Whayt I learned from the Singapore District winner
I have met the District winner at her club which meets at Ciarnhilll, before she became the national winner. I saw her for a second time at Toa Payoh centra club where she generaously shared with us tips which she had got from previous years' wnners.
When people win, they can offer to coach others. Coaching is very time-consuming. So if you are a worldwide winner you are in demand from major businesses and conferences and can command high fees tospea or coach.
The most relevant part for e was the discussion about leaving an audience feeling sad or dispiited after telling a sad story. I have often been given a table topic (impormptu speech subject chosen from slips of paper placed face down on a table or drawn out of a hat. I have a few seconds to decide whether to tell a sad story or a hapy one. A table topic last two minutes, not to be consued with evaluation which i three minutes,maximu three, with thirty seconds grace to wrap up.
I generally choose to tell a happy story, because otherwise I depress myself.
When studying Shakespeare plays, ou are often told that he introduces humrous scenes with mior characters in tradgedies, where the major dramatic and tragic events involve the ain characters.
The audience is likely to be left fed up after a really sad story. (In China plays about suicide pacts were banned after they led to suicides amonsgst members of the audience.
That goes to show the power of words.
Wp,ams magazines also bn tragic ends. You can have a tragedy early on but all must come right in the end.
The general pattern for success and motivationla speeches, are, begin with the sad story and end happily.
In a seven minute speech you have time for three stories and two or three ups and downs.
The speaker showed us a chart of her speech, showing a wave of ups and downs. You could analyse your speech with a bar chart.
At writing courses in Swanwick Writers School, I have seen how writers analysed the content of a magazine short story, in order to supply the editor with something similar. They were not using two colours for ups and downs, but three colours for description of surrounding, dramatic events, and conversation. So they could see if their own story was missing an element, or should end with a piece of conversation or a quotation.
I observed at a recent humorous speech compeition that the winner (second place I think) used her title as the oening line, repeated it several times and ended with it. I thought it was a bit boring and repeititve, but at the end you could rmember her speech, when you had forgotten other people's
The other lesson from our coaching session was that one should simplify. One of the lessons from the old manual is to cut jargon. We are given a world of the day in meetings to teach us to use a new word. This might boraden our vocabulary. But with a huge audience from many nationalities and speakng English as a foregn language, even more need to make the whole speech understandable.
She used the word procrastinate only once, and throughout the speech simplified it to wait. Usingthesaurus you could find another word, or several, and choose one to convey a similar meeting,
The first step in writing a speech is to have a simple but widely applicable and important message.
1 Important memessage.
2 Clear.
3 Short words.
Not too miserable.
This is my adaption of her advice..She gave us five tips, which could be counted on the fingers of your hand.
All in all a very useful session.
Underlined the point that you need a written speech so you can check word length, time, syllable count and so on. A good practise.
.
When people win, they can offer to coach others. Coaching is very time-consuming. So if you are a worldwide winner you are in demand from major businesses and conferences and can command high fees tospea or coach.
The most relevant part for e was the discussion about leaving an audience feeling sad or dispiited after telling a sad story. I have often been given a table topic (impormptu speech subject chosen from slips of paper placed face down on a table or drawn out of a hat. I have a few seconds to decide whether to tell a sad story or a hapy one. A table topic last two minutes, not to be consued with evaluation which i three minutes,maximu three, with thirty seconds grace to wrap up.
I generally choose to tell a happy story, because otherwise I depress myself.
When studying Shakespeare plays, ou are often told that he introduces humrous scenes with mior characters in tradgedies, where the major dramatic and tragic events involve the ain characters.
The audience is likely to be left fed up after a really sad story. (In China plays about suicide pacts were banned after they led to suicides amonsgst members of the audience.
That goes to show the power of words.
Wp,ams magazines also bn tragic ends. You can have a tragedy early on but all must come right in the end.
The general pattern for success and motivationla speeches, are, begin with the sad story and end happily.
In a seven minute speech you have time for three stories and two or three ups and downs.
The speaker showed us a chart of her speech, showing a wave of ups and downs. You could analyse your speech with a bar chart.
At writing courses in Swanwick Writers School, I have seen how writers analysed the content of a magazine short story, in order to supply the editor with something similar. They were not using two colours for ups and downs, but three colours for description of surrounding, dramatic events, and conversation. So they could see if their own story was missing an element, or should end with a piece of conversation or a quotation.
I observed at a recent humorous speech compeition that the winner (second place I think) used her title as the oening line, repeated it several times and ended with it. I thought it was a bit boring and repeititve, but at the end you could rmember her speech, when you had forgotten other people's
The other lesson from our coaching session was that one should simplify. One of the lessons from the old manual is to cut jargon. We are given a world of the day in meetings to teach us to use a new word. This might boraden our vocabulary. But with a huge audience from many nationalities and speakng English as a foregn language, even more need to make the whole speech understandable.
She used the word procrastinate only once, and throughout the speech simplified it to wait. Usingthesaurus you could find another word, or several, and choose one to convey a similar meeting,
The first step in writing a speech is to have a simple but widely applicable and important message.
1 Important memessage.
2 Clear.
3 Short words.
Not too miserable.
This is my adaption of her advice..She gave us five tips, which could be counted on the fingers of your hand.
All in all a very useful session.
Underlined the point that you need a written speech so you can check word length, time, syllable count and so on. A good practise.
.
posted by Angela Lansbury Author at 5:19 PM
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