Listen. I believe everything we dream
Can come to pass through our union
We can turn the world around
We can turn the earth’s revolution
We have the power
People have the power.

From “People Have the Power” by Patti Smith

Introduction to the Chapter: Why Is Public Speaking so Important?

You have probably heard communication referred to as a “soft skill.” The word “soft” often evokes weakness or something that is not very robust. But consider what people mean when they say a soccer player needs a “soft touch.” Here, “soft skill” means that amid chaos and pumping adrenaline, the athlete can manage complex maneuvering and footwork on the field. Soft, in this sense, is about finesse and being able to manage many variables at once. As a soft skill, communication is a game changer: the difference between being able to complete specific tasks (hard skills) and being able to manage the people and ideas that support those tasks. To be a good speaker, you must understand yourself, your audience, and the situation in which you are speaking. Further, you must find something to say that matters to you and your audience that helps address the situation. For instance, when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon, he famously said, “That’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind,” implying that the victory of making it to the moon rested on the technological work that humanity had put forth. Imagine, instead, if Armstrong had said, “That’s one small step for [a] man; a giant leap for Neil Armstrong.” Such a statement implies that what mattered most was the work that he, Neil Armstrong, was about to perform. It ignores the audience and the situation!

Skill-builder 1.1

In this book, you will learn a few hard skills needed to create a compelling speech: outlining, conducting research, and vocal articulation, for example. Significantly, though, you will learn about and develop the soft skills needed to move and lead an audience. Creating a great speech requires you to attune yourself to social and psychological forces affecting your audience, to recognize what will motivate your audience to act, and to engage in self-reflection to ensure that you can achieve your personal and professional goals.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, students will

1. imagine how speech will play a part in their everyday lives,
2. identify topics and subjects that are of interest to them,
3. explore the physiological aspects of speaking in front of an audience, and
4. recognize how speech performance is different than other forms of communication.

Learning Outcomes

After reading this chapter, students will be able to

1. create and deliver a short speech based on their interests,
2. explain how speech is different from other modes of communication,
3. articulate how using artificial intelligence (AI)–generated speech content will limit their ability to succeed, and
4. practice building their confidence as a speaker.

Key Terms

The following key terms will be introduced and used in this chapter.

• Critical thinking: Seeing a problem or situation from multiple angles in order to find appropriate responses.
• Speech performance: A mode of communication that involves persuasion, aesthetic presentation, and an audience with the ability to help create change.
• Subject: A broad area of knowledge or experience that is of interest to many people (e.g., “speech performance”).
• Topic: A narrow portion of a subject that can be addressed succinctly. “Soapbox speech” is a topic within the broader subject of “speech performance.”
• Chatbot: A computer program that uses language processing and artificial intelligence to provide information.

Section 1: I’m Going to Be a _______. Why Do I Need Public Speaking?

There are some jobs where speaking in front of an audience is part of the work: teachers, sales representatives, and broadcasters, for example, engage in speech performance as a routine part of their work. Others, though, might be wondering why a speech class is necessary. If you are going to be making widgets all day, and happy doing so, what is the point of learning to speak publicly? While the ability to stand and speak in front of a group of people without passing out is important (don’t worry, we’ll get to that shortly), developing the ability to speak publicly will give you the tools to head off conflict before it begins and help push you ahead in your career, will help you think critically so you can assess and manage a variety of problems when they arise, and will increase your capacity for empathy, an essential characteristic of many great leaders. Beyond developing the confidence to speak in front of an audience, below are three examples of how people have used public communication skills and knowledge to benefit themselves professionally.

Speech Performance and Conflict Resolution

Priya is a biologist who took a digital public speaking class in college. The class focused on speech theory and practice, much like this book does, and her projects involved creating edited video speeches and leaving feedback for her peers on their video speeches. In her own projects, she had to manage the time constraints of coming up with ideas, researching, drafting, recording, and editing. When responding to her peers, it was not enough to say something like, “Great job!” That would not help her peers. Instead, she had to think about what her peers were trying to accomplish, determine whether they accomplished it, and explain to her peers what they could do to better achieve their goals in the future. In other words, both her personal projects and her in-class participation required her to plan and think about communication beyond simple, straightforward tasks.

