Audience Analysis
Adapting to Your Audience and Situation
At every point in the speech making process, you need to ask yourself: “Self, what does my audience want from me?” It is the audience and situation, and not you (the speaker), that should determine the object and form of your speech.
Speech Introductions
Writing the Introduction
It’s no accident that most good Hollywood movie scripts follow this pattern: exciting opening (think Saving Private Ryan), an interesting and easy to follow story line, and a memorable finish (think Shawshank Redemption). Screen writers realize that their audiences put a lot of stock into first and last impressions. Guess what? Your audience does, too. Because of this is, your introductions and conclusions always need to be exceptional.
Writing a Speech
Writing the Speech Body
Every speech should have one central idea around which the speech is built. If your audience remembers nothing else, they should remember this, essentially the point of your speech.
To support the central idea, your speech should have between 3-5 main points. Trying to squeeze in too many main points will just confuse the audience. Your main points should be clear, meaningful, and memorable and an equal amount of speech time should be given to each point if they are all of equal importance.
Writing the Conclusion of a Speech
You might recall from the section of this website on introductions the fact that audiences tend to put a lot of emphasis on their first and final impressions of a speaker (technically known as the primacy/recency effect). Because of this, it is very important to finish your speech with something great. If you have ever seen a stand-up comedian perform, you will find that they save their best jokes for the end of their set, for this very reason.