You Are The Speechwriter

In the interest of efficiency, a lot of presenters tend to head straight to PowerPoint when it’s time to develop a presentation. The result is often a process that falls somewhat short of “efficiency”. Visuals, though critical to a presentation, are aids and enhancements rather than cornerstones, and it’s tough to start here and work your way backward toward a meaningful presentation.

One of the best ways to start on a presentation is to assign yourself the job of head speechwriter. The point is not to end up with a scripted, memorized presentation, but instead to put yourself through the mental process of organizing your message, seaming your points, and developing strong introductions and conclusions. If you write a great speech, you’ll have a tremendous amount of clarity when you turn to PowerPoint to create the supporting deck.

The other great thing about working this way is that you’ll tend to arrive at an appropriate length for your presentation since you’re working through your key points and all the supporting arguments as you write the speech. When you’re just putting together slides, you’re not really organizing your thoughts around each visual; it’s usually left up to spur-of-the-moment thoughts and elaborations on the slide subject. Presenting this way is the equivalent of stream of consciousness in literature, and just like Ulysses, you’ll usually end up delivering an extremely long presentation. We don’t mean to suggest that Joyce should have cut his opus in half, but we do mean to suggest that you probably should.

Finally, starting out by writing the presentation as a speech allows for a more honest review process that’s easy for others to take part in. When you share a drafted speech, the only thing people are reacting to is the core message: are these the things we as a team or business unit or company are wanting to communicate? When you share a presentation deck, perhaps even through a demo delivery, they have to react to the content, the aesthetics and the delivery all at one time. It’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater this way, so get everyone’s assent to the speech first! Then, as you progress through the other stages, you’ll know their feedback is specific to individual variables.

When we think of the word speech, we often think of politicians and formal addresses. But really, a speech is just persuasive monologue, and that’s exactly what presenters are trying to deliver with the help of visual aids. So take a stab at speechwriting the next time you need to present, and see if it doesn’t lend the entire process a degree of clarity and organization that you haven’t experienced before.

Question: When was the last time you truly organized your thoughts with a full length draft of the content you want to cover?





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