As a biologist, Priya works in a lab that researches autoimmune diseases, conditions where a person’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy parts of the body. Because there are many types of autoimmune conditions, her team works closely with a few other teams. One day, Priya got to her lab and asked her team leader if she could get some of the research reports from another team in the lab, the one working on Crohn’s disease. Her team leader scowled and said that the Crohn’s team was refusing to cooperate and would not share reports before the Crohn’s team had published their reports, which would slow down the progress of the other teams. Priya knew that the similarities between the diseases they were studying meant that sharing information could lead to faster and better outcomes for patients. To help address the problem, Priya spent the rest of the week gathering information to better understand the problem. She spent her lunch with colleagues on other teams and learned more about the dynamics of those teams and what they were working on. She learned that the Crohn’s team was close to completing work with an important set of data and that in the past, the Crohn’s team leader had information used without her permission, leading others to take credit for her work. With this information and a better understanding, Priya was able to explain the situation to her team leader and was eventually able to persuade both teams to share information.

Speech Performance and Critical Thinking

Jamie is a programmer at heart, yet he wound up becoming the vice president of a multinational cryptocurrency firm. While he loved programming and was very good at it, he knew he was not great. He met and worked with others in high school and college who were more adept at programming than he was. He knew he could continue to work and would likely become a great programmer, but what he loved about it was that it gave him the ability to create new things. He knew that he didn’t want to spend his career programming the ideas that others had. In college, he opted to minor in data science and major in management. As part of his major coursework, he took a course in public speaking. He earned a “C” on his first speech but couldn’t understand why—he had chosen a topic he loved (programming), had conducted research on the topic, and had performed well. His professor told him that for all his passion, the speech was for himself, not for his audience. He never considered why his audience would want or need to hear a speech about programming. Jamie recognized that if he wanted to reach an audience, he would have to find ways to make what he cared about into something the audience would care about. Jamie would have to engage in critical thinking, finding appropriate solutions by seeing a problem from multiple angles.

When Jamie’s friends graduated with their degrees in computer programming, most went to work as programmers for large multinational tech corporations. Jamie’s first job was at a regional merchant processing firm. Quickly, Jamie’s bosses recognized that he had an ability to solve problems—not just in programming, but with people too. Jamie’s team developed new software, which their team leader was having trouble convincing their clients to use. Jamie asked if he could put together their upcoming pitch to a small fast-food chain. Jamie knew the usefulness of the product, but instead of starting with the usefulness, he began his pitch by talking about his experience working in fast food when he was a teenager and about the problems he had to address back then. The business owners nodded as he “spoke their language.” He then explained how the product would help solve some of those problems. Rather than speaking from his company’s perspective, Jamie imagined what life would be like for his clients and helped them see how the product would benefit them. At his small firm, Jamie earned a few promotions before landing positions managing programming teams that many of his classmates had gone on to work for. While many of his classmates continued to address the problems they were assigned, Jamie worked to imagine problems from different angles and come up with new ways to solve those problems.

Speech Performance and Leadership

Maria had always been an introvert. When she got to college, she decided to take an Introduction to Performance class, hoping that it might help her come out of her shell. Within a few weeks, two things were clear to Maria and to everyone else in the class. First, Maria had no intention of ever performing after the class was over. She got better at managing her nerves but could not get comfortable performing and did not like the idea of pretending to be someone else. She was glad she learned this about herself. Second, if anyone else had difficulty performing a character, they would go to Maria for help. Early on, there was a section of the class dedicated to character analysis, where the class studied how emotions develop and how to express emotions. At the core of these analyses was empathy, the ability to feel what others are feeling, even if we are not going through the same experiences. Maria was great at empathy and could help others in the class figure out why their characters might act one way or another.

Maria graduated with a premed degree and went on to earn a medical doctorate in pediatric cardiology. As a pediatric cardiologist, she oversaw the care of children who were born with critical heart defects. A significant part of her work involved helping a child’s parents make the best medical choices for their children. Maria did not know what it was like to raise a child with a heart defect, but she continued to develop her skill in empathy. Parents and children felt like Maria really understood them and were happy to be in her care. Indeed, parents who had children with complex cases were often referred to Maria by other doctors, who then put her in touch with the most skilled pediatric surgeons and surgery teams. Her patient care and her connection to great surgeons led her practice to be a highly sought-after residency for new doctors and nurses. A system of care for these children had developed with Maria at the center, built on her ability and desire to empathize with those around her.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of empathy, a skill that impacts our ability to think critically and is a strong indicator of leadership potential. In his TED Talk on the subject, psychologist Jamil Zaki explains that when we attune ourselves to the emotional frequencies of others, we become better at managing complex social situations. Watch his talk and consider what it means to recognize that empathy is a skill and how that skill will be useful as you think about the audiences you will speak to.

