Ten Top Tips



Ten Top Tips For Writing A Memorable Speech: Winning The Mental Game Of Presenting.    When you sit in the audience enjoying a wonderful speech, the speaker's words seem to all make sense. The speech is logical, interesting, convincing, entertaining and has a nice flow to it. There is a reason for this. It's the writing. Do you have a speech coming up soon? Need to write a talk that will grab your audience and make them sit on the edge of their seats? Take a moment to learn these ten essential elements of speech-writing and you may just give the speech of your life.    806 words.


Ten Top Tips For Writing A Memorable Speech: Winning The Mental Game Of Presenting.    When you sit in the audience enjoying a wonderful speech, the speaker's words seem to all make sense. The speech is logical, interesting, convincing, entertaining and has a nice flow to it. There is a reason for this. It's the writing. Do you have a speech coming up soon? Need to write a talk that will grab your audience and make them sit on the edge of their seats? Take a moment to learn these ten essential elements of speech-writing and you may just give the speech of your life.    806 words.


Ten Top Tips For Writing A Memorable Speech


When you sit in the audience enjoying a wonderful speech, the speaker's words seem to all make sense. They seem to be well-organized and easy to follow. One thought seems to fit with the next in a tight jig-saw puzzle kind of way. The speech is logical, interesting, convincing, entertaining and has a nice flow to it. You seem to be gently and effortlessly led along by the speaker's words. It's a small slice of heaven, isn't it?

What we see and hear as effortless speech-making actually comes from diligent, intelligent, sophisticated speech-writing. It comes from someone sitting down and crafting a thoughtful, smart, strategic set of concepts turned into practical tips, stories and action items. What the audience hears is music to their ears, almost literally.

Do you have a speech coming up soon? Need to write a talk that will grab your audience and make them sit on the edge of their seats? Take a moment to learn these ten essential elements of speech-writing and you may just give the speech of your life.

Ten Strategies For Crafting Excellent Speeches

1. Prepare Early. Begin gathering material for your speech right away. As you learn more about your topic, new ideas for writing and organizing it will automatically come to you.

2. Be Audience-Centered. Everything you write should be with the needs of the audience in mind. Aim all your efforts at helping the audience understand what you are saying.

3. Start At The End First. Write the conclusion of your talk right away. Decide what you want the audience to do or to think as a result of your speech. Then write the talk using that as a guide.

4. Write For The Ear, Not The Eye. Experienced writers know that every medium and project has its own language, cadence, style and structure. Don't write the speech to be read. You need to write your speech so when your audience hears it, they get it.

5. Make Rough Drafts First And Polish Later. Don't needlessly pressure yourself by trying to write the perfect speech at the outset. The best speeches come only after many, many re-writes.

6. Put Your Own Spin On The Material. You may block your creative juices if you think everything you say has to be original. Don't worry about being unique, just put your personal spin on it. The audience wants to hear your personal point of view.

7. Make Only Three Main Points. It is always tempting to tell as much as you can about a subject, but this will confuse and overwhelm your audience. Keep your major points to three and your audience will find it easier to follow your speech organization.

8. Craft A Take-away Line. When people can't make a speaker's session, they ask others who were there, "What did the speaker talk about?" What they say you said is your take-away line. You'd like people to walk out with that nugget. It's like creating street buzz for yourself.

9. Decide The Minimum Your Audience Needs To Know. What is the very least the audience needs to know about your topic? What is the most critical? Leave out material that would be "nice to know". You probably won't have time for it anyhow.

10. Write Using The WIIFM principle. WIIFM is when your audience responds to your material by asking themselves "What's In It For Me?" People are really only interested in material that affects them. After writing any piece of material, no matter how brilliant, apply the WIIFM principle and judge if your audience will care about it and use it.

Three Bonus Tips For Writing A Great Speech

1. Write As If You Are Conversing With One Person. How many times have you felt the speaker was talking directly only to you? This phenomenon is in part an acting and speaking technique, but it also stems from how the speech is written. As you write, picture one person and what you want to say to them. Then write the speech.

