the art of public speaking by Stephen Lucas

the art of public speaking by Stephen

Art of Public Speaking 11e by Stephen Lucas continues to define the art of being the best by helping today’s students become capable, responsible speakers and thinkers. With a strong focus on the practical skills of public speaking and grounded in classical and contemporary theories of rhetoric, The Art of Public Speaking by Stephen Lucas offers full coverage of all major aspects of speech preparation and presentation. Utilizing the full suite of resources, students learn to internalize the principles of public speaking, build confidence through speech practice, and prepare for success in the classroom and beyond. With the new Enhanced Speech Capture in Connect Lucas, instructors now have the ability to evaluate live speeches using a customizable rubric in the classroom. Instructors may also upload speech videos on students' behalf to create and manage true peer review assignments. With its ground-breaking adaptive learning system, Connect Lucas also helps students “know what they know,” while guiding them to experience and learn important concepts that they need to know to succeed.

Here we are going to cover all the remaining topics from the book the art of public speaking by Stephen Lucas.

1. Outlining the Speech-: Outlines are essential to effective speeches. By outlining, you make sure that related ideas are together, that your thoughts flow from one to another, and that the structure of your speech is coherent. You will probably use two kinds of outlines or your speeches—the detailed preparation outline and the brief speaking outline. In the preparation outline, you state your specific purpose and central idea; label the introduction, body, and conclusion; and designate transitions, internal summaries, and internal previews. You should identify the main points, subpoints, and sub-sub points by a consistent pattern of symbolization and indentation. Your teacher may require a bibliography with your preparation outline. The speaking outline should contain keywords or phrases to jog your memory, as well as essential statistics and quotations. Make sure your speaking outline is legible, follows the same visual framework as your preparation outline, and includes cues for delivering the speech.
   
2. Using Language-: Good speakers have respect for language and how it works. As a speaker, you should be aware of the meanings of words and know how to use language accurately, clearly, vividly, and appropriately. Words have two kinds of meanings—denotative and connotative. Denotative meaning is precise, literal, and objective. Connotative meaning is more variable, figurative, and subjective. It includes all the feelings, associations, and emotions that word touches off in different people. Using language accurately is vital to a speaker. Never use a word unless you are sure of its meaning. If you are not sure, look up the word in a dictionary. As you prepare your speeches, ask yourself constantly, “What do I really want to say? What do I really mean?” Choose words that are precise and accurate. Using language clearly allows listeners to grasp your meaning immediately. You can ensure this by using words that are known to the average person and require no specialized background, by choosing concrete words in preference to more abstract ones, and by eliminating verbal clutter. Using language vividly helps bring your speech to life. One way to make your language more vivid is through imagery, which you can develop by using concrete language, simile, and metaphor. Another way to make your speeches vivid is by exploiting the rhythm of language with parallelism, repetition, alliteration, and antithesis. Using language appropriately means adapting to the particular occasion, audience, and the topic at hand. It also means developing your own language style instead of trying to copy someone else’s. The subject of inclusive language can be complex, but a number of inclusive usages have become so widely accepted that no aspiring speaker can afford to ignore them. They include avoiding the generic “he,” dropping the use of “man” when referring to both men and women, refraining from stereotyping jobs and social roles by gender, and using names that groups use to identify themselves.
   
3. Delivery-: Speech delivery is a matter of nonverbal communication. It is based on how you use your voice and body to convey the message expressed by your words. Rather than calling attention to itself, effective delivery conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly, engagingly, and without distracting the audience. There are four basic methods of delivering a speech: reading verbatim from a manuscript, reciting a memorized text, speaking impromptu, and speaking extemporaneously. When speaking extemporaneously, you will have a brief set of notes or a speaking outline and will choose the exact wording of your speech at the moment of delivery. To use your voice effectively you should work on controlling your volume, pitch, rate, pauses, vocal variety, pronunciation, articulation, and dialect. Volume is the relative loudness of your voice and pitch is the relative highness or lowness. RaThe refers to the speed at which you talk. Pauses, when carefully timed, can add punch to your speech, but you should avoid vocalized pauses (“er,” “um,” and the like). Vocal variety refers to changes in volume, pitch, rate, and pauses, and is crucial to making your voice lively and animated. You also need correct pronunciation and distinct articulation. Avoid heavy use of dialect in situations where the audience does not share the dialect or will find it inappropriate. Posture, personal appearance, facial expression, gestures, and eye contact also affect the way listeners respond to speakers. Dress and groom appropriately, use gestures and bodily movement to enhance your message and make eye contact with your listeners. You should practice all these aspects of delivery along with the words of your speech. Start your practice sessions early so you will have plenty of time to gain command of the speech and its presentation. If your speech includes a question-and-answer session, anticipate the most likely questions, prepare answers to them and practice delivering those answers. During the question-and-answer period, listen carefully to the questions, approach them positively, and respond to them briefly, graciously, and straightforwardly. Direct your answers to the full audience, rather than to the questioner alone, and make sure to end the session in a timely fashion.
   
