Project 2 - Organise Your Speech (Part 1: Coaching)

Congratulations on completing your Ice Breaker! It's a hurdle that you just have to jump over and get done. But now, the real art of speechmaking begins. 

Project 2 is probably one of the most important projects in the CC manual. Having a well structured speech is the basis for all of your speeches to come (if that makes sense). 

I often describe the CC manual to visitors as a set of projects which are like "building blocks" because each skill you develop while working on a particular project will help you with your next speech, so you can literally build your skills as you go along. You can look at project 2 as the foundational skill, or the base of the building blocks. It's absolutely essential for a good speech, and if you don't get it right, all of your (later acquired) "building blocks" or skills will topple over.

This project is all about having a well-structured and organised speech. An organised speech has so many benefits:

• It's easier for you to remember
• It's easier for your audience to understand and remember
• It makes you look like a more professional and organised person, and
• It helps you with staging (later on, when you're a more advanced speaker).

There are many different ways you can  arrange the sequencing of a speech (an important part of speech structure), but the two easiest ways (I find) are either:

• Chronological (time-based), or
• Spatial (place/location-based)

You can also do a mixture of the two, which is quite easy as well. For instance, your speech may revolve around a trip to the beach. You can mention the car journey there (first place/time), your arrival at the beach (second place/time), and then your swimming adventure at the beach (third place/time).

Spatial speeches have the added advantage that you can stand on one part of the stage to represent one location, and move to another part of the stage to represent the next location. Not only does this make your speech easier for your audience to follow, it also helps you to remember it better. This is an advanced technique, known as anchoring, so I'm not going to go into much detail about it yet.

The other thing you need to work on is having a good structure for your opening, body and conclusion of your speech.

An opening/beginning sets the scene for what's to come in the rest of your speech. It's like a trailer to a movie. It hints at what is going to happen in the speech, gets the audience excited/intrigued, but never gives away too much information. And never give away your ending in your opening! It should be a surprise. 

It's hard to discuss the body of a speech without using an example, so you'll have to wait for my next post where I analyse my speech to see how it's done. (I'll also be showing examples of how to do transitions in that analysis).

The conclusion is a summary of the main points or ideas you put across in your speech. It's basically a gentle reminder to your audience of what your speech was about. Conclusions can sometimes feel boring because you feel as though you're repeating what you just said, but you need to phrase it in a way that's not boring so that your audience won't fall asleep. Try to end your speech with a call-to-action. Basically, just tell them to do something as a result of hearing your speech. For example: "Having heard all of the reasons why it's important to stretch before exercising, I encourage you all to do it before you next gym session."

Here's a music video clip that you can groove to while preparing your speech for Project #2. See if you can guess what the (tenuous) link is between this song and what I've been explaining in this post. You can add your guesses via the "Comments" link down below.

Labrinth - Earthquake