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A Short Guide to Giving a Short SpeechBy David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine, andexecutive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association 

You’ve been assigned to give a short speech. You’ve spent months or weeks or days warding off your anxiety by telling yourself, “It’s just a short speech.”

Today you’re faced with actually writing the short speech, and you’re forced to confront what you really knew all along:

The real difculty in giving a speech has nothing to do with its length. If anything, giving a short speech leaves you more exposed than

giving a long one, in which you can meander from half— baked notion to somewhat relevant anecdote to mildly amusing statistic, therebylulling the audience into a trance that allows them to tell themselves, “This speaker sounds intelligent, and must have a strong point which

I’m apparently missing.”

A short speech offers you no such shelter.

Here’s how to give a good one.

1. Do not overreach. 

It is a short speech. It should be on a specic topic. If you’re giving a short speech about the history of the Chevrolet Corvair, for instance

do not be tempted by your own intellectual ambition, by the audience’s expectations or by any other force to expand the topic to 20 t

century transportation and its contribution to the decline of the family as the essential social unit.

Tell us about the Corvair. Tell us something we don’t know. And tell us why you care so much about it, and why we should too.

2. Write the speech in a sentence, and expand it from there. 

If you can’t summarize the point of your speech in one sentence, how do you expect listeners to do so with their loved ones and friends?

Your listeners will be asked, if you are lucky, “What was the speech about?” They will not answer, “The speech was about three things

the global economy, climate change and the situation in the Middle East.”

If your speech was about all that, your listener will confess to his questioner, “I honestly don’t remember what the speech was about. Buthe speaker was really  intelligent!”

If you have a message that you want to spread, that’s not what you’re going for. This is what you’re going for.

“What was the speech about?”

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“The speaker said if we don’t shift from fossil fuel to alternatives by 2030, we’re all dead.”

Get that line on the page rst - the sentence you want your listeners to use to explain your speech to their half— interested friends who

didn’t attend it - and begin to build your speech from there.

3. Show the audience why they needed to see you in person.

Seven hundred years ago, a speech was an efcient way to communicate: “Everybody gather round so I can tell you all at once.”

Then came the Gutenberg Press. And then newspapers. And then radio. And then TV. And then Internet, and now social media.

If you’re seriously going to ask people to stand there and be quiet - and stay off their phones—

to listen to one person talk even for ashort time, you’d better not leave them wondering why you didn’t just send them an email or put something up on YouTube. You’d bette

connect  with them, and you’d better use your physicality to do it.

This doesn’t require perfect elocution. Quite the opposite, actually.

It means you have to be deeply involved in the speech. Your voice should shake, your lips should quiver, your eyes should smile, you

hands should dance as you get across a message that means something to you— that, for as long as you’re delivering it and as far as

the audience is concerned, means everything  to you.

4. Give your audience something meaningful to share with one another.

The deepest and eternal reason people still gather to see and hear a speech when they could just look the speaker up on YouTube is

that they want to see each other . They want to watch the speaker and simultaneously watch other people like them watching the speaker

You know you’re fullling your social purpose as a speechmaker not when the audience gazes at you with apparent rapt attention. Peoplelearned to fake that in school before they were seven years old. No, you know your speech is making an impression when you see

members of the audience looking at one another in astonishment that says something like,

“Is this person as interesting [or funny or courageous or honest or righteous— or, yes it’s possible, stupid]— to you as to me?”

People go to speeches— and eagerly listen to wedding toasts and eulogies— because they want to feel bonded not only with a speakebut with one another. To some small extent, your speech should transform its audience into an intellectual or spiritual community with two

things in common: you, and your message.

5. Put your speech to this test: Could this speech have been delivered by any other person to any otheraudience at any other moment in history? 

If the answer is yes to more than one of these questions, the audience will sense that what they’re eating came from a can.

They’re attending your speech because it’s human spontaneity they want. The good news is, that’s really all  they want. And they want i

so badly that you they’re not demanding a new idea, or even a new perspective.

You don’t have to say something new, you just have to say something personally true.

Thus, there are only two steps to writing a short speech - or any speech at all.

1. What’s personally true for you?

2. Prove it.

If you can do that — as these givers of great short speeches did before you — you’ll have done something good. If you can’t — don’t give

the speech. (You’ll have done something good, too.)