Communication Matters
The single best way to improve just about any speech is to make it shorter.
1. Shorter speeches have a better chance of maintaining your audience’s attention.
Today’s audiences have the attention span of a gnat. They have too many distractions. And they’re trained not to sit still and listen.
Even a masterful speaker with a well-prepared speech will have trouble keeping an audience engaged for long. So keep your speech short.
Most public speaking advice focuses on the strategies and skills of creating and delivering an effective speech.
What most public speaking advice overlooks is the importance of being a better speaker, of being in effect a good person.
And yet history and even, sadly, contemporary politics are filled with examples of the damage done by bad people who give powerful, even mesmerizing speeches.
By bad people I don’t necessarily mean that they’re evil people, although some of them are/were. (Is there any better way to describe Hitler, one of the most powerful speakers of the 20th century?)
Bad people may or may not be well meaning and sincere, but they are
Cicero, ancient Rome’s greatest orator, knew only too well the harm that unprincipled, but effective speakers cause. Toward the end of his career he wrote De Oratore, the distillation of his experience.
Cicero wrote De Oratore to describe the ideal orator and imagine him as a moral guide of the state. Cicero understood that the power of persuasion—the ability to verbally manipulate opinion in crucial political decisions—was a key issue. The power of words in the hands of a man without scruples or principles would endanger the whole community. (Wikipedia)
To be a better speaker requires us not just to improve our public speaking skills and strategies.
Being a better speaker requires us, first, to be good people, to be the kind of people who
What would you add to my list?
