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Students put their verbal skills to the test when they took part in a public speaking competition.

Presentations are such delicate processes- miss out one key element, and the whole thing is ruined and you’re left looking unprofessional, unprepared and unconvincing. Nobody wants that! So therefore need to work on your presentation and public speaking skills. It’s about more than just having fancy slides on the projector, you have to grip, captivate, and sell your audience your message. They have to know what you want to say, and what they need to take from that. At this point you’re probably interested but wondering how can you improve your public speaking skills or presentation skills? Well, it’s a lot easier than you think!

Improve your public speaking skills with these 5 tips. Whether still in school or already working, you may discover that you enjoy what you used to dread!

Public speaking skills are an art that many people tend to underestimate its difficulty. A lot of people fail to realize that there is a difference between speaking in a conversation, and actually speaking and delivering a message to an audience. There is a lot more to be thought about and prepared for with the latter, and this is where your public speaking skills come in. Some people are naturally gifted, and are able to remain calm in front of an audience and deliver the message emphatically. For others, it’s a lot more of a daunting prospect! However, regardless of which category you fall into, no matter how talented you are, there are many ways to improve your public speaking skills.

Kansas City Live spotlights the people, places, trends and local attractions that make KC such a great place to live.

Whether it’s an address to an association, a presentation to the Board or a pitch meeting to land a killer whale of an account, public speaking is a skill that will serve you well time and time again throughout a professional career. While we are not all destined to give a keynote for a conference or speak to a university’s graduating class, in sales, marketing and entertainment you will eventually face a need to “pitch” an idea or “close” a deal that relies as much on your delivery of your message as it does on the content.
A UCLA study showed only a mere 7% of communication is transmitted through the words that you say, while 38% is voice quality (tone, volume, etc), and 55% is transmitted through nonverbal communication (word pacing, gestures, facial expressions, breathing, posture, stance, etc.). It may be shocking that less than 10% of what we are saying is communicated through the words that come out of our mouths, but it reinforces the incredible power of non-verbal communication to affect our ability to impact and connect with an audience.
5 Tips to Improving Your Public Speaking Skills:......

Here is the list that we made in class on Friday. I hope you all are enjoying the weekend.

Public speaking skills

Physical:

Eye contact with the audience
Confidence
Appearance (match the context)
Movement
Mindful of surroundings
Tone

Content/Rhetoric:

Dear Abby: I'm really bad when it comes to speaking. It's hard for me to squeak out the few words I can. I am shy and not very sociable, so when I'm with people, even my two friends, I feel like I come across as rude.

As a young professional, you must learn good communication skills. Here are tips on communicating in the workplace and boosting your career.

The Port Washington Public Library presents a free interactive workshop on the skill of public speaking and speech writing. "The Effective Presenter – How to Write and Give a Speech" will be held on Saturday, Sept. 22 from 10 a.m.-1 p.m.

The workshop provides participants with expert professional coaching in public speaking skills and how to organize a clear and concise message resulting in successful presentations for business, education and industry.

The program includes:

How to combat the heckler in your audience;
How to use humor in your speech;
How to conduct question and answer sessions, and more.
Participants will arrive at their own personalized and professional communication style and will be ready for the next speaking task at hand. This workshop is for people who are at any level of their career path or for people who are in transition or for people who are in the process of determining their next step.

Whether you are asked to make a toast at a wedding, say a few words at a birthday dinner, nail a sales presentation, or speak to the student body, might as well shoot for the stars. Here are the ways to public speaking mastery.

Public speaking is an essential skill — not just for CEOs and Oscar winners — but for each and every one of us. Whether you are asked to give a toast at a wedding, say a few words at a birthday dinner, nail a sales presentation, or speak to the student body, might as well shoot for the stars.

Here are 21 steps to mastery:

1. Dress to Stand Out
When spotted in the crowd, don’t blend in. Be a touch dressier than the audience and wear a bright color or at least a bold accessory.

2. Be Aware of Your Body
Stand tall with your shoulders back, unclench your fists and take a deep breath. Great posture exudes confidence.

3. Limit the Thank-Yous
Only those being thanked tend to listen so if you begin with the thank-yous, you risk losing your audience before you capture them.

