How to give a good speech

Before you begin, what is it that you really want to say?

- Tim Harford

There are many ways to give a terrible speech. The chief executive who pulls out a sheaf of densely written text and robotically reads it aloud. The management consultant whose every word competes with a jargon-filled tangle of meaningless diagrams and bullet points. The best man who manages to embarrass the bride and outrage her mother with his scurrilous tales.

The strange thing is that we all know this. We've all sat in audiences watching speakers commit these familiar crimes against rhetoric. We all know that there are much better ways to give a talk. So why do we keep doing it so badly?

The answer is we're afraid. Jerry Seinfeld joked that people would rather be in the casket at a funeral than giving the eulogy, and while it's a myth that people are more afraid of public speaking than they are of death, fear of public speaking is very common.

It's this ubiquitous anxiety about speaking in public that - ironically - leads so many people to speak so badly. The chief executive is worried that an ad-libbed line will end his career. The management consultant is afraid of losing the thread or running out of things to say. The best man is terrified that people won't laugh at his jokes. The unspoken question that frames the speech preparation isn't "what do I want to say?" but "how do I get out of this in one piece?"

Being asked to give a 20-minute speech is viewed by many people as an ordeal to be survived, and the central task is to safely fill 20 minutes with words, neither running out of material nor forgetting your lines.