4. Using Visual Aids-: There are many kinds of visual aids. Most obvious is the object about which you are speaking, r a model of it. Diagrams, sketches, and other kinds of drawings are valuable because you can design them to illustrate your points exactly. Photographs should is large enough to be seen clearly by all your listeners. Graphs are an excellent way to illustrate any subject dealing with numbers, while charts are used to summarize large blocks of information. Video can be useful as a visual aid, but it needs to be carefully edited and integrated into the speech. You can act as your own visual aid by performing actions that demonstrate processes or ideas. If you use PowerPoint, plan carefully why, how, and when you will PowerPoint rather than putting everything you say on screen for your audience to read, use PowerPointnly when it will genuinely enhance your message. No matter what kind of visual aid you use, you need to prepare it carefully. You will be most successful if you prepare your aids well in advance, keep them simple, make sure they are large enough to be seen clearly and use a limited amount of text. If you are creating visual aids on a computer, use fonts, color, and images strategically and effectively. In addition to being designed with care, visual aids need to be presented skillfully. Avoid passing visual aids among the audience. Display each aid only while you are talking about it, and be sure to place it where everyone can see it without straining. When presenting a visual aid, maintain eye contact with your listeners and explain the aid clearly and concisely. If you are using PowerPoint, make sure you check the room and equipment prior to the time of delivery. Above all, practice with your visual aids so they fit into your speech smoothly and expertly.
   
5. Speaking to Inform-: Speaking to inform occurs in a wide range of everyday situations. Improving your ability to convey knowledge effectively will be valuable to you throughout your life. Informative speeches may be grouped into four categories—speeches about objects, speeches about processes, speeches about events, and speeches about concepts. Objects include places, structures, animals, even people. Speeches about objects usually are organized in chronological, spatial, or topical order. A process is a series of factions that work together to produce a final result. Speeches about processes explain how something is made, how something is done, or how something works. The most common types of organizations for speeches about processes are chronological and topical. An event is anything that happens or is regarded as happening. Speeches about events are usually arranged in chronological or topical order. Concepts include beliefs, theories, ideas, and principles. Speeches about concepts are often more complex than other kinds of informative speeches, and they typically follow a topical patted organization. No matter what the subject of your informative speech, be careful not to overestimate what your audience knows about it. Explain everything so thoroughly that they can’t help but understand. Avoid being too technical. Make sure your ideas and your language carefully comprehensible to someone who has no special knowledge about the topic. Equally important, recognize that what is fascinating to you may not be fascinating to everybody. It is your job to make your informative speech interesting and meaningful to your audience. Find ways to talk about the topic in terms of your listeners. Avoid too many abstractions. Use description, comparison, and contrast to make your authe audience see what you are talking about. Try to personalize your ideas and dramatize them in human terms. Finally, be creative in thinking of ways to communicate your ideas.
   
6. Speaking to Persuade-: Persuasion is the process of creating, reinforcing, or changing people’s beliefs or actions. When you speak to persuade, you act as an advocate. The ability to speak persuasively will benefit you in every part of your life, from personal relations to community activities to career aspirations. How successful you are in any persuasive speech depends on how well you tailor your message to your listeners’ values, attitudes, and beliefs. You should think of your speech as a mental dialogue with your audience. Identify your target audience, anticipate objections they may raise to your point of view, and answer those objections in your speech. Persuasive speeches may center on questions of fact, value, or policy. When giving a persuasive speech about a question of fact, your role is akin to that of a lawyer in a courtroom trial. You will try to get your listeners to accept your view of the facts. Questions of value involve a person’s beliefs about what is right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. When speaking about a question of value, you must justify your opinion by establishing standards for your value judgment. Speeches on Questions of value do not argue directly for or against particular courses of action. Once you go beyond arguing right or wrong to urging that something should or should not be done, you move to a question of policy. When you speak on a question of policy, your goal may be to evoke passive agreement or to spark immediate action. In either case, you will face three basic issues—need, plan, and practicality. How much of your speech you devote to each issue will depend on your topic and your audience. There are several options for organizing speeches on questions of policy. If you advocate a change in policy, your main points will often fall naturally into problem solution order or into problem-cause-solution order. If your audience already agrees that a problem exists, you may be able to use comparative advantage order. Whenever you seek immediate action from listeners, you should consider a more specialized organizational pattern is known as Monroe’s motivated sequence. Regardless of your topic or method of organization, you need to make sure your goals are ethically sound and that you use ethical methods to persuade your audience.
   
