Tips on Public Speaking

Approach public speaking positively! Accept the possibility that you may experience some emotional stress but that such tension will decrease with successful experience. Reject misconceptions about the study of pubic speaking and develop a positive philosophy that will enable you rapidly to acquire effectiveness.

Recognize that your function as a speaker is to promote within the listeners the maximum amount of movement that is possible under the constraints of the total situation from their initial position toward closure with your position. The movement of the listeners toward closure occurs as a result of the process of cyclical interaction between speaker and listeners that continues throughout the speech. In its highest form, speechmaking constitutes a kind of dialogue in which the listener extends himself creatively and actively toward understanding and, perhaps, concurring with the speaker; the speaker interprets the silent responses of the listeners and correspondingly adjusts what he says and how he says it.

A student once said that an effective speech is "forthright": it is the "right" speaker delivering the "right" speech to the "right" audience at the "right" time and place. Unknowingly this would-be humorist echoed a basic principle that has been expressed in writings on speechmaking from the earliest systematic treatment by the Sicilian Corax in the fifth century BC to the present text: successful oral communication is dependent upon an appropriate fusing of speaker, speech, audience, and occasion. Each of these basic elements of the speech situation interacts with the others. In order for you to select, develop, and deliver a message that will promote maximum movement of the listeners from their original position toward closure with your position, you must carefully analyze the constraints (freedoms and restraints) imposed upon the message by the other elements and must adapt your message accordingly. Only by analyzing the freedoms and restraints projected by the audience, speaking occasion, and yourself as the speaker can you competently asses the rhetorical problems confronting your speech. Only by estimating the nature and intensity of your rhetorical needs can you calculate which of the various rhetorical choices available to you will most effectively satisfy, or answer, these needs.

Short Answer Questions

1. It can be got from the passage that initial speechmaking may involve ____.
2. According to this passage, you make a speech to ____.
3. Speechmaking forms a type of dialogue, which means ____.
4. The "would-be humorist" (Paragraph 3) refers to ____.
5. The author maintains that successful oral interaction requires an adequate combination of ____.

(Keys.)