The first thing I did was disabuse him of the notion that he needed to write a manuscript. He only knew he needed to say the aforementioned two words but beyond that was a mystery. A few years back, the CEO of a furniture-building company-let’s call him Connor-asked me to help him with a 5- to 7-minute “thank you” speech for a humanitarian award. The setlist isn’t what the band is presenting to the audience it simply reminds them to deliver the goods and in what order. Think of your notes like they’re a rock band’s setlist. The days of using stacks of numbered index cards are long gone. If I can make a similar speech with their notes, then there’s too much information and likely too many complete sentences.Īs with all good cheat sheets, you should rarely need more than a small piece of paper to contain your notes (but please use paper, not your hand, as Sarah Palin once famously did). When I review the notes my students prepare for their speeches, the first thing I look for is that they make little sense to me. It should contain only those things you need to remember, not things you already know. Good notes are basically a short-hand cheat sheet of the points you’ll be hitting in your speech, as well as anything you might forget, like a date, a name or a statistic. Given these realities, the best (and easiest) way to stay on point and connect with your audience is putting together and using good notes. You will also end up twice as nervous and truthfully, you should be. You could memorize your speech, but that’s extremely time-intensive and very dangerous. And doesn’t it inevitably seem unauthentic-when’s the last time a friend read to you his restaurant recommendation or what she did over the weekend? It also instantly dates your presentation and makes you seem less spontaneous-who knows how long ago you wrote it? It diminishes your power to persuade and inspire, because it is harder to read and emote at the same time. This makes losing your place more likely and certainly more catastrophic. Why? For starters it forces you to look at your words instead of your audience. But while reading from a pre-written script is standard for prominent events such as conference keynotes, political convention speeches and commencement addresses, in most day-to-day cases it’s a bad idea. They often take this route because they think precise wording is critical, or because they think it will calm their nerves to simply read word one through word 632. Many people think creating and delivering a speech automatically entails writing a word-for-word script.
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