Beyond a profession, speech performance is clearly relevant for all of us. Having the confidence to speak your mind in an engaging way and having the tools to connect with an audience through reason and emotion can positively impact our relationships. A casual conversation after class can turn into a great friendship if you recognize similarities and can convince the other person to spend some time getting to know each other. You may one day recognize that the lack of cell service in your home is a neighborhood-wide concern. With the tools of speaking, you can advocate on behalf of yourself and your neighbors for the city to work with cellular service providers to solve the problem. During an argument with your spouse, you will learn to have the foresight to imagine the world from their perspective and be able to identify some of the underlying concerns that have led to the argument. Communication skills may not solve all your problems, but being an adept communicator will help you confront many of the problems you face.

Skill-builder 1.2

Section 2: Everyone Has a Soapbox. What’s Yours?

In the nineteenth century, it was common for traveling speakers, be they politicians, storytellers, or peddlers, to travel with a small wooden box they could pull out when needed as a makeshift stage. From this “soapbox,” the speaker would hock their wares, perform, or otherwise speak their mind.

Today, when we talk about a “soapbox,” what we mean is a belief a person has that they are willing and excited to speak about. One of my soapboxes is the importance of speech performance (yay, speech!), but I also regularly speak up when I hear issues around health care or when I hear someone speaking about the Cohen brothers (#GreatestFilmmakersEver). If there is something you believe or feel strongly about and you would like to state your opinion on it, then that is one of your soapboxes. Having a soapbox, though, does not necessarily mean you feel comfortable speaking up. There are barriers to speech. We might have nerves that prevent us from voicing our opinions; we might feel like this is the wrong occasion to speak; we might feel that this is the wrong audience to speak to. And some people might think that they don’t have a soapbox—that they have no concerns that are worth giving voice to.

The Relationship between Fear and Public Speaking

We will begin with the easy one: fear of getting up and speaking in front of an audience. If you ever hear someone claim that speaking in front of an audience does not make them nervous, then one of two things is happening. First, that person is lying to you. In a culture where self-reliance is an important value, some people might push down feelings of nervousness while trying to project feelings of confidence. Second, someone claiming that they are not nervous might not care what the audience thinks. If you care about what you have to say, then you should be nervous. Nerves mean that you have something at stake! If a person truly is not nervous, even a little bit, then what they have to say probably doesn’t matter a whole lot to them. The important thing to remember is that feeling nervous is a good sign. It means you care. New speakers will often want to get rid of their nerves, but here’s where we rip the Band-Aid off: you will not get rid of your nerves, especially if you care about your topic. Instead, you will learn to manage that nervous energy and use it to show your audience how much you care and to inspire your audience to care as well.

Throughout this book, you will learn how preparation, meditation, and learning about your audience can help you manage your nervous energy. These are intellectual and psychological elements to managing your nerves. One crucial element of managing your nerves, though, is physiological. When you get nervous, your heart pumps your blood faster, and your blood vessels constrict, increasing your blood pressure. This means that any obstruction of your blood flow could cause you to pass out because the blood is not getting to your brain as quickly as your body needs it to. To allay this worry, just remember one simple thing: do not lock your knees! When standing, you should always keep a slight bend in your knees. If you lock your knees, keeping them tight and perfectly straight, the arteries in your legs are constricted, decreasing blood flow to the brain, which can cause you to temporarily lose consciousness. So, remember: do not lock your knees. If you need help remembering, it could be useful to write at the top of your notecards or on your speaker’s slides a highlighted reminder to yourself.

