I attended the Division B speech contest held at Sunday as an audience. It was great opportunity to observe those good speakers and I'd like to summarize my learnings here -

 

1. The use of Ah - Never have it if possible. My past observation is that native english speakers seldom have ah in their speeches while many native chinese speakers tend to have a lot of ah's even when they are speaking in Chinese. It's wierd, right? Ah's generally indicate we are not ready for what to say next. My conclusion is that english is lengthy while chinese is concise. In the same time duration,  using chinese can deliver more information than using english. Chinese speakers speak faster than they think while english speakers think faster than they speak. They should be thinking in the same speed. So the tip to avoid ah is to slow down our pace a little.

 

2. Language - Language is a tool for communication. Many people think it's ok as long as we can convey our message. It may be true for one to one conversations. I doubt it when coming to speeches, which is generally one to many. Both grammar errors and influency reduce our credibility and make us ineffective in front of a big audience. So improve our language first if we want to do public speech.

 

3. Good structure - Have an opening and a strong conclusion no matter what we are talking about. It just makes our speech more convincing whatever we are saying in the body part. No more to say as i have talked this a little bit i a former educational speech.

 

4. Humor - We cannot win best table topic without laughter from the audience. Humor is necessary in the delivery of any speeches unless improper. Fun points in a speech keep the audience concentrating on our speech and help them to undertsand our purpose.

 

5. Gorgeous words and sentences - Nontrivial words, triads and parallelism make our speeches splendid. They are not necessary for communication but to show, win and make us unique. The best table topic speaker used "rainbow" to describe the color of Beijing and then got the first place. It's definitely more unique than saying Beijing is multi-colored. I once used 3 forms of the same word - performance, perform and performer and it seemed many people like that. So as triads and parallelism. These gorgeous words and sentence can change our speeches from average to above average.

 

Just my personal opinions about delivering table topics. These techniques can also be used in prepared speeches. Practice can help us to make these techniques become our instincts.

 

Generally speaking, public speaking is also a kind of performance and some kind of exaggeration is necessary. :)