4. Write It Down
Spend time writing and editing your speech, and have it completed at least a few days in advance.

5. Rehearse and Repeat
Even if you use notes, repeat your speech so many times that they become a safety rather than a necessity.

6. Tell a Story
Look at the Presidential candidates. They are most engaging when they incorporate anecdotes about themselves or others. Do the same.

7. Make It Personal
To connect with your audience, throw a splash of yourself in there – if it’s relatable, it’s right.

Trainer's tip: Your presentation is ready – but is your voice? Christina Hession limbers up.

As a trainer your voice is an essential part of your equipment - so it's important to look after it.
You need to ensure that before a training session you warm up your voice so it doesn't get strained. This is especially important if you are delivering an all-day training session, or if you have a number of sessions very close together over a few days.

Through years of experience in amateur dramatics, I've developed six top tips to prepare your voice for speaking:

Drink more water: Being dehydrated will affect all the lubrication systems in your body. Drink eight glasses of water daily. Keep the dehydrating tea, coffee, alcohol and soft drinks to a minimum. If you have a dry throat while training, sip a small amount of water, hold it in your mouth for a second, and then swallow.
Rest and sleep: Sufficient rest and sleep are vital to keep the voice healthy. If the body is tired, it will not be able to support the voice effectively. Don't forget to rest your voice if you have been practising a lot, or you have a cold.
Relax: Avoid stress if possible as it contributes to vocal fatigue and strain. If you're feeling stressed try to find time to relax – even if just for a few minutes. Also try walking, swimming, tai chi or yoga.
Irritants: Irritants like smoke are best avoided. Cigarettes dry the throat and affect the mucous lining. Apart, from making you more prone to sore throats and coughs, smoke will impact negatively on your breath control. Fumes from varnish or paint can also affect the throat, so household tasks involving both, should be avoided (a good excuse to ask someone else to do them!)
Exercise: Regular exercise and keeping fit are also important. However if you are doing sit-ups or weight training in a gym, care is needed. It is easy to get tight around your throat area and strain your voice.
Warm up: All the muscles connected to voice production, and not just the vocal chords, need to be warmed up before going into action, just like the other muscles in the body. A five minute vocal workout (see below) should be sufficient.
The simple vocal workout:

September 9, 2012
NRCTC plans to offer public speaking course

New River Community and Technical College will offer a six-week public speaking course on Saturday mornings beginning Sept. 29. The class will meet from 9 a.m. until noon at New River’s Jefferson Office Park location in downtown Lewisburg.

This course is designed to give participants the tools and confidence needed to engage their audience and convey thoughts, ideas, information and instruction.

Upon completion, attendees will be able to address groups with confidence and conduct presentations to colleagues and clients, make positive and lasting impressions during interviews and interact with others in any situation.

The skills and experiences gained during the course will be invaluable to students, teachers, public safety/service employees, supervisors and managers, job applicants and anyone wanting to gain confidence and bearing in a public setting.

Instructor Helen Ann Barlow has more than 40 years of experience in public school and university settings as a teacher of theater/drama, stage production, advanced-placement English and broadcasting/journalism.

She has also acted in and directed stage productions at the high school, college and community theater levels. She is a graduate of Edinburg University, in Pennsylvania.

Tuition is $150, and preregistration is required by Sept. 15.

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This article reviews the 2006 TED talk by Ken Robinson about whether our education system kills creativity. As I write this speech analysis, his talk is the most-viewed TED talk in history. Not surprisingly, it is rich with lessons for speakers.

Robinson’s talk demonstrates many lessons, including:

Reference shared experiences or beliefs
Signal key statements
Tell stories
Use humor
Use rhetorical questions
This is the latest in a series of speech critiques here on Six Minutes.

I encourage you to:

Watch the video;
Read the analysis in this speech critique; and
Share your thoughts on this presentation in the comment section.

