most important things in preparing an effective presentation. We are all subject to our own biases and are unable to ever completely examine ourselves from an outside view, so it’s critical to gain a second or third perspective on your talk to identify problems that may not be obvious to you, but that your audience will notice. Give your talk to trusted friends who are new to the topic (and therefore will not share any assumptions or biases you might have about it), and ask them for feedback on:- If your explanations assume any knowledge that the audience doesn’t have.
- If your connections between ideas and your overall direction are clear.
- If you make eye contact.
- Your tone of voice and how it makes the audience feel.
- Your pacing. Many speakers go too fast, which makes them seem stressed, unprepared, and unnatural – as well as making it difficult for the audience to follow.
- Your enunciation.
- If it seemed like you were reading.
- If the slides were helpful or distracting.
- Any noticeable habits that would distract or bother the audience – things like posture, physical tics, or repeated use of phrases such as “you know” or “like.”
- Any content that felt confusing or unnecessary.
- Any parts where they felt bored.
While these pointers should of course be adapted to the specific circumstances and limitations of your individual speaking situations, the most important things to take away are the two principles of communicating an idea to the audience, and being natural in doing so.
Many of these ideas were adapted from TED founder Chris Anderson’s book
TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking.
