How to Write a Speech: Check Out These Guidelines to Succeed

Writing a speech is a serious challenge for a student, especially with little or no previous experience in this area. However, this knowledge is not a hidden one: you just need practice in talking to the public as well as proper oral skills. Another success factor is being methodical in preparation for your speech. Here are some guidelines and tips on how to write a speech from scratch with proper quality, that were gathered with the help from professional writers of ProHighGrades and EditProofRead.

Goal and general structure

A speech should have a certain narrow topic, typically addressing a certain occasion, or distinguishing someone's achievements, or calling for changes. It is important to have a clear understanding of what your speech should seek to achieve. But also keep in mind that context matters. Having specified the goal or the main idea, you need to think it through and outline the general structure: introduction, addressing the main problem, making references to sources to support your point, calls to action, etc.

The resulting brief has to be logical and concise. Avoid adding any unrelated ideas to your speech outline. Each irrelevant phrase or a vague remark brings a certain amount of risk to obscure the speech and consequently fail to capture the audience's attention. Imagine listening to a tale with a constantly changing storyline. No matter how talented the narrator is, your brain will get tired pretty soon because of the information overload, and eventually, you will stop paying attention at all.

Plan and full text

The next step is to compose a plan. An important part of a speech is the way how a speaker talks. Therefore, a good plan must include notes for the vocational part and even for gestures. A detailed plan will help you estimate the time your speech will take and probably cut some lengthy parts to fit into your schedule. Besides, you will be able to notice some difficulties, points that require your attention when speaking, or maybe some details to omit.

Now it is finally time for the full-text version. You need to follow the plan step by step and write down the words to express your ideas. It might be a tricky part because, as a speaker, you might often prefer to formulate your thoughts on the go instead of memorizing a complete text by heart. In that case, it could be convenient to mostly use short phrases to write down your speech.

Do not use formal language – after all, you will most probably speak the same way as you always do. Anyway, your language should be suitable for your target audience. This is important to make it follow your arguments.

Another important element is writing down the reference information. A serious speech most probably will have to refer to reputable sources in order to support its goal and reasoning. In that case, it will be necessary to be as exact as possible in quoting and naming your sources. This information needs to be written down during the preparation and memorized if possible.

Practicing your speech on beforehand

Once the full text is ready, you need to actually speak it. It would be perfect to gather a small audience, supportive but able to criticize your performance. Your friends or relatives, for example. Critique from others is what helps the most to find your mistakes or flaws. But even if you cannot find anyone else to listen to your speech patiently, you can perform in front of a camera and review the recording afterward, taking notes at each problematic part and making corrections to the text. After two or three such preliminary speeches, you will be much better prepared for your actual one.

Aiming at perfection is not recommended. Obviously, even a good performance will lack some minor details, but that does not mean you have to improve your text over and over again. After all, where could you find time for this? A nice speech has to be logical, straightforward, captivating, and performed in a proper, uninterrupted manner. This should be enough for its success.

Speaking and analyzing your result

If you have worked diligently to prepare and review your speech, it is most probably bound for success. It is quite natural if you change your plan a bit. Even if something unexpectedly goes wrong, it is quite natural. Just make sure you resume your speech as quickly as possible after any interruption.

When the speech is over, it would be wise to make notes for yourself while you are still at it. Make sure you remember what did not go smoothly or which of your arguments did not seem to affect the audience. Writers from ResumeCvWriter say that live performance is the best way to get trained for other future speeches – next time you will be twice as much prepared!