The Occasion and Audience for Speaking

We tend to assume that some conversations are for some audiences and situations, and others are not. For instance, consider whether we should include lessons about racial and sexual violence in middle school. As a White cisgendered man from the United States, I was well into my college years before I learned that girls and women have to take extra precautions before going out at night, something most girls probably learn around their tween years. I was also well into my college years before I learned that Black kids and adults had to take extra precautions when dealing with authority figures. I knew what sexual assault and racial violence were, having learned about these ideas at some point in grade school, but they remained ideas, not real-life situations that would ever affect me. Despite all the other things we learn in grade school, these discussions were largely absent, seen by our educators as “not fit” for educational settings. In a report by Gawthrop and Helmstetter for the APM Research Lab, fewer than 50% of Americans surveyed felt that teachers should cover contemporary racism in their classrooms. The same study showed that over 50% of Americans believe that parents and primary caregivers should be responsible for sex education, despite research that shows that teaching accurate sex education, something only 17.6% of middle schools in the United States currently do, can decrease the frequency of sexual assault (Sex Ed for Social Change).

The point here is that there are some things we should be speaking to people about that we are clearly not speaking to people about. And if some of us are not learning essential information until college, what about those who never end up going to college? Does this mean I should walk into a kindergarten class and teach about the dangers of sexual assault? Or try to teach them about the institutionalization of racism? Not exactly. We should cater our communication to the needs and abilities of our audience. A parent might choose to give in-depth warnings to their young children, but that would be different from a conversation that might happen with a class of young children. For instance, a first-grade class doesn’t necessarily need to learn that a Black person is three times more likely than a White person to be killed by a police officer (Schwartz), but we can teach very young children, as adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Adrienne Clark suggests, that most police officers dedicate their lives to helping others, but occasionally interactions with police can go wrong, and people get hurt. Similarly, as the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network points out, we can teach kids at different ages different elements of sexual health to prepare them for more complex discussions that can happen as they get older. Rarely is there a topic that you should just never talk about, yet how we talk about a topic will need to change depending on those variables. The photographer Angélica Dass, for instance, works with children of all ages to help them see the complexity of race. In the video below, she demonstrates how she creates art with students that helps them recognize shared human connections. The artwork then leads to age-appropriate discussions and responses about the social construction of race.

Discovering Your Soapbox

Your soapbox does not have to be a controversial or difficult topic to speak about. If you are having trouble thinking of a topic that will appeal to your audience, take a step back. Your goal when finding a topic is not to appeal to an audience. At this stage, your goal is to find something that you are interested in speaking about. Since any topic can be spoken about to just about any audience, begin with something that you find interesting. Consider the casual conversations you have with friends and what you enjoy talking about. Think about your major and why you chose it. Look into the future and imagine what you could do with your life if there were no limitations. Choosing a topic like this is selfish: it is about the things you want, the things you find interesting, and the things you care about. At this part of the process, when you are just spitballing and in the initial stages of brainstorming, the speech is just about you. You have a few minutes to speak in front of an audience, so what do you want to speak about? Eventually, you will get to the point where you make your topic matter to the audience, but for now, let yourself be a little selfish.

Imagine you just had a debate with your friends about which superhero is the best. The subject, the broad area that you are speaking about that you and your friend (the audience) are discussing, is “superheroes.” When you begin debating what makes one better than the other, you are discussing topics, parts of the subject that you can address more easily in a single speech. When your friend says that Superman is better than Batman (he’s wrong, by the way) because Superman can fly, the topic is “superpowers.” You can then debate which powers/abilities are best and why. If you respond by saying that Batman is better (which he is) because he recognizes that there are gray areas when meting out justice, the topic is, “What counts as justice?” We will dive into these ideas more later. For now, recognize that subjects are broad, and topics narrow the subject to a manageable scope. Even these two topics might be too large for a single speech. There are enough definitions and examples of “justice” that you would need to narrow it down a little more, and there are so many possible superpowers that you would have to limit which ones you would want to address and why.

When discovering your soapbox, begin by returning to the things you speak and think about often. Then, consider any stories or examples that resonate for you, those parts of the subject that make you want to speak and think about it. Only then should you start considering why your audience should also be concerned or interested in your topic. For instance, I could say that Batman is the greatest superhero because of his ingenuity. Then I could explain that in the comics where Batman faces off against Superman, Superman wins because of his brute strength. When Batman wins (which is a fair amount of the time), it is because of his ingenuity—his ability to outwit the man of steel. I may also follow this up with a personal story about being bullied as a kid. Since I was not as strong as the group of kids who were picking on me, I used humor and wit to develop a strong support network that would deter bullies. At this point, it becomes a little easier to see how I could use this topic to appeal to an audience: kids need role models like Batman, who find creative ways to solve problems when the odds seem stacked against them.