2. Decide What You Want Your Audience To Do Or Think Differently As A Result Of Your Speech. There is really only one reason to give a speech. That's to have your audience either make a change in their thinking or their behavior. Otherwise, what's the point? Decide what you want for them and then write your speech around that.

3. Use "Audience-Involvement" Devices. To bring the audience into your talk and to make sure they are engaged, craft numerous interactive techniques. These can be questions, exercises, role plays, verbal quizzes and other ways that get them actively involved with your material.

So there you have it, ten quick tips (and three bonuses!) for writing better and more memorable speeches. When you write your speeches, remember these and your audience will thank you by giving you their rapt attention.

Parts of speech


Examples and Observations:

"Writing in about 100 B.C.E., the Greek grammarian Thrax, who invented the whole idea of the parts of speech, counted eight of them: adverbs, articles, conjunctions, nouns, participles, prepositions, pronouns, and verbs. The Romans had to drop articles (that is, a and the), since such words didn't exist in Latin, and added--hot damn!--interjections. The early English grammarians started out by adopting the Latin scheme, and it wasn't until Joseph Priestley's The Rudiments of English Grammar, published in 1761, that someone came up with the familiar baseball-team sized list that included adjectives and booted out participles for good."

"A part of speech outside of the limitations of syntactic form is but a will o’ the wisp. For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech--their number, nature, and necessary confines--is of the slightest interest to the linguist."
(Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech, 1921)


"When linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that the term part of speech soon fell out of favour, word class being introduced instead. Word classes are equivalent to parts of speech, but defined according to strict linguistic criteria."
(David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003)


Open Classes: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs
"The open parts-of-speech classes that may occur in a language are the classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Typically, each of these classes may be divided into a number of subclasses on the basis of certain distinctive grammatical properties. For example, the class of nouns in English may be divided into such subclasses as common and proper (on the basis of whether or not the nouns occur with articles like the: the girl vs. *the Mary), count and non-count (on the basis of whether or not they occur in the plural: chairs vs. *furnitures), etc. And the class of English verbs may be divided into such subclasses as transitive and intransitive (on the basis of occurrence with objects: enjoy it vs. *smile it), active and stative (on the basis of occurrence in the progressive: is studying vs. *is knowing), etc. Such subclasses are not ordinarily identified as distinct parts of speech, since there are in fact properties common to the members of the different subclasses, and since the label parts of speech is . . . traditionally reserved for 'major classes.'"
(Paul Schachter, "Parts-of-Speech Systems." Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Clause Structure, ed. by Timothy Shopen. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985)


Closed Classes: Pronouns, Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections
"Of the traditional parts of speech, . . . the pronoun, preposition, conjunction and interjection are closed [classes]. . . .

"Closed classes . . . are highly resistant to the addition of new members (though the term 'closed' should not be taken to imply that such expansion is strictly impossible). A topical illustration of the difficulty of adding to the closed classes is to be found in the failure to satisfy the widely perceived need for a singular personal pronoun to replace the he of examples like If any student wishes to take part in the seminar, he should consult his tutor: many people understandably find it offensive for he to be used for a non-specific member of a set containing both males and females. . . . [T]here is no morphological process appropriate for filling the gap and attempts to create a new simple stem (such as thon) have not been successful."