Lesson 1: Reference Shared Experiences or Beliefs
Want to learn more?
This credibility-boosting technique is #6 in the 15 ways to establish ethos.
Anchoring your speech content around experiences or beliefs that you share with your audience accomplishes two important tasks:

You make your speech more understandable as you transition between what your audience knows (the experience/belief they share with you) and what you want them to know (your message)
You boost your ethos (your credibility) because your audience feels similar to you. i.e. you’ve been through an experience together and have a shared past.
Ken Robinson does this throughout his speech. For example:

In the opening [0:33], Robinson references “three themes that have been running through the conference”. This is a reference to the TED conference at which he is presenting.
A few moments later, he references the four days of the conference with “despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days”
Later [at 13:15], “as we heard yesterday”
Then [17:45], “Al Gore spoke the other night” (incidently, he is referring to another speech previously critiqued on Six Minutes)
In the concluding words [18:35], “What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination”
With these examples, Robinson tightly binds the shared experience of the conference to his main points. There are many more too. See the annotated transcript below, where these references are color-coded in yellow.

Lesson 2: Signal Key Statements....

http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/speech-critique-ken-robinson-ted-2006/#more-6996

A commenter steeped in theatre compares the podium performances from Ann Romney and Michelle Obama. ...

Now that Michelle Obama and Ann Romney have both made their case for why Americans should vote for their husbands, pundits are comparing the two on their messages, deliveries, even their wardrobes. But how would Obama and Romney's speeches fare as theatre? One of our commenters called on his background as a stage director to compare the performances.

Romney's performance left Fel Cruz uninspired. He writes:

When an actor is given a line reading, the performance rings hollow; the combination of body language and expression doesn't match the veracity of how a believable expression is delivered. Such was Ann Romney's speech at the RNC last week; it was a very long line read. It didn't feel like she was fully committed to the words ... She may very well have believed the content of her speech, but whoever coached her obfuscated any real sincerity and the total effect was disingenuous.
But Cruz thinks Obama nailed her part:

Body language, eye movements, and delivery all combined to make the speech sincere - or appear to be sincere. Either she's a very good actor with a knowledge of acting that allows her to subtly create the illusion of genuineness or she actually believed the content of her speech. Either way it was more effective in connecting to her audience.

Following his first post on giving the learners a ‘pragmatic shock’, Arizio Sweeting returns with more voice-based activities to get your students speaking in English.

In this second voiced-based post, I would like to share with you two activities to help learners become more aware of the power of their voice.

I have called these activities: Intonation Gap and Voiceover, respectively.

The first activity, Intonation Gap, aims to encourage learners to notice what their voice sounds like when expressing emotions such as fear, shock, excitement, and so on in their speech.

The activity works like this:

Divide the class into two groups: A and B.
First, give the learners some nonsense sounds on the board e.g. piupiu, etc.
Tell the learners that they are going to ask a question using the nonsense sounds.
The questions must be short, preferably one-word questions e.g. piupiu? Demo what to do.
On the board, write up some adjectives such as afraid, surprised, angry, pleased, excited, questioning, etc.
Using the nonsense sounds, learners practise asking questions expressing the emotions on the adjectives on the board. If you have small mirror, give these to the learners so they can see the facial expressions or mouth articulations. The same procedure is repeated for answers.
Give each learner the name of a suburb. Alternatively, you could use shop names, street names etc.
Tell the learners to mingle and ask each other questions to find someone with the same information, trying to communicate the emotions that would go with the adjectives on the board. This time, they should use real words e.g. Marble Arch? And short answers such as Yes and No.
Learners should respond in the same way, paying close attention to the emotion being expressed before giving an answer.

A study showed that fear of public speaking is actually greater than the fear death. How that is possible is quite astounding. But it is true. People are terrified of public speaking. It should not be such a fearful plight. Here are some tips to walk you through what should be an easy process of speaking to an audience.

PHOTO COURTESY/THINKSTOCK
Public speaking can be daunting. Some tips can help calm fears and increase effectiveness.
Research your topic. Even if you consider yourself an authority on a given topic, the Internet is filled with information as well as misinformation. Try to fact-check what you've read to be sure that there is more than one source which concurs with the information.

Stay focused. It is always good to employ the use of stories, sidebars or metaphors. However, be sure that each aligns with your topic and does not confuse or refer to other topics which may distract an audience in their attempt to follow your line of thought.

