How to Hold an Audience in the Palm of Your Hand! Part 3

Write the speech like an essay

Now that you know how long each part of the speech has to be you should ascertain how long it takes you to speak a page of your notes at a normal pace. When you know that, you can determine how many pages are needed for each section of your speech. For exam­ple, if you take two minutes to deliver an A4 page then obviously a ten minute speech will require five A4 pages.

Then settle down and write your speech as if it were an essay. This is one of the keys to successful speech writing. Don’t be misled into believing that because it is a speech you have to adopt a differ­ent style to that which you would normally use in speaking or writ­ing. Everyone has been taught to write essays at school and if you treat writing a speech exactly like writing an essay, you will find it surprisingly easy to do.

Don’t worry too much about the grammar or how your thoughts tend to run on. Just let what you want to say come out in an essay prose style. When you have fin­ished writing the speech, go back over it and read it aloud. Listen to how it sounds as you read it. You are bound to find a few things that wrote well but didn’t come out as well when you read them aloud. Make corrections and adjustments until the speech flows effortlessly.