13.1 The Best Speech I Heard in Florida

Academic conventions can be overwhelming, and the 1993 conference of the Speech Communication Association^[1] in Miami was no exception: thousands of attendees, and at any given moment, more than a dozen presentations on the latest in communication. Everyone at the convention was in the academic discipline of communication (I was a graduate student), and I’m willing to bet that most had taught public speaking.

At many of the presentations, however, I saw speakers who read their conference papers in a rapid monotone, not looking up from their paper, and overestimating how much they could get through in their allotted time (usually around ten minutes, to allow half a dozen presenters to squeeze into an hourlong panel). The authors wrote good papers, but some didn’t think much about the difference between a paper and a speech, and I’m not sure they would even think of their presentation as a speech.

After a few days, I took a break to go on an afternoon tour of the Everglades. Our tour guide was 19 years old, identified himself as a member of the Seminole tribe, and spoke passionately about the history and geography of the region. Three decades later, I still remember his presentation well, and look back on it as the best speech I heard all week — perhaps all year. The irony of a lay person doing a better job at public speaking than the scholars at the Speech Communication Association national conference has stayed with me ever since.

Granted, the tour guide had some advantages over the scholars. He was giving a speech he’d given many times before, and got to take breaks while we rode around in air boats and held baby alligators. The scholars, in contrast, had a tight time frame, were probably intimidated by their audience, and probably hadn’t presented their papers before. Of course, those conditions also apply to many wedding speeches — given only once, to a potentially intimidating audience, and if you go on too long, you’re keeping people from getting their wedding cake and dancing —but that doesn’t prevent grooms like this guy, Ben Carpenter, from crafting and delivering a brilliant speech that goes viral:

Even if you don’t spend a year learning Korean, or don’t want a speech of yours to be viewed 3.9 million times (as of this writing), learning how to write a good wedding speech will pay off. And even if you’re never a speaker in a wedding party, or a tour guide, it’s likely that other situations will arise that call on you to give a speech in front of a live audience: coaches give speeches at year-end banquets, employees give pitches to bosses or clients, students present projects to teachers and classmates, lawyers make opening statements, athletes give press conferences … and maybe, just maybe, you will one day go up to a podium to receive an award and say a few words. And if you count presentations given to remote audiences as speeches, that includes recording podcasts and putting together YouTube videos.

As I noted in Chapter 2, I discovered that Speech is a college major when someone recommended I take a public speaking course, which got me into an academic discipline I have never left. You may not be as eager as I was to take public speaking: it might be a requirement for another major, a course you’re postponing like a dentist appointment, or a class that produces more anxiety than any other. (The next chapter covers how reduce fear of public speaking). But there is a good reason so many college majors require you to take public speaking: because so many fields require public communication.

Public speaking also allows you to put all of the previous chapters (listed here in parentheses) to good use: a speech can be viewed as a situation in which your understanding of the listening process (4) can be used to craft an ethical message (3) that is adapted to an audience (5) to persuade them (6), using a combination of logic and emotion (7 and 8), drawing on your credibility (9), effective use of language (10), and stories (11), and conveyed through your voice and body (12) and media (19).

All of these chapters could also be put to good use communicating in contexts that you might not call “public speaking,” ranging from mass communication to one-on-one conversations with loved ones (see the Levels of Communication from Chapter 1). But public speaking is enough of its own entity that I’ll devote two chapters to it. This chapter is focused on creating and writing a speech; the next chapter is about delivering it.