Grabbing your audience's attention and putting it on your message

There is a constant debate among speaking professionals about how much of a presentation should be planned and written and how much should emerge spontaneously from the speaker. As with most polarizing arguments, the answer is generally that the best practices come from a blending of the two approaches.

Few of us are good enough to build a coherent, clearly structured, strategically sound presentation without taking the time to consider our purpose, marshal convincing arguments and brainstorm different approaches. Often, it takes me hours of writing and deleting to even find the central message that I’m trying to communicate. Having a script keeps me on track to deliver that message.

Yet, for as comforting as it is to know what you are planning to say, focusing on the words, rather than the people in front of you, tends to inspire a rather robotic, detached quality in the speaker. The essence of compelling speaking is to direct your energy out to the audience, not at a paper or screen or inward to your own mind.

An entirely spontaneous presentation is usually fresher and more immediate. It allows the speaker to focus on the audience, to respond to how they react and to adjust course on the fly. It also lets the speaker nurture an intimate audience rapport that a pre-scripted speech simply can’t achieve.

Spontaneous speeches are also infamous for the, “I should have said” moments that generally follow.  Though I often get some of my best ideas in the heat of the moment on stage, I’m rarely able to express them in their most concise and coherent form without some time to ponder and massage them. Our minds sometimes work in intuitive leaps and tangents, but that’s something the audience will rarely be able to follow in its raw, unfiltered form.

Deliberate consideration leads to a well-reasoned, persuasively logical flow of information and the immediacy of spontaneous insight and expression gives it the spark to inspire, so plan carefully what you want to say, but then express yourself freely.

Put more simply, don’t worry about the words you use. Remember what you want to say.

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Have you ever taken a good look at the lighting in a jewelry store? Most of us don’t pay much attention to things like that, but jewelers do. They know that the best way to sell sparkly things is to emphasize the sparkle, the sizzle as it were, rather than the steak of prudent financial investment, so they install dozens of little pinpoint lights in the ceiling over the display cases. The stones, especially diamonds, reflect and refract the points of light back to the eye, and “voila”, they sparkle.

Speeches need to sparkle too. They need to be filled with small points that catch the ear and engage the mind and the imagination. Give your audience a crisp description that captures the essence of a person or place with one perfect adjective. Surprise them with twist on an idiom that sets them leaning one way, just before it whips them in another. Drop in a well timed pause that leaves a key word hanging in the air to be pondered.

The iron girders and bolts of fact and logic certainly have their place in the structure of your speech. They provide the strength and stability that hold the whole thing together. Emotion and enthusiasm provide the energy and resonance that will motivate change. But it’s the incandescent flashes of originality and insight that the logic supports that will really make the speech come alive for your audience.

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Most speeches plod. All of the parts are there, tied together competently, and yet the end result has all the verve and vitality of a Clydesdale pulling a heavy wagon. They get the job done, but that’s about it. Most speakers plod too, but that’s a point for another time.

What is it that makes a speaking script come alive? It’s not a big vocabulary. In fact, that is often a part of the problem. Nor is it any of the other skills you learned, or more often, failed to learn in high school English class. Good writing comes from three things; clear thinking, linguistic flexibility and an ear for the music.

Clear thinking means knowing what exactly you are trying to say. That sounds easy, but it is deceptively difficult to do. In fact, most of us use our language abilities far more often to hide our lack of clear thinking than we do to explain what we mean. Elegant simplicity in thought or language is a rare commodity.

Linguistic flexibility is the ability to take a clear thought and mentally work through the many different ways of expressing it, fitting the pieces together like a verbal jigsaw puzzle until the entire train of thought clicks into a cohesive and coherent whole. It’s what a visual artist does with an image or a musician with a string of sounds; spin and twist it in their minds, until the parts fit together just right.

As for the music, that one I can’t explain, any more than I can explain the genius of Mozart, Frank Sinatra or Elton John. The world is full of skilled musicians, but it’s the ear for the music that makes a skilled musician transcendent.

Some writers have that same ear for the music of language. Most of us don’t. Yet we can still aspire to the first two, and that’s enough to make us more competent than the vast majority of people who put pen to paper.

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