How to Prepare a Speech

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Mitchell, and today I'm going to explain how to prepare a speech. There are two basic parts to preparing for a speech. The first and equally important, is research, and the second equally important part, is to practice. For the research, in order to prepare for a speech, you need to know your topic, and by researching this, you can go to the library, or check the internet for sources, but generally, you need to convince your audience of something, and the best way to do that, is with facts or statistics. The second part is equally important, especially if this is something that you do not do very often, and you don't have a lot of practice, speaking in front of people, and that is to practice. You can start with notes, but when you're preparing for a speech, you generally don't want to always be looking down, and reading your notes. You want to try and give the speech, with as much of a natural feel as possible, and so if you practice reading a speech at home beforehand, and read it enough and practice it enough, when it's time to actually give the speech, you should know it pretty well by heart. The second one is to basically what I call, fade the audience. A lot of people get very nervous when they stare out into a huge crowd of people, and then they tighten up, and they stress out, and then they forget everything that they wanted to say, in their speech.If you can blend the faces together, and not look at any one particular person, but look at the entire group as an object, generally then you can distance yourself, from the face to face contact, and it makes it much easier for you to give that speech, so when people have to give a speech in front of a large crowd of people, they oftentimes get very nervous, and then when they concentrate so much on the huge crowd, they forget their speech. What I recommend, is to try and not focus on any one particular face, but to concentrate on the entire group as a whole, and think of them as one large blob, and then you will be able to think and concentrate more on the topic of your speech, and less on the fact that all of those eyes are staring at you."