Section 3: Can I Just Get AI to Write My Speech for Me?

Making what matters to you matter to others is not a simple task, and trying to simplify the task can erode your credibility. Take, for example, the significant and divisive topic of gun violence. In February of 2023, a gunman opened fire on Michigan State University’s campus, killing three students and injuring another five. Mass shootings in the United States are a common occurrence. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, which defines a mass shooting as any incident where four or more people were intentionally shot and wounded or killed; in 2022, over 600 people were killed, and over 2,700 people were injured in mass shootings in the United States. Because of the regularity that these events take place, our responses, as individuals, communities, and organizations, are expected, and they tend to follow similar patterns. Some people note that they give “thoughts and prayers” to the loved ones of the victims, some argue for greater gun control, some argue for better mental health resources, and some argue for fewer restrictions on gun control, believing that if potential mass shooters knew their targets might be carrying weapons, then they might think twice about opening fire.^[1] Regardless of what people say or argue during and around these events, responses tend to refer to mass shootings as “tragedies” and note that we need to care for those around us and create safer environments. When these events happen on school grounds, it’s common for other schools to send out messages of care to their own communities. For instance, after the Uvalde school shooting in May of 2022, the superintendent of my child’s school district sent out a letter noting that “our thoughts and prayers” are with the Uvalde community, reassuring our district that we are taking appropriate measures to keep our children safe (Jamesville-DeWitt).

Given the regularity of these events and the similarity of our responses to these events, it should not be surprising that chatbots, computer programs that use language processing and artificial intelligence to create messages, can churn out seemingly heartfelt letters of remorse, compassion, and solidarity. Yet when Vanderbilt University used a chatbot to generate its response to the Michigan State Shooting, many people were outraged. The general uproar was about the insensitivity of having a computer perform the emotional work that a human should perform. In other words, people were upset that a real person serving as a representative of a community did not express their real feelings about the tragic event. Yet a question remains. Had the person who sent the Vanderbilt letter removed the line at the bottom stating that the letter had been generated by ChatGPT, would anyone have noticed? The now common event of a mass shooting has led to common ways of responding to mass shootings, and the chatbot was able to generate a reasonable facsimile of a human-created piece of communication. Consider the following two statements:

1. “Students should not use ChatGPT to write their speeches because it prevents them from developing essential critical thinking skills.”
2. “Students should not use ChatGPT to write their speeches because it lacks the personal touch, authentic voice, and originality that comes from genuine human expression and understanding of the topic.”

One of those sentences was written by ChatGPT, and one was written by me, the author of this textbook. After I wrote my reasoning, I opened the chatbot and added the prompt: “In one sentence, can you tell me why students should not use ChatGPT to write their speeches?” Can you tell which sentence I wrote, and which sentence was written by a chatbot? The chatbot even managed to get the first 11 words exactly the same as mine! ChatGPT wrote the second one. Notice that in the above paragraph, I made the point that chatbots can present a reasonable facsimile of human communication. What they cannot do is develop critical thinking skills for you.

This is the point at which you must decide for yourself what you want to get from your education. Is using a chatbot to complete your work cheating? Most likely, yes, and your professor and college will likely have a policy that says as much. Further, like the outcry regarding Vanderbilt’s letter, if your audience knows you used a chatbot to generate your speech, they will lose faith in you and will not see you as a credible speaker, no matter how well you might perform the role. All that said, if you take the right precautions, there is a good chance that using a chatbot could go unnoticed by your audience. Then, rather than spending hours on a speech or paper, you can use that time to take on an extra shift, hang out with friends, or otherwise divert yourself, confident that you will get at least a “C” or a “B” on the assignment. Thinking about this, though, should make you wonder what your personal and professional goals are. While a chatbot may be a useful tool to perform research or to find information, it is only a tool. When used to generate content, it is a shortcut that gets you from one point to another, with little, if any learning occurring along the way.

Most will tell you that the intellectual journey of figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it is a worthwhile endeavor. I had a student named Jackson. As a sophomore education major, Jackson took a public speaking class. While developing a speech about the importance of public education, Jackson learned some uncomfortable truths about his chosen career path. He learned that his dream of becoming a creative and inspirational high school history teacher would have to contend with state and federal regulations regarding what and how he could teach. He also learned that those regulations would likely be informed by private interests more than by public welfare. His research helped him realize that he would not be happy as a teacher and that if he wanted to make an impact, the classroom was not the place he would do so. Other students may have made different decisions, but Jackson’s decision was his own. Despite feeling frustrated by what he learned, he was glad that he did the research, spent the time thinking it through, and made choices that made sense for himself.