Is Media Violence Free Speech


NO
George Gerbner is the former dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996, he founded the Cultural Environment Movement to examine the role of media violence in American society. He says media violence is tantamount to censorship by media conglomerates who effectively shut out diverse points of view. 
YES
A high-profile veteran of the 1960s peace movement, Todd Gitlin has become a leading U.S. commentator and author on media and culture issues. In his essays and books, he has called the crusade against media violence "hollow" and "cheap." He says media violence isn't dangerous, it's just stupid.
Gerbner starts:
Formula-driven media violence is not an expression of crime statistics, popularity, or freedom. It is de facto censorship driven by global marketing, imposed on creative people, foisted on the children of the world. Far from inciting to mayhem, media violence is an instrument of fear and social control.
Violence dominates television news and entertainment, particularly what we call "happy violence" - cool, swift, painless, and always leading to a happy ending in order to deliver the audience to the next commercial message in a receptive mood.
The Cultural Indicators Project has found that heavy viewers are more likely to overestimate their chances of involvement in violence; to believe that their neighborhoods are unsafe; to state that fear of crime is a very serious personal problem; and to assume that crime is rising, regardless of the facts.
Heavy viewers express a greater sense of insecurity and mistrust than comparable groups of light viewers. They are more likely to be dependent on authority and to support repression if it is presented as enhancing their security.
Gitlin responds:
Television violence is mainly redundant, stupid, and ugly. The deepest problem with TV violence is not that it causes violence - the evidence for this is very thin. The problem is that the profiteers of television in the United States - the networks, the program suppliers, and the advertisers - are essentially subsidized (e.g., via tax write-offs) to program this formulaic stuff.
Professor Gerbner may well be right about TV watchers - the more violence they watch, the more dangerous they think the world is. They may therefore support heavy-handed, authoritarian responses to crime.
But consider the case of Japan. There is far more vile media violence - including more widely available violent pornography - in Japan than in the United States. But there is less real-world violence - particularly sexual violence - in Japan than in the United States. This is not to say that television is healthy for American society. To the contrary.
It would help to provide alternatives. We could use some government-subsidized programs devoted to something other than mindless, transitory entertainment. We could tax television sets, as in Great Britain, or subsidize public broadcasting through taxes, as in Canada, or - in a more American mode - charge fees to networks, which now avail themselves of the public airwaves, buy and sell licenses, and amass immense profits, all without charge.
Gerbner rebutts:
"The case of Japan" argument surprises me from Professor Gitlin. It is the knee-jerk retort of apologists, of whom Mr. Gitlin is certainly not one. The argument assumes that media violence is the only, or major and always decisive, influence on human social behavior - extensio ad absurdum. Media violence (or any other single factor) is one of many factors interacting with other influences in any culture that contribute to real-world violence.
I completely agree that the main problem behind violence is virtual commercial monopoly over the public's airways. No other democracy delivers its cultural environment to a marketing operation.
But apologists might also argue that the free-market environment delivers programming tailored to its audience. However, our studies show that violence actually depresses ratings. Instead of popularity, the mechanisms of global marketing drive televised violence. Producers for global markets look for a dramatic formula that needs no translation, speaks "action" in any language, fits every culture. That formula is violence.
The V-chip is not the solution. That technology merely protects the industry from the parents, rather than the other way around. It only facilitates business as usual. Programming needs to be diversified, not just "rated." A better government regulation is antitrust, which could create a level playing field, admitting new entries and a greater diversity of ownership, employment, and representation. That would reduce violence to its legitimate role and frequency.
Gitlin explains:
By citing the case of Japan, I mean simply to restore some balance to a discussion that, like so many other American debates, gets pinned to single-cause theories and sound-bite nostrums. TV versions of violence are egregious, coarsening, and produce a social fear and anesthesia which damage our capacity to face reality, but I think many liberals have gone overboard in thinking that if they clean up television, they have accomplished a great deal to rub out violence in the real world. To make television more discriminating, intelligent, and various would be an achievement worthy in its own right, but let's not kid ourselves: The deepest sources of murderous American violence are stupefying inequality, terrible poverty, a nihilistic drug-saturated culture, and an easy recourse to guns. TV's contribution is a target of convenience for a political culture that makes it difficult to grow up with a sense of belonging to a decent society.
