For almost 26 years, even a trivial boy like me, have made over 100 and listened uncountable speeches, most of which are boring and tedious. Some professionals might have great intelligence but could not talk it out, some of them could talk it out but make it really tedious. The main target of speech is to deliver your minds and thought to your listeners as efficient as possible. Make them understood is much more important than how much you talked.
Please never ignore great power of speech, which might be the most great power of changing whole world than war or iPhone(呵呵).
How to make a "not-so-boring" speech?
1. Try to be a listener when acting as a speaker
Most speakers are just speakers, what means that they don't care, or couldn't care about listeners' feeling. Think about the way you talk to your girlfriend or child (if you have,notwithstanding I don't), You must be really paying close attention to their expression and reaction. Try to be a listener when speaking, tell yourself what you feel when another you sitting below, then you will know what to do, the audiences are not stupid radish, try to let them feeling that you care about them.
2. Do not repeat again and again...
Most primary speakers like to make this mistake. As a example, you might say "The economic growth of China is really impressive", and you don't need to repeat it as something like "So great economic changes happened in these years in China". These example might let you feel stupid, but many people like to repeat what they have said, notwithstanding in different way. They might believe audiences couldn't catch him or just have nothing to talk. But please try to avoid repeating unless necessary. Repeat waste audiences valuable attentions.
3. To tell stories to introduce what you talk
Time of listeners is valuable, so what made them puzzled is not what you talking, but "Is this speech useful to me, or just wasting my time?" The key changing point always happened in starting 5 minutes, they pay their attentions in 5 minutes and then decide whether taking out smart phone. 5 minutes is so important, audiences will vote your speech by their phone.
So please make your speech interesting, or at least in starting time, please tell an audience-interested story and let them know this speech is important to them.
4. Interesting, eggs or sugar
A funny speech always attract most, people like funny things much more than so-called professional knowledges. Make a science speech interesting and understand easily is quite hard task, which needs a lot speech experience and deep understanding of what you say. Hawking could not make <A brief history of time> so interesting without deep and profound physics knowledges . If you could not do that, please put some eggs or sugar into your speech, TED speakers do it a lot. These could greatly brighten your speech and make some listener put down their phone.
5. Simple is great, less is more
Many speakers like putting so much texts and pictures on their fancy PPT, as they believe it could make others know how much hard work they have done. Yeah, you are right, make it hard to understand is a great way on graduation reply or knot topics. However, make your speech simple and concise most of other time:
- One core topic
- one interesting picture on one piece
- avoid PPT when possible
- make a speech in less half an hour
- make your audiences pay close attention on one thing
6. Watching TED
The last but most efficient way, learn how to speech by watching TED. Then you got it!