On Monday, October 1, I gave my eighth Toastmaster's speech entitled "How to Find Ideas for Your Speech." I was continuing the train of thought that I had in my seventh speech, "giving a speech about how to give a speech."
The speech lasted seven minutes and included a live demonstration of how easy it really is to find a speech idea. Some of the visual aids I used included the chalkboard and a newspaper. I also called on the audience to come up with ideas.
I've included my speech notes below once again. Enjoy!
Good evening Toastmasters and guests
Today I’m going to continue the train of thought that I used to make my last speech. How do you make, write, and present a speech well? Today I will talk about finding an idea for your speech
Again, I am not an expert on public speaking, but I’ve had some experience that I can share with all of you. While finding an topic is always difficult, there are a few tricks that you can employ to ensure you are never short of ideas.
First, what do you know better than everyone else? What do you know that other people would be interested in? We all know about something, I for example, know a bit about photography and long distance walking or running (write on board). I’ve actually already given a speech about both of these
Winnie here gave a speech on memes last week and Tarek gave a speech about politics.
Now let’s hear what you know, this speech is interactive, so don’t be shy!
If no answers, pick people and ask them these questions:
What club were you a part of in high school?
What about here at Schulich?
What are you specializing in?
Are there any sports that you play?
What is your favourite type of music?
What is your favourite book?
See! Lots of ideas already!
Now, if these are A) Not appropriate for the speech, B) You’ve already talked about them, or C) It’s too personal so you don’t want to talk about it you have a bit of a problem…But don’t worry! I have an answer for that writers block!
Pick up a newspaper, or at least go to their website or wherever you get your news from, I have a NP here as an example There are a few sections, top stories, financial, and sports and life
Normally you would make your way through all of them, but we’ll do top stories here today, here are a few examples:
Go through paper, pick ideas out, write them on board
Growing problem of nurses’ addiction to narcotics, front page
The rebellion in Syria
Pet peeves
Genetically modified foods
The speeches don’t even have to be totally related to the articles, we’re just doing this for ideas
As a side note, if you decide to do a contentious issue, it may be better to describe the situation as a whole rather than picking a side to avoid losing the interest of some of your audience
As you can see, we’ve already come up with a number of speech ideas, but if they still don’t work for you, I have one further recommendation.
Go through your twitter and facebook feeds, look at what people are talking about, and add that to your list. Once you have that, you’re almost ready to start writing.
You just have to decide which topic, we’ll say this one (pick one), and what you will do with it
If you have you’re CC manual, look at project 3, the first page has of the project has a section called “general purpose”
According to it, you have three possible goals:
To inform
To persuade
To entertain
This speech is meant to inform you, and most of my speeches are geared this way, some of you may have noticed
Let’s take out topic, (connect topic with one of the three goals)
And now you have an idea for your speech, if you think about it, it wasn't that hard a process, was it?
I’d like to end with a quote by Napoleon Hill, an author whose book Think and Grow Rich is 10th on the list of best-selling books of all time according to Wikipedia.
Like ourselves, he first had to have an idea of what he would write before he could put his pen to paper
“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.”
Thank you