Jackson’s story brings us back to the three stories that began this chapter. Jackson could have easily convinced himself that since he felt comfortable speaking in front of an audience and since he was going to be a teacher, his speech class was not that important. He could have chosen to phone in his work or simply use generated content for his speeches. If you type into a chatbot program, “Write a five-minute speech about the importance of public education,” I’m sure you will come out with a speech that identifies the relationship between education and economic prosperity, diversity, and ingenuity. In doing the work yourself, though, you will gain crucial insights and skills that you otherwise might lack. Like Jackson, you will have to come to terms with how logical your claims might be and if they are claims you want to hold onto. You may find that education is important for all the reasons listed above, but you might also find that our current system is not conducive to the types of public education that would foster prosperity, diversity, and ingenuity. At that point you would have to ask yourself what your goals and hopes are related to education. You would need to identify the conflict you are feeling and employ critical thinking skills to determine the best way to address that conflict. And if your goal was, indeed, the desire to make positive change, you would have to identify the steps you could take, given your new knowledge and understanding, that would still help you achieve your goals. To be sure, it is demanding work, but the alternative may well be dissatisfaction with your choices and a feeling like the time you spent “learning” was largely wasted. Without putting in the effort to develop an ability to think critically and to truly assess why you are doing what you are doing, your time is not well spent.

Section 4: What Will I Learn in This Book?

Speech performance is a specific type of communication, different than writing or digital communication and different than other forms of communication. For instance, what you say in front of an audience of your colleagues will look and sound different than what you say in front of your significant other, even if the point of what you say is the same. Sending an email inviting friends to a party will be different than inviting a friend to that same party in person, even if the result of the communication is meant to be the same. That said, the hard and fast rules that once existed (e.g., an email is different from a text message) are no longer as hard and fast as they might have been. As technology has made our ability to communicate competently in multiple formats easier, texting and email are not necessarily that different. Older textbooks might contend that a digital speech is altogether different from an in-person speech, yet today, it is clear that when we are on a video call, we are “in-person,” even if we are not in the same space. There are still differences between speeches that occur in virtual space and speeches that occur in physical space, and these differences are addressed throughout the book. Unless otherwise noted, though, speech performance can occur in-person or asynchronously, in physical space, or in virtual space. What makes speech performance different from other types of communication is that it always involves the following three elements: persuasion, aesthetic presentation, and an audience with the ability to help create change.

Persuasion

All speeches try to persuade their audience of something. Even when a speaker claims they are just giving information, the speaker needs to persuade the audience that it is information the audience wants and/or needs. Indeed, we should be apprehensive when someone tells us they are just giving us information. Why would they spend their time giving information without a reason? They might just like to hear themselves speak, but even then, they will need to convince the audience to stick around for the lovely sound of their voice. Our persuasion can, and typically does, take on multiple forms, all of which we will address in detail in the following chapters. We can persuade our audience through our character by presenting ourselves as someone the audience can trust and depend on for good ideas and useful information. We can persuade our audience by being reasonable, presenting them with claims that make logical sense and sound true. Finally, we can persuade our audience emotionally, encouraging positive or negative feelings about people, places, and events.

Aesthetic Presentation

“Aesthetic” is kind of a fancy word for “beauty,” but it goes beyond beauty to imply an understanding of why something is beautiful in a given situation. When I was a kid, my mom would occasionally play opera in the car, which drove me kind of nuts. To my untrained ears, it always sounded like two alley cats doing the things alley cats do. Then in fourth grade, my teacher taught us about opera. She explained the vocal style and ranges needed to perform the music and how the stories were composed and performed. Then we listened to part of Verdi’s La Traviata, discussing the story as we went along. It didn’t hurt that she had brought in small slices of opera cake for us to eat while we listened and learned. This did not make me like opera, but she helped me develop an aesthetic appreciation for opera. I understood what went into the creation of an opera, and I learned the circumstances under which someone would find an opera enjoyable.

