The Importance of Refining your Speech
A speech is like a car. We think of it as one unified object, but it’s actually a lot of smaller mechanisms working together. If your car isn’t running as well as it could, you can’t just fix the whole thing as one piece; you have to figure out which part isn’t performing as well as you’d like. Is it something in the engine? The fuel injector? The spark plugs? How are the brakes? Does it need new tires?
Similarly, a speech is made up of discrete parts that connect into a whole. Each part of the speech has its own logic and function, and each requires slightly different tools to build, diagnose, and repair.
In the writing process for speeches, like essays, once you have your central idea or thesis, it’s natural and useful to jump right into writing the body with your main points. During the act of creating a speech, you need to determine what you want to say and the order in which you want to say it, in a way that’s appropriate to your purpose, audience, and context.
After you have a draft of your content, organized in a way that makes sense, it’s time to write your introduction and conclusion – you can’t decide on the best way to introduce and conclude your remarks until you have identified and ordered those remarks themselves!
The concept also holds true for transitions, which are words and phrases that show linkages among the main ideas of your speech. The outline of a speech contains your structure, key points, and supporting material but if delivered without transitions, the parts of your speech can seem choppy and unrelated. Transitions are the glue that connects the elements of your speech to one another, making your speech a coherent whole. So part of refining your speech involves making sure you have clear and appropriate transitions linking your ideas.
Also, refining your speech involves reviewing your language to make sure it’s clear and appropriate for your audience and speaking situation. Even though you won’t be reading your speech, it helps to refine language before you speak so that you get some of that language into your own memory and can draw from it when you speak extemporaneously from your sparse speaking outline.
A refined, attention-getting introduction will:
- set the tone for your speech
- acknowledge and appeal to your audience
- provide a hook to get your audience engaged with your topic.
A refined conclusion will:
- review main points
- restate the topic
- provide a lasting thought.
The middle parts of the speech, brought together by thoughtful transitions, will guide the audience through and between different ideas.
As you can see, a main part of speech writing is revising and refining.
To extend the car metaphor, introductions, conclusions, and transitions are the components that need to work together, just like the engine, brakes, and spark plugs. And the fuel that makes the whole thing run is language. So make sure to do that final inspection.
