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If you're not accustomed to public speaking or you need to help someone, improve his or her speaking efforts, these observations and suggestions might help:
• Most people should speak a bit louder than normal and use larger gestures than they feel originally comfortable with, according to Ted Fuller of Communispond.
• Invest quite a bit of time in analyzing the audience. Be sure to tell that audience something it doesn't know.
• Avoid reading a speech with eyes glued to the lectern. If you want to read to people, just remember your parents read to you to put you to sleep. Work from an outline and trust yourself.
• Communications consultant Brent Filson suggests that speakers move away from the lectern. Establishing rapport with the audience is vital.
• Spend five or six seconds looking at each person in the audience. Shorter times can make you look like a "scared rabbit."
• Pause instead of inflicting "ums" and "ahs" on the audience.
-Karen Padley, writing in Investor's Business Daily from Communications Briefings Vol. XVIII, No. IV