In this book, you will learn how to create a speech that will be aesthetically appealing to your audience. You will learn what audiences come to expect from a situation that calls for speech performance, and you will learn to develop your own way of fulfilling those expectations. An aesthetic presentation is much more than looking and sounding the part. It also involves choosing things to say and organizing those things into a coherent whole.

An Audience That Can Create Change

The result of any speech should be to accomplish the speaker’s goal. In part, this means learning as much as you can about your soapbox. When you care enough about something to want to speak about it, you typically also want others to care about it as well or, at the very least, to respect your decision to care about it. After my fourth-grade teacher taught us to appreciate the work that went into creating and performing an opera, I did not mind as much when my mom had Mozart or Vivaldi playing in the car. My teacher may not have had that particular moment in mind when she presented her lesson, but her goal had been accomplished. Today, while I still do not choose to listen to opera on my own, I respect others who do. Nearly 40 years ago someone said a few things to me in a compelling way, and I was forever changed by the experience. I changed my behavior in the car with my mom, and today, in situations where opera is played, I act in ways I otherwise might not have. Whether you are speaking to lead your audience toward a specific action or whether you want to plant the seed of an idea and hope it grows, a speech performance is meant to elicit change for an audience.

Guiding your study of speech performance will be a few important key terms, notably the terms “public” and “speech.” In the following video, you will hear why these terms are so important and how they are used in this book.

Summary: What Have I Learned So Far?

This chapter set the stage for what you will learn from an introductory speech performance and communication course. You learned that studying communication can help you develop the skills needed to resolve conflict, to think critically, and to lead through empathy. By learning how different audiences and different audience members are driven to act, you will see how conflict arises and be able to identify ways to alleviate the concerns of your audience and help people come together for a common goal. Thinking through relationships in this way also requires that you learn to think critically, seeing and understanding multiple perspectives. As you strive to understand your audiences, you will also need to develop empathy, an ability to feel what they feel, and an important quality many leaders possess. This book is not about speaking about things that your audience cares about. Rather, it is about finding your soapbox, the thing(s) you are passionate about, and helping an audience see why they should care about those things as well. The speech performance process is a highly personal one, where the audience and the speaker must develop respect for one another. You also learned that using AI or otherwise unethical means to develop your speech can erode any trust or respect the audience has for you.

Finally, you learned the three key elements that you will begin to master as you create speeches. You learned that speech performance is persuasive. Even if your goal is to give information or celebrate someone, you must persuade your audience that the information is something they need—that the person is worth celebrating. You learned that a significant element of speech performance is its aesthetic quality—its ability to appeal to an audience through style and artistry. This does not mean that you have to be a theatrical performer to give a good speech! Instead, you will learn what works for you and build from there. You also learned that the end goal of every speech performance is to get the audience to do something. Maybe you want them to go vote, maybe you want them to donate to a cause, or maybe you want them to change their opinion about something. At the end of your speech, the audience should be on their way to doing something you want them to do.

References

Everytown for Gun Safety. “Mass Shootings in the United States: An Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund Analysis,” Mar. 2023, https://everytownresearch.org/mass-shootings-in-america/.

Gawthrop, E., and C. Helmstetter. “Mood of the Nation: How Americans Think Schools Should Teach about Race, Evolution, and Sex.” APM Research Lab, 7 Feb. 2022, https://www.apmresearchlab.org/motn/teaching-race-evolution-sex.

Jamesville-DeWitt Central School District. “Superintendent Shares Message about Texas School Shooting,” 25 May 2022, https://www.jamesvilledewitt.org/superintendent-shares-message-about-texas-school-shooting/.

Schwartz, G. L., and J. L. Jahn. “Mapping Fatal Police Violence across U.S. Metropolitan Areas: Overall Rates and Racial/Ethnic Inequities, 2013–2017.” PLoS ONE, vol. 15, no. 6, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229686.

Sex Ed for Social Change, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. “If You Care about Sexual Assault Prevention . . . Then You Should Care about Sex Ed,” 2022, https://siecus.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/If-Then-Sexual-Assault-Final.pdf.

Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. “Talking to Your Kids about Sexual Assault.” https://www.rainn.org/articles/talking-your-kids-about-sexual-assault.

Figure Credit

Fig. 1.1: Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Snake-oil_salesman_Professor_Thaddeus_Schmidlap_at_Enchanted_Springs_Ranch,_Boerne,_Texas,_USA_28650a.jpg.