How To Speak Well to an Audience

Here are some tips to help people who have trouble speaking well. People who will get stage-fright will find out that actually there is nothing to be afraid of. Here are some points you must take note of during your speech, they are stated randomly, not by any order of importance.

1) Clarity
2) Voice Level (Loudness)
3) Confidence
4) Eye-Contact
5) Tone of voice
6) Respect

7) Rehearsal

Clarity

Firstly, what is clarity? It means how clear your words are, this includes both your pronunciation and Voice Level. (I will explain Voice Level later on) To speak clear, firstly you must have a good body posture. You must NEVER be slouching as it will affect your voice, try to stand straight. Many people will sway around like some old oak tree when they make a speech, I had that problem too and I had just gotten myself off it recently. Your body posture states alot of things about you, your attitude towards this speech etc. Stay still, back straight and you will have a good body posture.

Also, try not to mumble when you are speaking, swallow any saliva in your mouth that could affect your Clarity. Speak clearly and preferably loudly, so people can hear you, without clarity, your speech is good as nothing. Your audiences cannot hear you, they will get bored and maybe would start to talk.

Voice Level

This should be pretty easy to understand, the voice level is the volume of your voice. I included it into the tip list as I feel that it is quite important. Firstly, no matter how well your speech is, if you speak too softly, your audiences cannot hear and they will have questions later on. Speak too loudly does not guarantee your voice level, speaking too loudly will cause the people to get irritated to your speech and will be "pissed" off.

Confidence

Confidence plays a very important role in speaking. Confidence is the value not many of us have, speaking in front of a big crowd takes both courage and good confidence. As they always say in novels, you must BELIEVE in yourself, then you can do better. If you can conquer this value, good. Nervousness is also a sign of not being confident in yourself, actions like folding the end of your shorts or as Singaporeans mumble with an "er...". This will completely ruin your speech and will completely break your momentum. Also, try to speak in proper English.

Eye-Contact

Eye-Contact is very easy to master, to master Eye-Contact, all you need to do is to look at the audiences once in a while while reading to check that they are listening. This will also "hook" the audiences' attention and it will prevent you from reading from the script. Reading from the script is a very serious mistake, most people tend to read and read, completely uncaring about the audiences. This will make the mood of the audiences VERY BORING! You have an Eye-Contact at any part of your script, giving Eye-Contact during pauses like fullstops and commas will prevent you from mis-speaking. Also, for more advanced people, they will read a whole chunk of text and memorise it. (Around 5~10 words) After they memorised the words, they will give complete Eye-Contact while speaking the memorised text. If you cannot memorise such a long text within seconds, work harder and memorise the script, as much as you can. Although you memorised, just bring your script up on stage just in case.

Tone of Voice

This is the hard part, even I could not get it right sometimes. The Tone of Voice technically means the liveliness of you speech, using bombastic words does not mean you have a great tone, in fact, the tone comes from your mouth. Tone of Voice actually means that your voice has a high and low tone, fast and slow tone, you can even strengthen some words which are more important in a text. This will give your speech a nice colour and it will also catch the audience's attention. Speaking high and fast when something good has happened, speaking slow and low when something sad has happened. This sounds easy but I can say it is not. Try your best to make the speech more colourful.

Respect

Respect means that the audiences have to give you the rights to speak. If your audiences aren't paying attention to you or talking, you can ask them to keep quiet to get their attention. You have the right to ask them that as you are the speaker, they have to respect you! While asking them to keep quiet, please be friendly and try not to scold them. If they are normal human beings, they should feel embarrassed and stop talking, if not, just try to ignore them, speaking louder would help.

Rehearsal

Speaking needs skill and skill needs practise. Rehearse your speech infront of a mirror at home to check your posture and your pronunciation, rehearse as many times as possible to be sure of your speech. Check for any errors like spelling errors, one error can cause the whole speech to not make sense. If you read the word wrongly, it is wise not to repeat unless it will cause a misunderstanding. If you keep repeating, your momentum would be disrupted and your whole speech would go downhill. Also, never go up on stage without rehearsing as your mouth may get tongue-tied with the words.

Conclusion

This practically ends the tips for speech, I hope this has helped you in anyway. Speaking good gives others a good impression of you, and a good impression is very important.

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