   
   
7. Methods of Persuasion-: Listeners accept a speaker’s ideas for one or more of four reasons—because they perceive the speaker as having high credibility because they are won over by the speaker's evidence because they are convinced by the speaker’s reasoning, or because they are moved by the speaker’s emotional appeals. Credibility is affected by many factors, but the two most important are competence and character. The more favorably listeners view a speaker’s competence and character, the more likely they are to accept her or his ideas. Although credibility is partly a matter of reputation, you can enhance your credibility during a speech by establishing common ground with your listeners, by letting them know why you are qualified to speak on the topic, and by presenting your ideas fluently and expressively. If you hope to be persuasive, you must also support your views with evidence examples, statistics, and testimony. Regardless of what kind of evidence you use, it ill be more persuasive if it is new to the audience, stated in specific rather than general terms, and from credible sources. Your evidence will also be more persuasive if you state explicitly the point it is supposed to prove. No matter how strong your evidence, you will not be persuasive unless listeners agree with your reasoning. In reasoning from specific instances, you move from a number of particular facts to a general conclusion. Reasoning from principle is the reverse—you move from a general principle to a particular conclusion. When you use causal reasoning, you try to establish a relationship between causes and effects. In analogical reasoning, you compare two cases and infer that what is true for one is also true for the other. Whatever kind of reasoning you use, avoid fallacies such as hasty generalization, false cause, invalid analogy, appeal to tradition and appeal to novelty. You should also be on guard against the red herring, slippery slope, bandwagon, ad hominem, and either-or fallacies. Finally, you can persuade your listeners by appealing to their emotions. One way to generate emotional appeal is by using emotion-laden language. Another is to develop vivid, richly textured examples. Neither, however, will be effective unless you feel the emotion yourself and communicate it by speaking with sincerity and conviction. As with other methods of persuasion, your use of emotional appeal should be guided by a firm ethical rudder. Although emotional appeals are usually inappropriate in speeches on questions of fact, they are legitimate—and often necessary—in speeches that seek immediate action on questions of policy. Even when trying to move listeners to action, however, you should never substitute emotional appeals for evidence and reasoning.
   
8. Speaking on Special Occasions-: In this chapter, we have considered speeches of introduction, speeches of presentation, speeches of acceptance, and commemorative speeches. Your job in a speech of introduction is to build enthusiasm for the main speaker and establish a welcoming climate. Keep your remarks brief, make sure they are accurate and adapt them to the audience, the occasion, and the main speaker. Speeches of presentations are given when someone receives a gift or an award. The main theme of such a speech is to acknowledge the achievements of the recipient. The purpose of an acceptance speech is to give thanks for a gift or an award. When delivering such a speech, you should thank the people who are bestowing the award and recognize the contributions of people who helped you gain it. Be brief, humble, and gracious. Commemorative speeches are speeches of praise or celebration. Your aim in such a speech is to pay tribute to a person, a group of people, an institution, or an idea. A commemorative speech should inspire the audience, and its success will depend largely on how well you put into language the thoughts and feelings appropriate to the occasion.
   
9. Speaking in Small Groups-: A small group consists of three to twelve people assembled for a specific purpose. A problem-solving small Group is formed to solve a particular problem. When such a group has effective leadership, it usually makes better decisions than do individuals by themselves. Most groups have a designated leader, an implied leader, or an emergent leader. Some groups have no specific leader, in which case all members of the group must assume leadership responsibilities. An effective leader helps a group reach its goals by fulfilling procedural needs, task needs, and maintenance needs. Apart from leadership, all members of a group have five basic responsibilities. You should commit yourself to the goals of your group, fulfill your individual assignments, avoid interpersonal conflict within the group, encourage full participation by all members, and help keep the group on track.
   

Overall, this is a great book to help learn about public speaking and the various elements involved. It is easy to read, visually interesting, highly informative, and Lucas takes it beyond the page by also offering a website that continues to build on this information. Worksheets, tutorials, study guides, tips, examples of good speeches, and more are all available online. I didn't find another text I liked better that was more complete or easy to read than this one.
This was the second part of the summary of the art of public speaking by Stephen Lucas.
Keep practicing these techniques and add more of your own unique style and approach and public speaking won’t be as terrifying. If you like this article❤ then share it😇 with others also.