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SPEAKING
AIDS
In formal speaking, whether it’s on a stage, a platform or in a conference
room, you will almost certainly want to prepare what you say. Very few
people have the skill to stand-up and deliver a brilliant speech off the
cuff; most of us need to know what we’re going to say, which means
planning and structure. But having a clear ‘right’ version of a speech
immediately raises the spectre of doing it ‘wrong’, which is where most
people’s fear of public speaking comes from – in particular, the fear that
one will forget one’s lines.
Some people can deliver a great speech from memory, and we will review
techniques for doing this at the end of this section. However, this is a
high-risk strategy because there is no backup plan: if the memory fails, or
a link in the chain is broken, the worst case scenario immediately ensues.
By way of reassurance, I have seen this happen to too many people over
the years, and it’s never as bad as the fear would have you believe. Even
on the TED stage, people dry up and get stuck sometimes. You never see
it on the website because the kind TED editors simply cut out those parts
and make the speech look as seamless and polished as possible. What
happens live is always the same thing. The speaker stops, becomes
flustered, shows physical signs of stress and embarrassment, and then
stutters an apology. The audience, far from being the feared stern-faced
bank of judges, inevitably breaks out into a sympathetic and encouraging
round of applause while the speaker regathers and finds the next link in
their chain. It’s rare that you will be in front of a genuinely hostile
audience, unless you practice stand-up comedy or get involved in politics.
People are generally kind and they usually want to hear what you have to
say.
Nevertheless, drying on stage is not a pleasant experience, so let’s
examine some aids that may help you to stay in contact with your
material, or to amplify your message with congruent visuals.
SCRIPT
In his TED talk on texting, John McWhorter makes a very illuminating
distinction between spoken and written language and the actual practices
of speaking and writing.
Obviously, we can speak spoken language and read written language. It
becomes more interesting when we consider the cross-fertilisation of the
language and the delivery methods. It is now possible to write speaking:
this is what texting is, and why it has few rules. It is also possible to speak
writing, as people used to do in the days before video, Twitter and
soundbites, and to some extent still do today. Speeches were carefully
written and then read out verbatim, and people would patiently sit for
hours and listen as the speaker read out the writing. When done well, this
can be very powerful. I saw Bono give his TED talk about world poverty in
Long Beach in 2013. I was sitting very near the stage, and he was
standing on a spur out into the audience, so I had to turn around and
look at his back. What I could see, but most of the audience could not,
was the big screen right at the back of the hall that was showing his
speech on a teleprompter, word for word. His skill as a speaker was such
that you would never know he was reading every word of the speech.
Watch it on video and you will see how this can be done by an expert.
Contrast this with a speech at the same TED conference that really
disappointed me. I love Jared Diamond’s book
Guns, Germs and Steel
,
and was eagerly anticipating his talk. But a lectern was brought out (very
rare at TED) and he stood behind it and read the talk from pieces of
paper. As a result, it felt lifeless, static, fixed and far from engaging or
inspiring.
For most people, reading writing usually sounds very different from
speaking: writing has grammar, syntax, capital letters and punctuation –
none of which we really think about when we’re speaking, typically in
successions of disjointed, uncompleted sentences with little or no formal
structure. We have all sat and suffered as someone stiffly and awkwardly
reads every word of a scripted speech, gripping a lectern and looking
down almost the whole time. With no lectern, holding sheets of paper has
a further disadvantage in that the paper amplifies any nervous tremors in
your hands, making the shakes plain for all to see.
In general, then, I advise against reading a scripted piece of writing
unless you really are an expert and you can use a professional autocue
with a clear panel in front of you or a screen behind the audience, so that
you can look at the people you are speaking to, rather than down at your
material.
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