Professional Speaker: January 2008 Archives

I'm pleased to introduce Peggy Jordan, who is a new contributing writer at HomeBusinessWiz.com. Peggy has her own home-based business called Working Words, where she offers writing, editing, and marketing consulting services.

As a professional content writer and writing coach, I continually remind myself and my clients to “write like you talk,” meaning: make it genuine and conversational. The classic test of whether a written piece works is to read it out loud and see how it sounds, running it past your ears as well as your eyes.

As a rookie Toastmaster, I’m fast talker who tries to squeeze a lot of material into those 5- to 7-minute speaking slots. I have to work hard on pacing myself, speaking slowly, remembering to breathe, and sticking to my script rather than rambling on and on. And it recently occurred to me that just as “writing like you talk” can bring life to the written word, my fledgling speeches would be much improved if I applied the same techniques to speaking that I use in writing.

White space is important for speeches, as well as documents

Writers make their documents easier to read and understand through the judicious use of what’s known as “white space,” the blank parts of a printed page or Website page. White space between blocks of text rests the eye, gives the reader a chance to assimilate what’s come so far, and alerts them that a new topic or idea is coming up. Think of it as breathing room.

In public speaking, the verbal equivalent of white space is silence. So for this speech, instead of just trying to remember to add pauses, I designed them into the script.

How I did it

After whittling down the first draft into something workable, I formatted it just as I would if it were brochure copy or an article. I gave it a headline and subheadings in bold, contrasting fonts. The opening was its own paragraph; then came white space. My three main points followed in a bulleted list, followed again by several blank lines. Then, each bullet point became a subhead for the information supporting it. After a nice restful helping of more white space, I added the conclusion, again surrounded by its own restful, serene moat of space.

Just looking at it made me relax. Instead of my usual scribbled notes in tiny handwriting all squeezed tightly onto one or two index cards—I had what looked less like a lecture and more like poetry.

Pauses help keep a listener from getting overwhelemed

To practice, at first I read the speech from the page, timing my pauses according to the amount of white space as it came up. Once I had it down somewhat, I moved the page to the floor so that I couldn’t actually read the words but I could still follow the design for cues about where to pause. Amazingly, the same pauses that would help keep a listener from getting overwhelmed or lost were keeping me from getting overwhelmed or lost.

When I delivered the speech, I pictured the clean, spacious clarity of that page in my mind’s eye. I was silent for the white space, emphatic with the headlines (as if I were speaking in bold font), and used body language to convey the indentations and margins.

The best part? I never ran out of breath. Thanks to the white space in my “picture” of the speech, both speaker and audience had room to breathe and time to understand. And thanks to Toastmasters, this writer took another step toward becoming a better speaker.