During the delivery of a public speech, voice, gestures and movements play a crucial role into making the performance lively, meaningful and entertaining. Let us start with the voice, our main communication tool. What can we do with our voice? We can break or make the success of our speech. The voice can add spice to what we say, raise interest or on the opposite get people bored. It can highlight like a marker something important or skate over what you “have to say” but don’t’ really want people to pay attention to. We do all this via a number of devices and we shall see now the most important ones. First of all, we can use volume: we can “broadcast”, for example, stating loud and clear our point. Don’t underestimate the power of broadcasting. It makes you sound assertive and self-confident and people get immediately in the state of mind that you are actually saying something fundamental, indisputable, incontrovertible. Something that one may hardly object to. You may want to try yourself and see the effect it makes: instead of sounding doubtful, speak as if you the world’s destiny depended on what you say. You will see how people tend to listen in awe. You may have noticed this, when someone else was speaking this way. This is a simple but powerful strategy. Or we can use the trick of lowering the volume, so that people really need to focus their attention if they want to grasp your words. This will also add the flavor of something being said in confidence, that you are entrusting people with. Something like an important secret. Second device: register. We usually speak from the throat using the so-called “modal register”, the normal register let’s say. Quite seldom do we speak in falsetto, which I hardly recommend, though for sure it would startle people and maybe wake up a sleeping audience. What is more interesting is if you learn to speak deeply, from your chest. Surprising though it may seem, we “vote for politicians who have deep voices, because we associate depth with authority”, like Julian Treasure in a quite interesting TED-talk that I suggest to watch reminds us. That’s how far the power of a voice can go! Third, we have prosody, that is, the patterns of stress and intonation in a speech. Prosody contributes to convey a number of meanings including the emotional state of the speaker, the difference between a statement and a question, irony (“this is really good, you know?”), jokes, etc. The advice is to use prosody like a musical instrument, to play different patterns. Eventually, there is pace, the speed at which we talk. We may want to change pace, again as a way to keep people’s attention. Sometimes we can go fast, sometimes we may want to slow down, to add emphasis to what we say. Slowing down means “I really want you to pay attention to this”. We may also want to have a bit of silence here and there, as if leaving time to people to digest what we are saying. There is nothing wrong with silence in a speech. It’s like a change of paragraph in a page. Now we must talk about possible flaws in the use of voice. The public enemy number one are “crutch sounds”: all those sounds, like “mmm” or “aha” or “ill”, that we do unnecessarily and that are ways to play for time when we are looking for what to say next. Sometimes we even use words or short sentences, instead of just sounds: things like "like, you know…” or “basically, basically” or “you know what I mean?” or “and so on and so forth…”, etc. This kind of sayings are quite disturbing for the audience and they have to be eliminated. But how? Here is a simple exercise that you can all do. Take a timer and set it to 1 minute. Then start pronouncing words. Anything that occurs to your mind. You can take inspiration from what you see but not be restricted to it. Something like “studio, computer, projector, people, window, sun, air…” etc. Do not use sentences, which would require your brain to work on grammar, syntax and meaning. Just name things. What matters is that you don’t introduce crutch sounds. Stop when the timer beeps. You can make a first round to see how you perform and how much you tend to use crutch sounds. Then repeat the exercise at a pace that allows you to keep crutch sounds at bay. Through practice, you will be able to increase the pace and reach a reasonable fluency. Another exercise you can do is the “TV commentator” exercise, which consists into describing what you see, again without using crutch words, and progressively improving the pace. Something like: “Today I am here in a studio, recording a lesson for my course on communication. There are three people in front of me, one of them is wearing a blue shirt…” and so on. And remember: better a short silence than a crutch sound, always! The second issue we deal with is repetitive prosody patterns. A number of people, when speaking in public, tend to use repetitive prosody patterns, for example pronouncing every sentence as if it were a question? While in fact it is not? So what can we do to fight this? We can in fact practice? In a way that I am going to tell you? You can do this exercise, which will improve prosody as well as intonation (which is the specific ability of adding meaning to what you say). Take a text, whatever. Better if something descriptive like a recipe. Being Italian, I will take a yummy Italian recipe: lasagna. See what we can do with it. We can read the recipe as if it was something very sad: “Cook noodles according to package directions; drain. Meanwhile, in a Dutch oven, cook sausage, beef and onion over medium heat for 8-10 minutes or until meat is no longer pink, breaking up meat into crumbles. Add garlic; cook 1 minute. Drain.” Now you can read the same text as if it was super exciting: “Ehi, cook noodles according to package directions; drain!!!” What really matters is not being montone, which literally means “using one single tone". I remember a professor of mine, when I was at university. She used to speak like this: “In this slide, we see a temple… with six columns on the front… and 13 columns on each side… in Doric order…” Never, ever do like this. Your audience is bound to fall asleep. Let us talk now about gestures and movements. Generally speaking, using gestures is ok: much better than looking like the mummy of Tutankhamun. Of course, you do not have to exaggerate (as we Italians may tend to do…) but again, it is much better to move than to stand still. Gestures are the physical counterpart of the vocal strategies we have just seen. They help adding emphasis and can actually contribute to meaning-making and memory. Let us make an example. Let us imagine I am presenting two opposite views on an issue. I could make gestures that underline this opposition, something like this. On one side, some scholars think that A is correct. On the other, other scholars object that B is correct. My hands are reinforcing what my words are saying. We can do this also with movements as we will see in a minute. Our fingers can help follow a list, something that we deal with quite easily in books and documents but not in oral presentations. We can say: on this, I have 3 comments. My fingers are saying “three” just like my words are saying “three”. Please note that in an oral presentation, you would hardly go beyond a list of 3-4 items. Just like gestures, also movements can help underlying a meaning. You may want to move from one side of a room to another when you present two different points of view over the same topic: actors tend to do this quite cleverly. Another reason to move when you give an oral presentation is to keep people’s attention. An audience listening to a speech or a lesson is making an effort. Furthermore, they are in an unnatural situation. Their body is bound to stay still for a quite long time. We tend to overlook the fact that this is unnatural, but it is. Like Ken Robinson says: “We all have a body, don’t we?”. So if you move, from one side of the room to the other, or along the central aisle, at least you make people turn their eyes, turn their heads. It is not much, but still something! And better than keeping your gaze fixed on the same point (which in the end is quite hypnotic).
