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General Tips

Most speaking advice is noise. These six fundamentals survive scrutiny, and they apply whether you're toasting a wedding or pitching a board.

1. 01

   Start with the audience, not your material

   The single biggest shift in speaking skill is moving from “here's what I want to say” to “what does this audience need to hear?” Before you write a word, answer three questions: who are they, what do they already know, and what should they do differently afterwards. Every choice about content, length, and language follows from that.

   Matt Abrahams · Stanford Graduate School of Business

2. 02

   Decide your one sentence

   If the audience remembers a single sentence a week later, what should it be? Write that sentence first and build the talk around it. Speeches fail far more often from having three half-messages than from having one message delivered plainly.

3. 03

   Structure beats memorization

   Audiences follow and recall talks that have a recognizable shape: a beginning that frames, a middle with a few clear points, and an end that resolves. Memorize the map, not the script. Know your opening and closing cold, and navigate the middle from structure rather than from memorized prose.

4. 04

   Always practice out loud

   Reading your notes silently is not rehearsal. Speaking is a motor skill: pacing problems, clunky phrasing, and missing transitions only show up when the words pass through your mouth. Stand up, say it at full volume, and time it.

5. 05

   Record yourself and review

   Skill grows fastest with tight feedback loops: perform, measure, adjust, repeat. A recording shows you the gap between how you think you sound and how you actually sound, from filler counts and pace to energy and trailing endings. This is the core finding of the deliberate-practice literature: practice improves you when it comes with feedback.

   K. Anders Ericsson · deliberate-practice research

6. 06

   Shorter is stronger

   Almost every talk improves when cut by a fifth. Ending early is a gift no audience has ever resented; running over is a tax on everything you said before. Decide what to cut in rehearsal so you don't improvise cuts on stage.