Quick & Easy Speech Preparation Tips

    * This tip is geared toward Toastmasters* members, but can be useful for other types of speakers, too!

Often, people cancel their speeches at the last minute because they don't feel they've had adequate time to prepare. We often mistakenly believe that it takes 3-5 hours or more to prepare for delivering a good speech. This just isn’t the case! It IS possible to prepare a good speech on short notice by using the following tips:

1. Keep an ongoing list of possible speech topics:   areas of interest and expertise, personal experiences and stories, and current events. We all have things about which we could easily speak for 5-7 minutes. My husband is a good example of this. He has very little free time for speech preparation, yet he has recently given excellent speeches about flying, biking, and his father passing away. For each of these speeches, he probably only spent about an hour in preparation time.
2. Clip or print out articles you like and share key points in a speech. I once used an article about communication to create TWO speeches and neither speech took that much time to prepare.
3. Use others’ speeches for inspiration. Earlier this year, a fellow public speaking club member gave a speech about Randy Pausch, and I did a speech a few weeks later which involved interpretive reading from Randy’s book, "The Last Lecture."

These are just a few ideas for preparing a speech in about an hour. Click here for another tip on delivering an impromptu speech.

Source: Debbie Roes, Pacific Beach Toastmasters

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