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The Passionate Speaker
"I'm not a speed reader. I'm a speed understander."
– Isaac AsimovA Newsletter for Speakers By Michael Landrum September, 2003 — Number 57 Reading the Speech: Five Rules "There are three things to aim at in public speaking: first, to get into your subject, then to get your subject into your self, and lastly to get your subject into your heart." – A.S. Gregg Knowing how to read from a written text is one of the necessary skills any presenter must master. While I urge my clients never to read an entire speech, (always at least open and close with good, solid eye contact, addressing the audience directly), I cannot deny that reading is part of the real world of speaking, perhaps the greater part. As a corporate spokesman and narrator for forty years now, I have had to read from a text to make a living. So, far be it from me to forbid the practice to you. Here are five rules to help you succeed as a reader from a text. 1) Read with your mind faster than you speak with your mouth. When reading to an audience, the task is to make the words on the page come alive. You want to seem to be expressing your own original thoughts in the moment, so you must deliver them as spontaneously as possible, with conviction and commitment. The deadly habit of most readers is to speak only the word they are looking at, the way a beginner reads in school. Your eyes should be able to scan the entire sentence while your voice is uttering the first few words of it. That will allow you to look up at your audience while you finish the sentence. This takes a little practice, but once you master the trick of it, you=ll find it possible to maintain better rapport with your audience. Obviously, this technique requires considerable practice with the text. 2) Your connection to the audience is more important than your connection to the page. Many speakers fail to grasp the importance of this vital rule. They feel their chief obligation is to pronounce the precise words on the page. The audience ends up staring at the top of the speaker=s head while mentally re-interpreting the speech for themselves. The objective of public speaking is to deliver the meaning of our ideas to a group of human minds. It=s ironic that a fixation on the words should be among the greatest obstacles to successful communication. 3) Interpret the speech. One of the deadliest mistakes most readers make has to do with the rate of speaking. On the page the words are evenly spaced and given equal stress by the printer. Of course when we speak in daily conversation, we are constantly varying our rate, pitch and emphasis. To sound natural and to be well understood, we must break up the monotonous march of words with inflection, stress and vocal color. Jazz singers call this Aphrasing@ and the best practitioners, such masters as Sinatra and Mabel Mercer, were terrific models of this subtle art. We can learn a lot by listening to how they interpreted the Astandard@ songs - taking familiar lyrics and making them their own, fresh, personal and unique. 4) Format the page. When you must read from a page make sure the text is printed in a nice, big font, at least 14 point, double spaced; and if it is a long piece, let each sentence begin a fresh line. Many speakers find it useful to mark their text with colored pens, underlining certain words or thoughts to stress, numbering lists and ideas, etc. Some even mark pauses and places to breathe. You might want to play with it on your computer, putting some words in bold type and others in italic. You can even use color and wild enlargements of some words to add emphasis . . . anything that will remind you to use your full range of vocal variety. If there is no lectern available, copy the speech onto cards (be sure to number them) which make a neater handful than a typed page. 5) Practice. The most important tip is to make sure you practice. If you think reading the speech gets you out of practice, you are deluding yourself and headed for a mediocre performance. Speaker’s Tip Ask the audience questions. Even if they're innocuous little ones like "Don't you agree?" or "What do you think?" To lead by listening is the way of mastery. Speakers often fall in love with the sound of their own voices and assume that everyone else is, too. A simple display of humility and graciousness by asking a genuine question and then attending seriously to the answer can do much to restore that speaker's credit. A Thought to Ponder "Rather than thinking about carving a statue out of stone, I picture in my imagination the completed work, in all of its exquisite detail. I then project the picture from my mind into the stone, where it becomes entombed, imprisoned within the stone. My job as the artist is not to carve an image into the stone but to free it from the stone. And this I do with passion because I know the image is already there, alive and breathing. The process is quite simple. That which I desire, I must first imagine. That which I can imagine, I create." - Michelangelo ©2001-2003 Michael F. Landrum |
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