I'm not against the V-chip as such, since any device that enables parents to redress the imbalance of power they suffer under the invasion of television is all to the good. Given the power of nihilistic corporations over TV programs, any reasonable off-switch is defensible. But again, let's not kid ourselves about just how easy it will be to address the problem of TV violence all by itself. The Hollywood mania for dumb-bunny action is driven - as Professor Gerbner rightly says - by the export imperative. Entertainment is America's second-largest export in dollar value. The industry is not going to go quietly.
Gerbner speaks:The V-chip is a sideshow and a diversion. I have observed this game since the 1970s. It is called "the carrot and the stick." Legislators posture in public, shaking the stick; and then vote the carrot of multibillion dollar windfalls for the same companies they pretend to threaten. They may even extract some meaningless concessions to calm the waters, take the heat off their media clients - who are among their major bankrollers - and call it a victory.
But the industry knows better. The cover story of the 14 August 1996 issue of the trade journal Broadcasting & Cable is titled "The man who made the V-chip." Pictured on the cover is "the man," liberal House Democrat Edward J. Markey, who should know better. The cover story is titled "Why the Markey Chip Won't Hurt You." In fact, it can only help the industry. It's like the major polluters saying, "We shall continue business as usual, but don't worry, we'll also sell you gas masks to 'protect your children' and have a 'free choice!'"
There is no free market in television. Viewers are sold to the highest bidders at the lowest cost. That drives both violence and drivel on television. The giveaway of the public airways to private exploitation damages our children and swamps any effort toward democracy. Only a broad citizen movement can turn this around.
Gitlin responds:
V-chips or the like are sure to come - they are perfectly tailored to the American can-do attitude that there is a technological fix for every social problem. Though I don't regard them as pernicious - parents deserve all the technohelp they can get - I agree with Dr. Gerbner that the irresponsibility of the broadcasters is the fundamental issue. They are nihilists who spend many millions of dollars to buy a supine government. Pat Robertson's willingness to sell his "Christian" channel to Rupert Murdoch, master exploiter of brainless smirkiness and sexual innuendo, shows what kind of values are in play among the movers and shakers.
The problem of TV goes far beyond violence. The speed-up of imagery undermines the capacity to pay attention. Flashy sensation clogs up the synapses. The cheapening of violence - not so much the number of incidents as their emptiness and lightweight gruesomeness - leads to both paranoia and anesthesia. The coarsening of TV inhibits seriousness. The glut of entertainment cheers consumers on primitive levels. Whiz-bang new technologies like high-definition TV will offer sharper images of banality.
To the idea of a citizen's movement, hooray! At the least, let all who want a more vital America - and more vital arts - support antitrust action against the media oligopoly.
Gerbner's last word:
We agree: The problem goes beyond violence, ratings, or any single factor, to the heart of the system. Television is driven not by the creative people who have something to tell, but by global conglomerates that have something to sell.
Citizens own the airways. We should demand that it be free and fair, and not just "rated." Besides, the current so-called rating system is fundamentally flawed:
Ratings flash on during opening credits, but never again Producers rate their own programs, resulting in inconsistencies across networks Ratings designed by the industry is like letting the fox (no pun intended) guard the chicken coop
So - don't just agonize; organize! The Cultural Environment Movement (CEM) is a nonprofit organization with members and supporters worldwide, united in working for freedom and fairness in media. For more information, email CEM@libertynet.org.
Gitlin's last word:The moneymaking machines that control as much of the culture as they can get their hands on will make just as many moral-sounding reforms as they think they need to keep Congress and the FCC off their backs. They will trim an ax-murder here, insert a V-chip there, and later - when public-interest groups and the FCC have taken their attention elsewhere - throw in another ax-murder, or six. The reforms, most likely transitory, will have a pleasant ring and will gain much well-meaning support. In the meantime, for the foreseeable future, the culture - the unofficial curriculum of American children - will remain infantile, degraded, and, among other things, tolerant of and conducive to a violent nihilism. Those who have access to the Web will feel that they have broken free of the tripe, but this is at least half-fanciful. Much of what goes on the Web, however decentralized and freely chosen, is as glib, shallow, and weightless as commercial TV. The great Fun Leviathan churns on.
I have been trying to argue in these few words that we are imprisoned in a mania for easy sensation. We have more and more delivery systems for hollow toys. The virtual eclipses virtue. This year's shoddy goods displace last year's. The freedom to choose is debased into the pursuit of the next kick. The frantic search for electronic sensation does violence to the reflection and deliberation that a democracy needs. No quick fixes, no "just say no" is adequate. It would make sense to curb our own hunger for distraction, as we need to curb the reach of the moguls who now lord it over the catering business.