Rich Watts

Ok, so I’m now down to the slightly harder graft, the speech writing. Some people find speech writing incredibly easy whilst others can struggle for hours and produce nothing that they feel happy with using. I’ve found from experience that the way in which we write speeches varies too, depending on who we are and how important we believe our upcoming speech to be.

Ok, so now I’m beginning to think about the topic I will speak on in the Toastmaster’s humorous speech contest and my thoughts are being led by the two points I made in my first post on the subject: * Humour and what is funny is essentially the choice of your audience * This has to be a speech with a story, not just random stand-up comedy

Ok, so since yesterday I've had a few people ask what criteria the humorous speeches are judged on. Here's the humorous speech judging criteria...

By the time you read this I should be led on a sunny beach in the South of France. If all goes to plan, I should also be thinking about and writing a humorous speech for the Toastmaster’s UK humorous speech contest which begins in September. Apparently I have a natural humour with my public speaking but this doesn’t seem to make the speech writing process any easier. Humour is after all extremely subjective and the nature of humour has been written about extensively by much greater, more informed writers than myself.

It's 70 years to the day that Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches to the House of Commons. His 'So Few' speech was given as an overview of why Britain was fighting, how the conflict was progressing and where he saw the conflict moving on to. A classic example of a well structured speech using the past, present, future method of organisation. It brings a smile to my face that a speech that was over 5000 words long is remembered 70 years later for one single line.

I recently worked with an individual that had a bad case of ‘hereiswhatIhavetosayImgoingtosayitandgetmymessageacrosstoyoureallyquicklyandthenIamgoingtositdownagain’. By this I mean he spoke to fast when delivering a speech. His audience could not understand him and as a result they disengaged and did not receive the message that he was trying to pass to them. At first I thought that this individual was nervous when speaking and this was why he spoke so quickly. However, I soon discovered that this speaker had been told in the past that he spoke too slowly.

What your audience knows about you before you start speaking can make or break your speech.

What if you embraced the silence and rather than seeing it as something to avoid, made it part of your arsenal for delivering a great speech?