Use a strong opening and closing. No matter how eloquent or well-researched your topic may be, the audience will only retain seven percent of what you say. Because of this, you want the audience to "walk away" with one or two main points. Make those points both in your opening and your closing.

Just as I am writing this I have come out of a session with a 40-year-old professional designer, who has been very successful but did not see themselves as any good at what they did for a living. Their self-image was poor and they kept waiting for people to wake up and realise they are not good as a designer, even though the evidence of getting paid for many years said they were good.

Do you know what your self-image is like?

I am going to mention something I tell people about confidence. Confidence is comprised of two words. The first word is ‘con’, meaning ‘with’ from the Latin and the second word is ‘fidence’, meaning ‘faith’ from the Latin. Together they mean ‘going forward with faith’.

How do you see yourself?
How do you hear yourself?
How do you feel about yourself?

These are not questions we normally we ask of ourselves. But they are the fundamentals of your self-image. They are what determine your level of confidence when you are engaged in public speaking or making a presentation.

Which southeast Queenslan celebrity do you reckon is the opening speaker at the Zoo and Aquarium Association conference starting today on the Gold Coast? She has achieved greatness on her own.

The Way To Conquer Your Fear Of Public Speaking.
2012-08-24
Fear of public speaking is a form of anxiety that we all can feel especially when it is our first time to speak in front of a crowd. Actually, even individuals who are used in speaking in front of aud...
Learning To Use Public Speaking Quotes Effectively.
2012-08-24
Public speaking quotes can be very useful when you want to inspire people with quotes from the greatest of men. However, dont try to insert so many quotes in your speech because your message can becom...
Best Tips On Public Speaking.
2012-08-24
Tips on public speaking can make you feel more powerful as you will learn how to overcome your shyness when making speech in front of an audience. Actually, feeling the nerves is not extraordinary eve...
Learning The Ways On Effective Public Speaking.
2012-08-24
Effective public speaking can be learned by anyone who has the goals of improving his skills in public speaking and develop his self-confidence. There could be lots of training involve in learning the...
How The Inspirational Speakers Can Enchant You With Their Words.
2012-08-21
Inspirational speakers even in the past have certain qualities that can persuade people to be good in what they do. They are very adept in everything they say and they always sound natural even in fro...

Read, write, listen and speak and you will get there.

Dimitar Berbatov, the handsome Bulgarian football player now with Manchester United (though maybe not for much longer), worked on improving his English by watching the Godfather films again and again, especially Godfather III.

This featured Andy Garcia, to whom Berbatov bears an uncanny resemblance. I won’t really recommend that method to all Malaysians, for fear you might give the wrong impression here! From time to time, I get letters from readers asking for ways to improve their English. Sometimes they want to improve it in general, but sometimes a reader like Mohd Sharafudin specifies certain aspects of his English that need improvement, like writing and speaking.

We are told that there are four skills to be developed in the teaching of a language: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking.

Malaysians who started school in and after 1970 learnt English for 11 years up to Form Five. But a lot of them still find the need to improve their understanding and command of the language after leaving school.

Let me try and suggest certain ways in which they can do that.

Are you are a manager or leader of an intercultural team? Or do you work within an intercultural company? If so, are you experiencing intercultural communication problems? Take a look at the photo — is that how you try to solve your intercultural communication problems?

Accustomed as we are, in the West at least, to cause and effect thinking, we are convinced that surely there must be a formula somewhere that we haven’t found yet. However, the flaw in this logic is that this is the wrong way to look at such problems. Intercultural communication problems are not a puzzle to be solved. That is why I prefer to use the metaphor of a dance when discussing these, this is closer to what happens when we communicate.

In a dance, such as a tango or waltz, everyone knows the basic steps. Then the dance changes slightly, according to who we dance with. This forces both partners to adapt. We prefer some partners to others. And we dance better with some people and worse with others. We also enjoy ourselves more with particular partners. There is always someone who leads and someone who follows; both roles are important and it is clear which is which in an actual dance.

Public Speaking is taught as part of Professional Development in college to prepare students for real life events that call for presentation of views or knowledge.