Tips for Improving Your Public Speaking Skills (Part 1)

Public speaking has become an essential life skill in the contemporary world. This article series would be based on the ways in which we could develop public speaking skills. In this article, we look at the history of public speaking and the famous public speakers throughout the history.

What is public speaking?

Public speaking can be defined as the process of presenting a speech to a live audience. In other words, it is a formal or an informal attempt of speaking of a single person to a group of listeners. There are many uses of public speaking.

- Transmitting information

- Motivating people

- Telling a story and so on.

Public speaking includes several elements.

- Audience

- Communicator

- Medium

- Message

Public speaking has a long history which goes back to ancient Greece. Public speaking was developed in ancient Greece and Rome. Rhetoric was the main constituent of work of art and speech delivery. The most important thing is citizens spoke on their own behalf (because there were no lawyers for the typical Athenians) instead of having experts to speak for them (lawyers in contemporary society). Most of the people debated the issues on economics, politics and war. Therefore, they had to learn the techniques of public speaking in order to be successful in courts and social life.

Sophists were the Rhetoric teachers who taught the Rhetoric techniques.  A sophist was a special type of teacher. They were specialized in both philosophy and rhetoric. However, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle have developed their own techniques of public speaking. Especially, these rhetoric principles were taught by Plato and Aristotle in the schools that they founded (The Academy and The Lyceum). Aristotle regarded rhetoric as the way of influence of any subject. According to Aristotle, to bring together the citizens into agreement, one needed to convince people. For him, this is ‘rhetoric’. As it has mentioned by him, there are three strategies/ pillars of public speaking and persuasion. They are,

Ethos – When the speaker can show authority over the subject matter

Logos – When there are facts to support the argument, so that the audience can use logic and deduction to decide the speaker’s argument.

Pathos – Emotionally convince people to get the acceptance

Roman orators modified the teachings of the Greek thinkers. Cicero was the influential person who systematized Latin rhetoric methods. Cicero explained that there are five canons of rhetoric. They can be listed as follows.

- Inventions- turn up with a material for a text (Ex: A political candidate comes up with particular points that she needs to highlight or to bring up in a debate)

-Arrangement- How to arrange the material in the text (A political candidate makes a decision on process of the speech)

- Style- Draft the speech

- Memory- Committing a text to memory (follow up rehearsals)

- Delivery- Presenting the speech to the audience

There are famous public speakers throughout the history.

- Socrates

- Winston Churchill – when Second World War started, his speeches motivated the British to ‘never surrender’ (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953)

- John F.Kennedy

- Margret Thatcher

- Martin Luther King Jr.

- Leon Trotsky

- Abraham Lincoln

- Mahathma Gandhi

- Hitler – He took the advantage of his oratory skills and used it as a weapon for war

Effective communication is required to be successful. We are required to speak in public in many situations and places: at a meeting, at an election campaign, at schools, at conferences etc. Everyone has the capacity to become a good public speaker. For this, he needs some kind of skill. He should have the power to stress and repeat with the energy of voice and intonation in order to prove his arguments in the minds of the listeners. He should have the capacity to emotionally drive the audience towards a directed goal. They should have a sound reasoning ability which encourages the public to accept the spoken truth.

References

https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/what-is-public-speaking--cms-31255

https://www.edx.org/course/public-speaking